We know that Chrome browser is a RAM hog, despite its reputation as a great browser. It’s behaviour is well known to the point where it has become an Internet meme.
However, it seems that this will be a thing of the past thanks to the latest under-the-hood update on the latest Windows 10 Update.
The Windows 10 May 2020 Update (ver 2004) is the first major upgrade this year and it has introduced Windows segment heap memory improvements that will reduce overall memory usage of Win32 apps like Google Chrome.
The new Microsoft Edge runs on Chromium like Google Chrome, and Microsoft confirmed that they saw a memory use reduction of upto 27% when browsing with Microsoft Edge.
Google confirmed in a post that they will add this functionality in a future version of the Chrome. “Adding a Segment Heap entry to the chrome.exe manifest will tell recent-enough versions of Windows (20-04 and beyond) to opt chrome.exe into using the segment heap instead of the legacy heap,” a Chrome engineer said.
Google says that experiments with the per machine opting into the segment heap for chrome suggests that this could save hundreds of MB in the browser and Network Service utility processes. They see the greatest savings on many core machines, which is interesting but the actual results will vary widely.
It is unclear when these improvements will land in Google Chrome, but for sure I am curious. This will benefit users who have 8GB of RAM or less on their laptops while running Windows 10 version 2004 or later.
