Do multiple browser processes in task manager slow down my computer?
Hi, everyone. Leo Notenboom here for
Askleo.com. Let's dive right into the question.
When I open additional links
on my homepage, I've been having my browser slow down
to the point that it ignores my mouse clicks to either open up to an additional
page or refuses to close the one I'm currently on.
I have to open the task manager to stop
the process, and sometimes there are four or five instances open and running.
It's like they don't close when I have
to close X for those pages, and they just keep running
in the background until they can't find any more process space to run with.
And I have to manually close them down
because they won't close down on their own.
This is one of those things that is
an interesting problem that the symptoms seem to have gotten worse in recent years.
Browsers have a lot of processes these
days, and we'll take a look at at least one in here in a minute.
But your specific case,
the specific case for this question, actually does feel like you are, in fact,
low on memory, or rather the browser is using up
all the memory that it's been allocated and honestly needs more.
So let's have a look at what this looks
like, and then we'll talk about some of the things you can try to improve things.
So we're over here in Windows 11.
I'll fire up Edge, and you can see I've just got one page open, right?
This is the
Askleo.com, home page.
If I now fire up the task manager,
and again, this is Windows 11, Windows 10 will be similar.
If in Windows 10 you see something
that says more options or more details, click on that and you'll end up
with a process list that looks a little bit more like this.
And you can see there's Microsoft Edge with this little number here, 43, 40.
Well, I hate to tell you,
but that's the number of processes that it happens to be running.
If I click on this little greater than sign, you can see now,
these are all the different things that Microsoft Edge has in Windows.
That feels like a problem.
And obviously, in prior years,
in prior versions of most browsers, this would have been a huge problem.
But it's not.
It is not an indication of a problem.
Most browsers, and this is true for Edge,
for Chrome, for FireFox, I've got examples of that in the companion
article for this video, are actually implemented.
They are designed today to do their job by using multiple processes.
Of more interest, I think, than the number of processes that are
being used by the browser is, I'm going to collapse this so that we
can just look at Microsoft Edge in total, is this memory usage.
You can see here, Microsoft Edge is using 580 rough megabytes on this machine.
For the record, this machine is a four gigabyte RAM.
So that means that it's using what about
an eighth of the RAM that's available on my machine.
This is normal.
This is honestly the system working as
expected, and I don't really have a performance issue.
This actually works relatively well.
But sometimes that can be a problem.
Now, what I want you to look at when we
take a look at task manager is, in fact, that memory usage.
Knowing that my system has four gigabytes,
and by the way, if you're curious, if you click on the performance tab here,
and it'll be a different tab in Windows 10, but same idea.
You'll see that this is now, and I click on memory,
you'll see that this is now showing me memory usage on this machine.
What's useful is that right here at the top, it says four gigabytes.
That's how much memory I have on this machine.
And you can see that this is a running
graph of how much memory is actually being used currently.
If you open this tab and you find that memory is 100 % in use,
then yeah, you can probably expect some performance issues.
Then we need to look at who's the culprit.
If we go back to the process list,
we can take a look and see exactly who's using how much memory.
I have this column sorted by who's using so much memory.
You'll find that it may come up with a different sort.
For example, if I click on the CPU column, you can see that now a Microsoft Edge is
still at the top because it's using the most CPU, at least temporarily.
But if I click on the memory column,
it now sorts by who's using the most memory at the top.
If you want to sort in the other way, you can click it again.
Now it's the least at the top, which is also the least valuable information.
So we'll click on that to make sure that arrow is pointing down and at the top
of the list will be whoever is using the most memory.
If you find that Edge, for example,
is using the most memory and you are out of memory on your system, then yeah,
Edge or whatever browser you're using might be the problem.
What I'm also experiencing from time to time, though, are that other programs
are also using memory, sometimes a lot of it.
And that means that your browser, when you go back to use it, it
is still struggling, even though there's nothing wrong with your browser.
It just doesn't have access to enough
memory to do the job you've asked it to do.
So what that means is you might need to do
a few things to see if you can solve this, if you can free up more memory
and presumably get your browser to perform a little bit better.
Here are some of the things I suggest you try.
Number one, and you're going to hate it, close browser tabs.
I know everybody loves having a zillion
browser tabs open, but I got to tell you, every browser tab uses memory.
Even if your browser has this sleep feature, which basically tries to reduce
exactly this problem by putting browser tabs that you haven't interacted
with for a while to sleep, it's still using some amount of memory.
Actually, by far,
having a zillion, quote-unquote, many browser tabs open
at the same time is perhaps the single biggest cause of browser memory usage.
Please get used to doing something else.
Have fewer tabs open.
Maybe use bookmarks to save the tabs that you want to come back to,
but have fewer tabs open to reduce the memory usage of your browser.
Another thing to look into is to disable extensions.
If you have a lot of extensions installed in your browser, or even if you have only
a few, extensions also use RAM, they use memory.
Not all extensions are, I'll just say, written particularly well.
What that means is that, yeah, they could have a bug.
They could be using more memory than they need.
Or perhaps they actually do need large
amounts of memory to do whatever task it is they are performing; performing.
Nonetheless, consider turning them off.
My recommendation,
typically for diagnostic purposes, is to turn off all the extensions.
A, see if that resolves the issue,
because if it does, then you know it's an extension-related issue.
Then start turning on extensions one at a time.
As soon as the problem returns and rears its ugly head, you'll know which extension
is actually at fault, and you can then decide whether or not you
need that extension or how you're going to mitigate that extension's impact.
This one is a little bit weird, but it basically boils down to have you
turned it off and turned it on again, right?
It's that classic meme.
Close your browser completely and reopen it.
Sometimes, browsers or extensions or something else related
will have a cumulative effect, a cumulative negative effect.
Sometimes it's memory leaks, memory that just gets used and used
and used and used, but never were released, and therefore,
the browser keeps using more and more memory over time.
It shouldn't, and most of them don't, but it's a very easy thing to set aside.
Close the browser and reopen it.
That way, everything will restart from scratch.
And if that solves the problem,
then you know you've probably got a memory leakage issue or something like that.
However, there's one huge caveat with this technique.
You need to turn off what I call background features.
There are features in Google Chrome
and Edge, and I think also in Firebox, that even if you close your browser,
never really terminate all of the processes associated with that browser.
You need to go into settings and look for a setting that turns that off.
In Google Chrome,
it's called continue running background apps when Google Chrome is closed.
Turn that feature off.
When you do that, then when you close the browser, the browser will really close.
All of it will go away.
Actually, since you've got task manager open, this is very easy to check.
When you close the browser,
you should not see any instances of the browser in task
manager's process list after a few seconds.
It takes a few seconds to actually go away.
If there are a couple of processes that are a handful of processes that stick
around, then you may be looking at this feature still being turned on.
Go turn it off.
Close other programs.
Like I mentioned earlier,
sometimes the problem isn't the browser, it's some other program that's eating up
all of the available RAM and not leaving any over for your browser to do its job.
If you take a look at the memory usage
in task manager, chances are whatever is at the top is the problem.
So see if closing that program
will resolve the issue for you, your browser will start to work better.
And if it does, then perhaps review how that program is using memory.
Again, we don't know what program it is.
I can't tell you exactly what to do.
But if the program has features or options or usage scenarios that will cause it
to maybe use less memory, then perhaps see if you can adjust its memory usage.
And finally, and this is like the last straw.
It's not something that I necessarily
recommend as a knee-jerk reaction, but it certainly couldn't hurt.
Add RAM.
If your computer has the ability
to contain more RAM, it never hurts to add more.
And if you are legitimately simply running
out of RAM because you're trying to do too much,
well, adding RAM will make it possible to do that without as much impact.
Obviously, not doing as much as the other
approach, not trying to do as much at the same time as the other approach.
But if you have the opportunity, if your machine can hold more RAM,
then sometimes the simplest solution is just to add more.
So hopefully that gives you some ideas of things to look at once your browser
starts to really, really bogged down and not perform the way you think it should.
For updates, for comments,
for links related to this topic and more, visit
Askleo.com/6104.
I'm Leo Nautenbom, and this is Askleo.com.
Thanks for watching.