[HowTo] Increase the Speed of Chrome

[HowTo] Increase the Speed of Chrome

Google Chrome is the most widely used browser in the world. Chrome is simple to use, fast, and powerful. It has useful tools in built, which in other browsers are not available by default. We have to rely on the browser extensions to avail some of  the required functionality. One of the example is Saving Web Pages as PDF in Chrome.

I run Chrome in Windows XP, and in Windows 7 systems. When I installed Chrome, the performance was amazing. Web pages load in a tremendous speed compared to other browsers. After few days, I installed useful extensions to it. Eventually speed of Chrome got reduced, and in my system with XP installation, Chrome Crashed!

What went wrong in Chrome?

In the beginning it was very difficult  track the issue, I always thought “My desktop is old and it is running out of resources”. But how did Chrome ran when I installed ?

What are the multiple instances of Chrome in Task Manager ?

So, I decided to see the resources and the memory Chrome consumes. I opened the Windows Task Manager and saw there were multiple instances of chrome.exe listed. Note that I opened one NewTab in Chrome, nothing else. We all know that Chrome spawns one process thread per tab opened. But what are these extra processes when I just opened one tab ?

 

Multiple instances of chrome.exe in task manager
Multiple instances of chrome.exe in task manager

 

All these Chrome processes were consuming considerable amount of memory and may be that was the reason for Chrome to crash.

So, I decided to end processes one by one. The moment I ended one process, I got error message in chrome “Extension xxxxxxxxx  is creashed”. So, I came to conclusion that the Chrome extensions were the culprit.

How To Analyze resources consumed by each Chrome extension?

Thanks to awesome tools provided in Chrome. You can clearly see, which extension is too heavy for Chrome.
Navigate to Settings->Tools->Task manager,  You will see the following screen.
Chrome task manager
You can select any process and end it. If you want more columns, you can right click on the window and Add columns to see extra details.
If you want few more advanced details, click on “Stats for nerds” or
Selectively ending processes one by one, Will help you to analyse which extension is actually causing the problem.
How to Increase the Page Load time in Chrome?
Talking about extensions which modify the web page content such as AdBlock, They sometimes hinder the speed of page load. When you open the web page, if you see any message like “Waiting for extension name” . Then, removing the particular extension could increase the page load speed in Chrome.

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