Is there any memory limit for Google Chrome browser?

Question

What is the default memory limit for a single tab in chrome ??

Answer 1

There was some talking about a very similar topic. Here

You should try the following:

Right click on the Chrome icon and go to properties. Chrome should be here:

"C:\Documents and Settings\%USER%\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe"  

Where %USER% is your username on your PC, obviously ;)

At the end of the line add --purge-memory-button

It should look like this:

"C:\Documents and Settings\%USER%\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --purge-memory-button  

Now, when Chrome works, press shift+Esc, and now you have a new option, "Purge Memory" which frees up memory. The tabs that do not need attention at that particular time will be purged from your RAM.

You can also add one of these lines:

Never voluntarily relinquish memory

--memory-model=high   

Voluntarily reduce working set when switching tabs

--memory-model=medium  

Voluntarily reduce working set when switching tabs and also when the

--memory-model=low  

Browser is not actively being used

You can have several lines after the target place "C:\Documents and Settings\%USER%\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe"

Let's say we wanna use the "Purge memory" line and the "Low memory model" line. It would look like this:

"C:\Documents and Settings\%USER%\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --purge-memory-button --memory-model=low  

Answer 2

It's hard to answer correctly and the answer could be figured out only in benchmarks for particular task with particular build.

There are several thing that could allow you to use from 1 to 2 GB of memory:

• Chrome version: because different V8 engines have different memory limits.
• Chrome platform: 32-bit or 64-bit.
• Operating System itself: chrome could be built with different flags for different platforms.
• Again, Chrome version: there are some discussion on the internet about recompiling chrome with some compilation flags that could allow to use more memory, then chrome developers decide to exclude such flags because of some reasons. Who know — maybe they will include them again or will increase default heap size.
• Video memory: in some cases page's content may require some video memory and, if your video adapter has no sufficient amount, Chrome will take it from general memory, which will increase memory usage for the page.

Right now, with 64bit Chrome version 47, on Windows 8.1 I can take up to 1.8GB with one tab, then it crashes.

Update:

As I can see some magic has happened and limit has changed.
For Chrome version 63, on x64 Windows 10 OS, I could allocate up to 3.5 GB memory, parsing a huge JSON string and then displaying it on the page.
The number is taken from Chrome's Task manager and from Process Explorer's Private Bytes metric.