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Chrome is using too much memory on your Mac
Chrome gives every tab its own memory. With many tabs open, Chrome can need more memory than your Mac has, and then the whole Mac slows down. You can fix it in a few minutes without closing everything.
Why Chrome uses so much memory
Chrome runs each tab and each extension as a separate process. This keeps one broken page from taking down the others, but every process needs its own memory. Web apps such as Google Docs, Gmail, Slack and YouTube need the most.
Chrome also holds on to memory the longer it runs. After a few days, the same tabs use more memory than they did when you opened them.
Is Chrome really the problem?
High memory use alone is not a problem. macOS keeps free memory busy on purpose. The number that matters is memory pressure.
- Open Activity Monitor: press Command-Space, type “Activity Monitor”, and press Return.
- Click Memory and look at the Memory Pressure graph at the bottom. Green means that your Mac has enough memory. Yellow or red means that it is short on memory (Apple Support).
- Click the Memory column to sort by it. If many “Google Chrome Helper” processes fill the top of the list, Chrome is the cause.
How to fix it
- Close duplicate tabs. It is easy to have the same page open two or three times, and each copy uses memory.
- Turn on Memory Saver. In Chrome, click the ⋮ menu, choose Settings › Performance, and turn on Memory Saver. Chrome then puts tabs that you have not used for a while to sleep, and wakes them when you click them (Chrome Help).
- Find the heaviest tabs. In Chrome, choose Window › Task Manager. Sort by memory and close the tabs that you do not need.
- Remove extensions that you do not use. Click the ⋮ menu and choose Extensions › Manage Extensions.
- Quit and reopen Chrome. Press Command-Q, then open Chrome again. If “Continue where you left off” is on in Settings › On startup, your tabs come back.
Safari, Edge, Brave and Arc
Other browsers work the same way: many tabs use a lot of memory. Close the duplicates and restart the browser now and then. Edge and Brave are built on the same engine as Chrome and have their own settings that put idle tabs to sleep.
What does not help
Apps that “free up RAM” make the memory number look better for a moment. macOS fills that memory again within minutes, because memory that sits empty does no work. Close the tabs that you do not need instead.
Sluggish finds your duplicate tabs
Sluggish shows how much memory your browser uses and counts the duplicate tabs in Chrome and Safari. One click closes the duplicates and keeps the first copy. It reads your tabs only after you allow it.
Download SluggishYour first 10 checks are free, then $12 one time. macOS 14 or later, Apple silicon and Intel.