Hmm, probably, 1.6GB, three tabs, one of which is a stream and one of which is a scrolled-down Reddit page that's probably going to slow to a crawl if I scroll much further. (Reddit dynamically loads pages, so everything you've scrolled past is still in the DOM, but probably Chrome forces objects to free and garbage-collect to conserve a little memory -- and CPU use -- on such pages. So, it starts to crawl eventually..)
IIRC -- Chrome conserves memory much more carefully on memory-constrained systems. It's simply the space-time tradeoff of computing. They use more RAM when it's available, to improve performance -- unloading fewer objects, using fewer swaps, etc.
So you'll get different answers from everyone, and numbers that don't scale in any meaningful way at all with the number of tabs.
Memory isn't a one-time resource. If you still have say 50% RAM open, and you never even use that, what does it really matter? Relax, you can use
more than all of it. You aren't losing data!
And that's not even considering the nitty-gritty of what the OS is doing -- Windows itself (and I imagine *nix does this too) uses ""free"" RAM as cache. That's why you can start an application once at boot, and it takes a little while to start, but subsequent startups go faster (if the cached data hasn't been overwritten by something else, which you can force by using enough RAM inbetween).
There isn't much importance on RAM usage these days, as long as things manage their use, which these examples do.
I mean, ever since paging was introduced it's (figuratively, but in some cases literally)
never been a hard limit, only a performance hit, and a hard limit only on specific configurations, which are discouraged anyway (i.e. disabling swap). It was pretty terrifically slow in the early days of course, but it's much less painful with SSDs prevalent now. Paging is an additional time cost over handling everything in RAM directly, but if the average case is programs and data being cached in otherwise-unallocated RAM, anything that purges that RAM (forcing an HDD fetch on the next access),
does precisely the same thing. It's psychology at this point: one seems like a punishment (goes slower when RAM runs out) while the other seems like a happy bonus (goes faster when more RAM is free). But they're semantically and functionally the same thing!
And speaking of psychology, I mean, if you're complaining about RAM usage, but you're also using dozens,
or thousands of tabs... well... y'know? (Insert "that's none of my business Kermit" meme.
)
Tim
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