Why does IE use so much memory
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I have Windows 7 and I've recently had to do some cold rebooting due to the entire system freezing. I don't expect that in Windows 7. In the past, I've had SQL Server Management Studio, 3 instances of Visual Studio, Many browsers, NotePad++ and a whole slew of other apps open, with no problem. Currently I am finding that with a few apps open, the machine may freeze. It seemed to relate to IE when I have say, only 10 tabs open. I have 4 Gig of fast RAM and an I3 processor. I started watching the resources usage in the Task Manager. I see that closing IE may release 500 Meg of memory. That seems a bit excessive. Anyone have any thoughts? Written on Chrome... Thanks, Mike
I have similar problems and I don't use IE. Windows 7 is a piece of crap. My H/W config. is also 4GB of memory on an AMD 64bit Quad. I have had it less than 6 months. So far, I had to run "repair" twice, put up with a number of BSODs (both "blue" and "black"), freezes, etc. I also use VirtualBox on occasion and when I do, Windows 7 refuses to shutdown when I close all running programs and issue the shutdown. I must force an "electrical power off" and then contend with the "options menu to start in safe mode, etc. the next boot-up. I have had more BSODs on Windows 7 (< 6 mo.) than I had in 8 years running XP. As far as being a more secure system, I question that when I look at the constant Windows updates and see that over 90% are "security updates". And don't even get me started on the annoyances - e.g., "sorting a folder and having the "ascending" order changed to "descending" order for absolutely no reason, copying files to an external HD only to find the symbolic links were copied and numerous other annoyances (I call them bugs, but I guess M$ calls them features).
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Don't forget IE8 and later spawn at least one process per tab as well. I don't know how much code gets shared between the tabs but I bet it's not that high....
That can be adjusted. I had a problem with an XP machine where IE8 always froze after some time when browsing using many windows and/or tabs, particularly with sites with many large images. It showed up that something (no idea what) had set it into single process mode (all windows and tabs runs in the same process), by adding the value TabProcGrowth = 0 to
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main
Saved a lot of memory actually, but the sideeffect was that it would freeze whenever memory use exceeded a certain amount, usually a little above 1 GB, even if there still was more than 1 GB free RAM left (4 GB in total on system). After setting TabProcGrowth = 18 it now runs in op to 18 processes (less will probably do, but haven't had time to experiment with it) and it hasn't frozen so far no matter how many tabs/windows I've opened, not even when being close to having used up all available memory. But if does indeed use a lot more memory this way per window/tab. More here: http://www.mydigitallife.info/hack-to-launch-only-one-or-limited-processes-of-ie8-regardless-of-number-of-tabs/[^]
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I have Windows 7 and I've recently had to do some cold rebooting due to the entire system freezing. I don't expect that in Windows 7. In the past, I've had SQL Server Management Studio, 3 instances of Visual Studio, Many browsers, NotePad++ and a whole slew of other apps open, with no problem. Currently I am finding that with a few apps open, the machine may freeze. It seemed to relate to IE when I have say, only 10 tabs open. I have 4 Gig of fast RAM and an I3 processor. I started watching the resources usage in the Task Manager. I see that closing IE may release 500 Meg of memory. That seems a bit excessive. Anyone have any thoughts? Written on Chrome... Thanks, Mike
Recently I noticed that when I close IE tabs it doesn't close the processes it associated with them! Separate IE processes close and release memory only after the whole IE is closed... If you open a tab to watch a YouTube video you immediately lose a significant amount of memory and you cannot get it back by simply closing the tab. Very unfortunate behavior.
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I have Windows 7 and I've recently had to do some cold rebooting due to the entire system freezing. I don't expect that in Windows 7. In the past, I've had SQL Server Management Studio, 3 instances of Visual Studio, Many browsers, NotePad++ and a whole slew of other apps open, with no problem. Currently I am finding that with a few apps open, the machine may freeze. It seemed to relate to IE when I have say, only 10 tabs open. I have 4 Gig of fast RAM and an I3 processor. I started watching the resources usage in the Task Manager. I see that closing IE may release 500 Meg of memory. That seems a bit excessive. Anyone have any thoughts? Written on Chrome... Thanks, Mike