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03 May, 2012

Why is Chrome So Slow?

google chrome logo

Google Chrome is usually fast for me. Until recently, when I was sending an article link to my friend via Facebook, it suddenly become so slow.

It was abnormally unresponsive.

What is going on? I suspected that something mischievous is going on. So, I put on the detective hat *not literally* and began an inquiry...

I hit Shift+Esc in Google Chrome to bring up its Task Manager like so:

chrome task manager
Sample: this screenshot was NOT taken at time of incident.
What I found out is that one of the tab which belongs to springpad is consuming over 1GB of memory O.O

How did that happen? I have no idea. But, I quickly close the tab and Chrome is back to speed again.

Reopening the springpad extension, everything runs normally. Whatever I tried, I couldn't replicate the bug or else I will report it to the springpad devs. Which explains why I am clueless as to how that happened.

Notice something interesting in the screenshot above? Yes, some pages do consume that much memory. If you are a web developer, you now have a tool to measure your website performance. Thanks to Google.

Recap:
To access the task manager, you could:

  • Shortcut key — Shift+Esc
  • or go to the wrench icon at the top right, the select "View background pages"

So, now that you all know about Google Chrome's Task Manager. It's time to go out there and do your own debugging next time chrome is running slow for you. Find out how much memory that webpage consume and report back here if it consumes more than 427MB.

Have you had a similar experience before? Share with us.

1 comment:

  1. Thanks - found out I had memory being used by an app to schedule Olympics events. Don't need that anymore.

    ReplyDelete