What does the Google Chrome exactly do when a new tab is opened?

Question

Today, i observed an interesting behavior. I am using windows XP-sp3 OS.
When i open a new tab in Google Chrome & view the task manager, a new process is created.
But, after some time, this process is terminated.

Why it is showing such kind of behavior? Is it due to system call vfork()? Does the child process immediately call exec()?

Does it happen only with Google Chrome or all other browsers behave in a similar fashion?

Answer 1

AFAIK Chrome maintains one process for each tab, also one process for some plugins too. They preferred multi-process architecture over multi-threaded one because when you are making network application which communicate with network all the time, you can expect to receive packets which can garble the memory. So having multi-process will prevent all but one process, as opposed to multi-threaded will kill the the tabs.

You can enlighten your self on following blog:

http://blog.chromium.org/2008/09/multi-process-architecture.html