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by forgotpwtomain 3692 days ago
Every single new chrome release memory consumption just gets worse. Most recently a single window with 1 gmail tab takes ~500mb (If I recall correctly you could actually run windows XP on 256).

I'm seriously considering rolling my browsers back to ~2012 and never upgrading again.

3 comments

Unused RAM is wasted RAM.

Gmail has an internal behavior that adapts its memory usage on available memory. It may fail in some specific situation (short and wide memory leak), but as a whole the idea is to use RAM as much as possible to make gmail faster.

And yes, gmail lacks of a "low memory consumption" button for those situation where automatic memory usage detection fails.

There is video of google explaining this voluntary behavior but I can't find it unfortunately.

> Unused RAM is wasted RAM.

This is just ignorant cliche.

> Gmail has an internal behavior that adapts its memory usage on available memory. It may fail in some specific situation (short and wide memory leak), but as a whole the idea is to use RAM as much as possible to make gmail faster.

This has nothing to do with Gmail, this is entirely to do with chromium. When my X-Server starts to freeze because 8 tabs taking up 2GB of memory means the OS is intensely swapping to and from disk; I'll take my unused RAM, thanks.

What about rolling your Gmail back to 2012 with the lighter HTML version...

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049?hl=en

I rolled back about a month ago to free up some resources since I have it open all day. So far, so good.

As a bonus, you have to manually check for new mail, which I actually like.

Except you'd have extremely vulnerable browsers.