NICEVILLE, Fla. — This week’s It’s Geek To Me column by Jeff Werner takes a question from a Fort Walton Beach reader about why Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome appear to launch dozens of processes on startup and dominate memory usage.
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QUESTION:
William R. from Fort Walton Beach, Florida, writes:
The list of processes in my Task Manager shows “Microsoft Edge (48)” and “Google Chrome (42)” immediately after startup. Beneath each is the list of 48 & 42 running things, respectively. That said, Edge has only seven tabs open, and Chrome has only five tabs open. As you’d expect, both items are dominating memory consumption with the setup after a routine boot and no other actions at 66%.
What are those two browsers also running above/beyond the tabs open on launch?
ANSWER:
Jeff Werner responds:
Ah, Reader William, you have stumbled across one of the great mysteries of the modern web browser! Solving it will earn you – well, nothing, but perhaps it will give you a great deal of satisfaction. I’m happy to assist.
What you are seeing for each browser is not an aggregation of the number of tabs you have open. Rather, it is the number of independent processes, or threads, running under the browser.
This will include a main browser process, a separate process for each tab you have open, plus a process for every browser extension or Browser Helper Object, plus processes for your computer’s Graphics Processing Unit and other miscellaneous internal browser functions.
Then there are utility processes that handle specific tasks like decoding and playing audio, processing network requests, storing or retrieving data, and more.
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Why so many? Well, modern browsers are specially architected to split up the workload into separate processes for security, stability, and performance. Each tab, extension, and plugin runs in its own process that is protected from every other running process.
This is a security measure that prevents malicious code that enters a tab from one site from affecting other tabs or the rest of the system.
This architecture also improves stability in that, if a website or extension crashes, the extent of the effect is limited to that individual process, allowing the rest of the browser and its other tabs to continue.
Performance is improved through splitting all these subtasks into individual processes. This allows each process to have its own memory space, and for the browser to make better use of multiple-core CPUs, which can make web pages load faster.
You can get a lot more information about what all of these processes are, and how many system resources each is using by taking a peek under the hood at the browser’s own built-in task manager, which is separate from the Windows task manager.
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In both Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, you can open the browser task manager with the key combination Shift+Esc. Don’t get too bogged down by what you see in there – you’re not likely to understand what all the processes do. But hey – you asked!
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From the Shameless Plug Division of It’s Geek To Me, here is a Public Service Announcement from our sister organization, the Geek Lights on the Corner:
By the time you read this, the chances are very good that Season 18 of my annual animated Christmas lights and music show will be in full swing. The show opens to the public this year on December 1.
With the sole exception of when it rains, shows run every night through the Epiphany on January 6. Light shows begin nightly at 6 p.m., and are 30 minutes long.
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The show restarts on the hour and half-hour, so there’s no need to rush to get there. If you miss the beginning, just hang around for the next one. Well, unless you arrive in the middle of the last show of the night.
To view additional content, comment on articles, or submit a question, visit my website at ItsGeekToMe.co (not .com!)
Jeff Werner, a software engineer based in Niceville, Florida, has been writing his popular “It’s Geek to Me” tech column since 2007. He shares his expertise to help readers solve everyday tech challenges.
