Reducing Chrome's memory footprint is one of the team's top priorities this year. We've already seen up to a 45% reduction in GMail's memory usage thanks to improvements in V8's garbage collection process but we're really just getting started. One of our next experiments in memory use is aimed at tab hoarders (like myself). It's called Tab Discarding.
Tab discarding is available as an experiment in Chrome 46 and above.
Background
For every tab you have open our renderer process usually takes around 50MB per tab, even though most people use just a single tab at a time. If you've got 10 tabs open there's at least 450MB of memory being spent just to keep your background tab state. This can get a little unwieldy over time.
One of our goals is to reduce the memory used on tabs you're not actually using. If I look at what tabs are consuming my system memory in the Chrome Task Manager, I'm really just 'using' one or two of the sites below whilst the other tabs in the background are unused.
That's where tab discarding can help reduce our memory usage.
Discarding unused tabs
Tab discarding allows Chrome to automatically discard tabs that aren't of great interest to you when it's detected that system memory is running pretty low. What do we mean by discarding? Well, a discarded tab doesn't go anywhere. We kill it but it's still visible on the Chrome tab strip. If you navigate back to a tab that's been discarded, it'll reload when clicked. Form content, scroll position and so on are saved and restored the same way they would be during forward/backward tab navigation.
We also have another new feature that allows caching all tab resources locally
which works nicely with tab discarding when you're offline. When the tab is
reactivated we offer you the choice to reload the cached version that was
previously loaded over the network. To enable page reloading from cache, you can
try out another experiment under chrome://flags/#show-saved-copy.
You can try out tab discarding today by enabling it via
chrome://flags/#enable-tab-discarding and relaunching Chrome. You can
control whether it's enabled or disabled via the same Chrome chrome://flags
page.
A new page called chrome://discards lets you list what tabs are currently
open and we try to share some insight into how interesting (we think) they are
to you, from most to least.
To test out the feature, you can either carry out your normal browsing behavior until your system is in a low-memory mode, or alternatively trigger a tab discard from about:discards by clicking 'Discard tab now'. This will discard the last tab in the list. You can also discard a particular tab from the list by clicking its corresponding 'Discard' button. A discarded tab will display with a [Discarded] prefix.
Tab discarding discards tabs in this order:
- Internal pages like new tab page, bookmarks, etc.
- Tabs selected a long time ago
- Tabs selected recently
- Apps running in a window
- Pinned tabs
- The selected tab
We've enabled the tab discarding experiment in Chrome Canary for Windows and Mac OS, with a Linux implementation coming soon.
Inspiration: hey there, great suspender
If tab discarding sounds familiar, it's because you've probably come across useful Chrome extensions that give you a slightly simpler version of this idea, such as the The Great Suspender. The Great Suspender aims to reduce Chrome's memory and GPU footprint by suspending tabs after a custom period of inactivity.
Similar to tab discarding, tabs can be un-suspended when you need to interact with them again. Great Suspender maintains each tab's title and favicon, showing suspended tabs in a dimmed state, making it straight-forward to navigate back to them any time.
Tabs in the background that I'm not actively using have been suspended, saving on memory. Tabs I am still actively using (GitHub and YouTube) are however still running as normal.
We actually had a great chat with the author of the Great Suspender extension while developing tab discarding and they're glad to see us natively tackling this problem in ways that are more efficient than an extension might be able to, such as losing the state of your user inactions.
Future improvements: the tab serializer
The tab serializer is a future piece of work we think may lead to significant improvements on our current approach to tab discarding. It takes the contents of a Chrome tab and serializes its *current* state into a binary blob. This binary blob can later be deserialized into a tab.
The serializer would serialize almost everything Chrome, Blink and V8 need to properly preserve a tab (something Chrome extensions tackling this problem historically haven't been able to easily achieve). Serialization would include the usual suspects: the DOM (with a lot of WebGL and Canvas included), CSS and the state of the V8 JavaScript VM.
If you use Android or ChromeOS, you may know that (similar to the tab discarding experiment covered in this post) we kill background tabs aggressively in order to ensure memory usage is low. The issue with the way we tackle this was that your tab would lose *all* of its state.
When you showed interest in the tab again, we would have to reload it and all your interaction with it would be lost. The tab serializer just approaches this problem in a way that gets you back to almost exactly what you were without requiring going back to the network. We look forward to sharing more information about this work at a later date.
Try out tab discarding and let us know what you think
We'd love to know whether this feature is useful to you and how it could be improved. Try it out, play around with it (especially if you're a tab hoarder!) and let us know what you think in the comments. :) We'd also appreciate it if you file tickets for any bugs you encounter on crbug.com.