Question Chrome Memory Saver... should I "Turn on"?

[Muse]

Never heard of it before but Chrome just popped up this little dialog:
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Make Chrome faster

Memory Saver frees up memory from inactive tabs so it can be used by active tabs and other apps

[Turn on] [Not now]
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Now, I have 32GB RAM on this Win10 64bit laptop. When I ran only 16GB I did experience slowdowns and latency when I had a lot of windows and tabs open and it was very annoying. But now that I run 32GB RAM mostly no issues. A few times I've gotten unresponsive Chrome for whatever reason and I've killed the process and restarted it and a couple times maybe Windows has locked up and I've had to throttle the machine to shut it down and then restart (Lenovo P1 Thinkpad).

So, should I Turn on or Not now? I might gain somehow (maybe not!) but if I want to access a tab that I haven't in a while I don't want to have to wait for it to reload or something.

 

[manly]

Chrome is very memory hungry (technically I use Chromium on Linux). When I had 16GB RAM, Chrome didn't have any internal limits and would over time consume most physical memory. Once it reached the system limit, the OS would forcibly kill processes. Usually it would kill off some Chrome tabs, but the Linux OOM killer can pick and choose which user processes to kill. Last fall, I upgraded to 32GB RAM and this problem has basically gone away. I don't think Chrome is imposing a hard limit between 16 and 32 GB RAM consumed. More likely with my browsing habits, it would take a while to consume all physical RAM. Also, Chromium does go "unresponsive" after weeks of usage, so that is likely occurring well before physical RAM is exhausted.

IMO with 32GB RAM, you don't need to enable the Memory Saver unless you notice your system is running out of physical memory. For what it's worth, unloading tabs is what mobile web browsers have been doing from the very beginning (as they operated on limited hardware). I believe Safari on Mac also deactivates tabs, for well over a decade. (However when I ran MacOS on 3GB RAM, excessive tab usage would NOT degrade gracefully. Instead of a quick OOM process killer, the OS would thrash for minutes. I ditched Safari for Chrome.)

 

[manly]

I have a lot of Firefox and Chromium tabs open, and I noticed my system using swap space for the first time in a while.

Firefox has tab unloading enabled by default, but it apparently doesn't really kick in until almost all your system RAM is consumed. It's possible to tune this to a more aggressive setting:

Taking Firefox memory usage under control on Linux

Life was easy when Firefox was 32-bit and single-process. In 2021 it is 64 bit, launches bunch of...

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