How to Reduce Memory Usage in Google Chrome with Low Priority Task Flags

[The AchieVer]

How to Reduce Memory Usage in Google Chrome with Low Priority Task Flags 

Google Chrome is one major resource hog, there’s no doubt about that, and the more tabs you open in the browser, the higher its memory usage.

Most Windows 10 users found this the hard way, but this didn’t stop Google Chrome from becoming the number one desktop browser out there.

According to third-party data provided by NetMarketShare, Google Chrome has a nearly 70 percent share, which means that approximately 7 in 10 PCs run Google’s browser.

This is impressive, to say the least, but at the same time, the aforementioned insane memory usage is quite an issue for a growing number of adopters.

Google is already working on improving the memory usage with several updates, and one of them has recently been included in the Canary version of the browser. Google Chrome Canary is the search giant’s own testing platform for Chrome experiments, so new features are first released for this version in order to give users the chance to try them out and for Google to collect feedback.

The new experiment is called Skip best effort tasks and its purpose is to block certain tasks from running during a typical browsing session. This means they would only be allowed to launch when closing the browser, so technically, Chrome should eat up less memory because these tasks wouldn’t be active during browsing.
 

 

 

The description that Google provides for this feature offers a few more details on what exactly is considered to be a low-priority task and suspending until shutdown:

“With this flag on, tasks of the lowest priority will not be executed until shutdown. The queue of low priority tasks can increase memory usage. Also, while it should be possible to use Chrome almost normally with this flag, it is expected that some non-visible operations such as writing user data to disk, cleaning caches, reporting metrics or updating components won't be performed until shutdown.”

Enabling this feature in Google Chrome Canary is easy. First of all, update to the latest version of the browser – I’m using 74.0.3703.0, so a newer build should work just fine.

Next, in the address bar type the following command to access the flags screen where you can configure additional browser settings:

chrome://flags

In the search box, type this name to find the feature that lets you enable the new functionality:

Skip best effort tasks
As a shortcut, you can just copy the following tag and paste it in the address bar of Google Chrome:

chrome://flags/#disable-best-effort-tasks
 

 

 

As you’ll see, the Skip best effort tasks is set to Disabled, so it’s not running in Google Chrome Canary for now. So what you have to do is to switch it to Enabled by clicking on the drop-down menu next to its name. A browser reboot will be required for the feature to come into effect.

What you need to know is that enabling this feature could cause other issues in Google Chrome, as the browser may experience some stability problems just because specific tasks aren’t launched when they are supposed to. This is one of the reasons the new optimization isn’t yet part of the stable version of Google Chrome, so the search giant is still working on refining its performance until it becomes available for everyone.

It remains to be seen when Google releases the feature as part of the stable update of Google Chrome, but for the time being, you can give it a try as part of the Canary version. Just don’t use Canary as your daily browser.

 

 

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