Chrome taking up LOTS of memory while doing nothing?

So when im playing League I always make a habbit of shutting off chrome.. Its so resource heavy and kills my frames, is it something to do with settings in chrome I maybe have? I took a screenshot and this cant be normal...

*Awaits someone that might actually be able to help with that*

In the meantime, I think what we all really want to know is:

Who's Diana?

5 processes is about right

2 tabs
1 extension (I see AdBlock)
Main browser process
and either Flash Plugin or the GPU process

From Chrome, you can right click on the top bar and open the Chrome Task manager, where it will give you only Chrome processes.

Yes nothing unusual or sinister there. Chrome achieves it's performance and reliability by starting a new process for each tab, so the more tabs you have open the more processes and the more memory. Normal stuff.

What Ubuysa said, each tab that you open creates a new process and uses memory for it. It's much more efficient that loading it on to one process.

As the actual question has been answered I will answer the following

DeadEyeDuk said:

*Awaits someone that might actually be able to help with that*

In the meantime, I think what we all really want to know is:

Who's Diana?

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Diana is one of the champions in League of Legends, a Mage style mid lane champ, very popular and a pain in the dairy air.

LFFPicard said:

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On a dark night, her I would not wish to meet! (Sorry Yoda)

Nice to see some league players here, yea she is my main and i got a nice background of her lunari crest ^^.

As for chrome. It seems like say mozilla may run as well but with less memory consumption, right?

Well, mozilla may appear to use less memory but running under a single process if a tab/page crashes the whole browser usually crashes. With chrome running each tab on a new process, if one tab/page crashes it usually does not effect the rest.

LFFPicard said:

Well, mozilla may appear to use less memory but running under a single process if a tab/page crashes the whole browser usually crashes. With chrome running each tab on a new process, if one tab/page crashes it usually does not effect the rest.

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In addition if something within the single Mozilla process starts to loop or hang then the whole browser is dead, with Chrome's one process per tab only the looping or hanging tab is affected, all the other tabs run normally.

It's swings and roundabouts, there is no such thing as a free lunch!

The memory usage given is total memory, including virtual memory (more accurately, it's the process's current virtual memory allocation, some of which may currently be in physical memory). So it's not necessarily using all that amount of physical memory, especially if it's not in the foreground.

I think I got that right - it's a long time since my systems software module.

grimsbymatt said:

The memory usage given is total memory, including virtual memory (more accurately, it's the process's current virtual memory allocation, some of which may currently be in physical memory). So it's not necessarily using all that amount of physical memory, especially if it's not in the foreground.

I think I got that right - it's a long time since my systems software module.

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Windows Task Manager only shows RAM usage. Not virtual memory.

Wozza365 said:

Windows Task Manager only shows RAM usage. Not virtual memory.

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I had a little look. The default view (as pictured by OP) only shows physical memory used that cannot be accessed by other processes (the so-called private working set). You can also view Commit Size, which is the full virtual memory amount allocated (and what I was on about above); as well as several other memory-related figures.

kasdoy said:

So when im playing League I always make a habbit of shutting off chrome.. Its so resource heavy and kills my frames, is it something to do with settings in chrome I maybe have? I took a screenshot and this cant be normal... View attachment 6826

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I don't think your "frame killer" is RAM usage. If you look at the task manager image you posted it says you're only using 36% of your RAM (that's physical memory) so even if Chrome were using large amounts (which it's designed to do) I doubt that's your problem here. RAM access times are constant, it takes no longer to access a RAM page when RAM is almost full compared to when RAM is almost empty.

Using lots of RAM is a good thing. The CPU(s) can only process data that is in RAM so you want as much of your data in RAM as you can get and if that means filling RAM right up then that's (mostly) good. That's why we buy lots of RAM when we spec our new PCs, because the more RAM you have the more data can be kept in there and the faster everything runs. RAM is a resource that you paid for you want that resource to be fully utilised, until that is you have a new program that needs loading or Windows needs RAM for one of it's processes....

Windows contains some very intelligent RAM management routines that maximise the amount of RAM used whilst ensuring that there is always some that can be obtained quickly. If RAM becomes exhausted then the least used pages of RAM (the ones no program has referenced in a long while) will be 'stolen', this means their contents are copied out to the page file (on disk) and the RAM pages freed up. Of course, if those pages are later referenced then free RAM has to be found for them and they have to be paged in (this is called a page fault and the page fault rate is a measure of how 'busy' your RAM is).

So RAM is only a performance problem when you don't have enough and the way to tell that you don't have enough are consistently high page fault rates.

As to where your "frame killer" problem really is, if you have a hard disk drive (and not an SSD) then I'd look at that first. Disk access times are incredibly slow compared to CPU and RAM access times, so any degradation of disk performance becomes very noticeable very quickly. I have no idea whether the game you're playing does disk access for data, but if it does then that's where your problem will be. Shutting down Chrome seems to help because you will have just removed contention for the hard disk, but the underlying problems are still there.

I'd initially try defragmenting the hard disk, file fragmentation is the biggest cause of hard disk performance problems. But if you really want to know what's killing performance run the Windows performance monitor whilst you play the game. The results from that will show you which resource(s) are reaching exhaustion. The performance monitor is pretty easy to figure out but if you need help running it just ask.