Humongous RAM Usage

[absolutep]

Description

Humongous RAM Usage for just 4 tabs [all 4 are of github only]

Browser eating almost 1 GB of RAM, which is surprising for a website which itself is light in nature.

In task manager it shows 16 but only 4 tabs are opened.

Steps to reproduce

1. Open brave browser
2. Get on GitHub
3. Open 4 tabs of github, but task manager shows 16 in front of brave browser
4. 

Actual result

Expected result

It should not eat 1 GB of RAM for just only 4 tabs.

Reproduces how often

Easily reproduced

Brave version (brave://version info)

Brave is up to date
Version 1.73.104 Chromium: 131.0.6778.204 (Official Build) (64-bit)

Channel information

• release (stable)
• beta
• nightly

Reproducibility

• with Brave Shields disabled
• with Brave Rewards disabled
• in the latest version of Chrome

Miscellaneous information

As I was typing this issue RAM Usage has gone up again.

[jonathansampson]

@absolutep The browser has many processes that run, in addition to distinct tab processes. Within the Browser you can press Shift+Esc to view the browser-based Task Manager, which will give clearer insights into what processes are running, how much memory is used by a given tab, and more.

[bsclifton]

What @jonathansampson said 😄

The network service, GPU, etc all run in their own process. You can use the Shift + Esc shortcut OR go to the Hamburger menu (three horizontal lines; top right of browser) and pick More tools > Task manager.

You can get a breakdown there and it'll even show the PIDs. You can expand the Windows view in task manager to see all 16 or 18 processes and you can map which PID is taking up a lot of RAM.

@absolutep if you're able to share that info, it should help- maybe there's a specific page (sometimes, JavaScript will run on a timer and keep eating up RAM; depends on the site). If you have hardware acceleration disabled sometimes that can eat more RAM too. Also curious how much RAM you have available total? I have a LOT of items open in Brave (several hundred tabs) and I'm sitting at about 3 GB of RAM. But I also have 256 GB of RAM total on this machine.

[absolutep]

@absolutep The browser has many processes that run, in addition to distinct tab processes. Within the Browser you can press Shift+Esc to view the browser-based Task Manager, which will give clearer insights into what processes are running, how much memory is used by a given tab, and more.

Thanks, I will check and report back when it happens again.

[absolutep]

You can get a breakdown there and it'll even show the PIDs. You can expand the Windows view in task manager to see all 16 or 18 processes and you can map which PID is taking up a lot of RAM.

thanks, I am checking.

there is this bat reward service that keeps running even after closing it.
gpu render also keeps coming back up.

what I do not understand is a single tab of even proton mail is eating 200 MB RAM.

If you have hardware acceleration disabled sometimes that can eat more RAM too

Graphics Feature Status
=======================
*   Canvas: Software only, hardware acceleration unavailable
*   Canvas out-of-process rasterization: Disabled
*   Direct Rendering Display Compositor: Disabled
*   Compositing: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled
*   Multiple Raster Threads: Enabled
*   OpenGL: Disabled
*   Rasterization: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled
*   Raw Draw: Disabled
*   Skia Graphite: Disabled
*   Video Decode: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled
*   Video Encode: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled
*   Vulkan: Disabled
*   WebGL: Software only, hardware acceleration unavailable
*   WebGL2: Software only, hardware acceleration unavailable
*   WebGPU: Software only, hardware acceleration unavailable
*   WebNN: Software only, hardware acceleration unavailable

Also curious how much RAM you have available total?

8 GB.

It worked fine uptill last month, this past month has been hell when using brave.

before that I used to have 15-20 tabs {that includes youtube} open in brave and it would eat 600-800GB RAM but never freeze or hang the computer. Nowadays, it does this a lot, practically making it unusable.