Tab Discarding in Chrome - A Memory-Saving Experiment

Addy Osmani
Addy Osmani

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.

Not all open tabs are used tabs. If low on memory, Chrome can discard uninteresting background tabs.

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.

Memory required per tab

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.

Memory required task manager

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.

Enable tab discarding screenshot.
Relaunch button screenshot.

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.

Discarded tabs page screenshot.

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.

Discarded tab example screenshot.

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.

Pinned tabs are also taken into account when looking at whether to discard a tab

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.

Suspender screenshot.

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.

Suspended tabs favicon screenshot.

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.

Serializer concept screenshot

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.