How to Troubleshoot Google Chrome’s High CPU and Memory Usage

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Google chrome is definitely one of the fastest web browsers currently. While it Might be able to beat down all its contenders hands down in terms of speed and features, Chrome does has a weak point. When it comes to memory usage, sometimes chrome may act a little weird and consume a lot of your RAM and CPU’s resources . This eventually might cause your computer to slow down and even may lead to blue screens.

A similar problem happened with me a few days back. I have been using Google chrome for a long time and suddenly Google chrome started to consume up a lot of my computer’s ram and CPU resources. Every time when i rebooted, my computer worked flawlessly but when i started Google Chrome, it started to lag and even it slowed down my computer and eventually lead to a blue screen. This was it, i started searching for possible solutions and fixes for this problem online .

I followed most of the solutions and fixes i could find  but nothing seemed to work . So i tried checking each and every setting of Google chrome and eventually i found a solution . The culprit was one of my Google chrome extensions and removing all the extensions solved the problem. Although the culprit in my case was a extension but it might not be the same in your case .

If you have a similar problem where Google chrome is hogging a vast amount of your computers ram and CPU resources, then let me provide you some tips on how you can troubleshoot this annoying problem . Simply follow all of the methods provided below and i am sure one of them should definitely work for you.

Method 1 : Use Google Chrome’s inbuilt task manager

Google chrome has a inbuilt task manager ? yes it apparently does . Its made for advanced users but anyone can benefit from it . To bring up the task manager on Google chrome just press the following key combination ( Shift + Esc ) .

google-chrome-task-manager_0

The Task manager in Google chrome shows how much resource every web page and each of the chrome extensions are using. Right click on any process and you can select from more categories of information . If you find any of them fluctuating and using too much of your ram and CPU resources. Chances might be the page is infected or the extension is malfunctioning. Select the process / extension and end it and do a thorough scan of your system to remove any malware infection..

Method 2 : Remove all the extension in Google chrome 

Sometime one or multiple plugins can be the reason why Google Chrome ends up using a lot of your computers resources . You can use chrome’s extension manager to find out which of the extension is using more resources. Simply select the extension and click on the End process button end it. Restart chrome and if the plugin works normally then the problem is solved, however if the problem still exists then Remove the extension from chrome and reset chrome to set it back to normal .

remove-extensions-google -chrome

Method 3 : Reset chrome

If you can’t find any solution to Chrome’s problems through all of the above steps then you can try Resetting Chrome . It fixes most of the problems with chrome. Before resetting chrome, do sync your bookmarks and other data with your Gmail account so that you don’t lose them .

reset-chrome-settings

If you follow these two steps then most probably your problem will be solved . If it doesn’t then do add a comment below . I am pretty sure that myself or any of our readers might come to your help.

About the author

lovejeet

95 Comments

  • Thanks. I have very recently been having super high lag and traced it back to 1000% (yes, that is one thousand!) CPU usage in a single chrome process, as measured by the built-in Resource Monitor in win7. Through trial and error, found a couple sneaky extensions had installed themselves in chrome. In my case, these were “searchnewtab”, “surfanddkeep”, and “youtubeadblocker”. Not sure which one was doing the damage, but removed all! Turns out some very nasty malware was hiding in my extensions.
    Thanks for putting this info up! Really helpful!!!

  • ugh, you techs! how do you reset the browser? i didnt understand any of this. the only thing i was able to do was to bring up the task manager. after that, the directions meant nothing to me.

      • If the instructions are for a general audience with no specific training, they should be clear, detailed, avoid technical terms, and provide illustrations. Just as companies do product testing, they could do instruction testing. It’s called being user-friendly, and it is something most products try to achieve. There is nothing wrong with my asking that the instructions be made more user-friendly.

        • For me it was pretty obvious that the “Reset browser settings” screen capture shown in Method 3 was from the Settings menu, but I can understand that some people never used the Settings menu and might not know where that button is. Anyway, you could have just googled the words “reset chrome”, and the FIRST result explains where to find that.

  • playing a game on fb is using around 40-50 of my cpu which wasnt the case earlier.
    I hav removed al extensions but still no help

  • depending on certain webpages, it can use a lot of resources. i was surprised my cpu temp jump to 65C from normal operation of 45C. Loud noise from fan with its speed jump to 2300rpm from normal oprtn 1500rpm.
    press ctrl+al+del , and end all those chrome processes. temp return to normal. and reclick chrome and continue browsing.

    • Seems to be a bad extension for me. If you ever face the same problem again, check which extension is using the highest resource. That might be your culprit.

    • This is where I’m at, though same problem recurs if visiting the same webpages is a necessity for the task at hand.

    • “press ctrl+al+del , and end all those chrome processes. temp return to normal. and reclick chrome and continue browsing.”
      That’s just stupid advice because the chrome processes aren’t there in Task Manager unless you have chrome running.

  • Chrome has become a useless piece of bloatware. Developers still use it because it often has leading edge features. If you think Chrome on Windows is bad, you should try Chrome on Android. Google should be embarrassed.

  • Bad tips.. Resetting makes it good for 1-2 days. Disabling extensions makes no difference. And checking the task manager does nothing but inform you that flash is using a fuck load of CPU. Can I get a job and give shitty tips as well?

    • Hi Gisle, i try to share all that i know through this blog and this doesn’t mean i know everything. Most of the time its the visitors comments on my blog from which i learn new things. All the how to guides and tips that i provide on my blog are thoroughly tested by me on my PC. I wouldn’t dare to post them if they didn’t work at first. The problem is we all use computers with different specs, Which is why my tips will work for some and for some they wont.

    • Indeed, problem I have is that YouTube Flash now takes up 100% of CPU (using process monitor) so sound breaks up – even if I pause to let it download ahead – seems to be in playback. Adjusting to low res doesn’t help. There ought to be a law against automatic (forced) updates the incur more resources. I still use XP because, unlike Windows Vista, 7, or 8, I am still allowed unfettered access to my computer – just imagine if you bought a car and were not allowed to look under the hood. That’s Bullshit!!

    • Are you just commenting to be a douche or do you have some alternative input rather than criticizing on what does not work for you. Seems like you know the ins and outs so let’s hear some good tips. Also if you think you can do it better just:
      -make your own blog
      -incorporate relevant information that will attract the type of visitors you want
      -link your site to all you’re preferred social networking groups that keeps your sites traffic flowing
      -hope that you have enough credible info that people can use are willing to spread the news about your site that you’ll run out of bandwidth allowing you to step up your game
      -and soon you too will be paid for your “shitty” advice
      Best of awareness to you, because narrow mindedness gets us nowhere.
      Thank you Lovejeet for sharing your knowledge although it does not help everyone you at least help some… Keep up the geek.

  • Thanks so much. I didn’t even need to delete an extension, just disabling it and immediately selecting it again freed up all my cpu!

  • I dont use a lots of extensions but i deleted one same prob and 2 more are there but i need them is there a another way

  • i tried all of those solutions but now i have a just install chrome, with no plug-in other than the ones it comes with and it still gets 15 to 20% of the cpu of my i7 4770k. when i use the inbuilt task manager it says that the browser isusing all the cpu, not one specific page, so how can i deal with that?

  • Bafore this started to happen Spring of 2014 I could open as many tabs as I desired with no issue…Then an update to Flash and its been hell since…I have also noticed that if you let facebook sit open it will consume the memory and rise to a gig or so.
    The only shortcut way out for Me is to click a new tab then close the facebook tab, then go back to facebook on the new tab. (and Your still logged in) Do We can ask Adobe and facebook whats the deal? I think it is closer to something facebook is doing such as feeding rotation weather ads or live feed. not releasing any memory.

  • Hello, I have Windows 7 and the past few days have been receiving a Norton Performance Alert for High CPU usage for Google Chrome. And also, my computer has been running very poorly, so I removed Google Chrome to resolve the problem. I am still getting the Norton Performance Alert for High CPU usage for Google Chrome, even though it is uninstalled. When I click on the details in the Performance Alert it says qmoqcpdgc.exe. next to a Google Chrome icon. I click ‘locate’ and it in the C drive listed as an application and is 841 KB in size. When I highlight and delete, it says, ‘the file can’t be deleted because it is open in Google Chrome. Close the file and try again’. The high CPU problem was happening while Google Chrome was installed and is still happening after I uninstalled it. How can I delete this ‘qmoqcpdgc.exe.’ application file at this point? The alert is popping up every few minutes and right this minute! My computer fan is non stop and I’m afraid my computer is going to crash at any moment. Thank you for your help!

  • Processes running show Dxptaxluzwsp.exe listed about twenty times. Shows as a Google file. I have tried going into safe mode and deleting the Dxptaxluzwsp.exe file but when I reboot it seems to return. Also my desktop keeps refreshing about 30 seconds. Any ideas how to completely remove Google?

  • I also uninstalled Google Chrome, but the Google process whxrwtanaf.exe still runs and uses up from 20-90% all my CPU and uses 1GB of RAM. There are multiple entries of the process and I tried to disable them, but they keep popping back in. Program Files(x86) still has a folder under “Common” called the Google Updater with the Google Updater service.com. I’m not sure what will happen if I just deleted this folder as the program Google Updater is not under Add/Remove Programs. Perhaps the best thing would be to restore to a past Windows Software Point, but I’d rather find a fix. Any ideas?

  • I fixed the problem of Google Chrome still HIGH CPU after uninstall. Task manager showed the process whxrwtanaf.exe as the culprit. I did a search for the file and located it in C:/users/*your user name”/AppData/LocalLow/Microsofthxohml/sycfaqxxdyle . Right clicked on the file and selected properties. Selected security, the advanced, then effective permissions, then edit. In edit, denied all permissions under SYSTEM, User, and administrator. Did apply and okay and returned to desktop. Restarted the computer and the problem was fixed. I checked the task manager after the computer was up fully and the google file was not running and the CPU usage was 0% and google no longer used 1GB of RAM.

    • Thank you so much, I tried to remove google, updated Bios,ran several system tests and nothing worked. It appeared as if google was taking control of my computer. Then after following your instructions above , my system is back to normal, once again thank you so much.

      • There’s nothing wrong with holly’s English.
        The English used in the article isn’t great either – especially with the spaces before punctuation marks (full stops, question marks etc).

      • Terris, you apparently had ridiculously easy English teachers. This is not professional writing by any stretch of the imagination, regardless of how ‘fine’ you happened to read it. As a matter of fact, it’s aimed at people such as yourself, who can’t discriminate between good and bad writing. They count on the fact that you’re dumb enough to miss the fact (and the disclaimer) that it’s an advertisement.

        • Oh who gives two shites? If it can be ready it’s good enough. If the ideas travel from point A to point B, mission accomplished.

      • I read it fine too, Terry. I cannot believe these ungratefull idiots who are complaining about his English when this guy was nice enough to post this article to help people out. Get a fucking life, nitpickers!

  • Adblock Plus takes 4 times the amount of memory as regular extension. Too bad I can’t kill it, preloading a pop up with animations takes a lot of memory too. 🙁

  • Thanks for the tips.
    I use the linux version of it and the tipoff was hearing the fan on my laptop spool up. The CPU usage gets ridiculous.

  • Use Internet Explorer. Don’t rely on the memes. IE is much faster and memory optimized than Chrome.

  • That is a HUGE issue. I found the easiest way to resolve it is to simply stop using Chrome. I can run Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer all at the same time with multiple tabs and combined they use less RAM than just using Chrome. No issues with any of the other browsers.

  • Thanks for the tip on the task manager. I haven’t had any disabling problems with high CPU usage, just with RAM. It turns out that the extra 2gb is caused by all the stuff that I ask Cr to do. Very helpful!

  • I get no response from Chrome when I try Shift+Esc. Is there an alternative way to reach this task manager?

    • you should have chrome window opened when clicking shift+esc.Alternatively you can go to:settings-more tools then scroll down to task manager.

      • Well, beside that Shift+ESC really doesn’t work I couldn’t find this mentioned ‘more tools’ anywhere. It doesn’t exists. Anyway, what worked for me was to right-click the top blue bar and choose ‘Task manager’ option…

          • I wasn’t looking at the dashed icon menu, instead I entering the ‘Settings’ page and trying to find a ‘more tools’ link there. Thanks for the clarification. Now about the Shift+ESC it never opens the task manager for me…
            PS: I edited my previous message. 😉

  • Thanks for this. I’d never seen Chrome’s task manager and in my case it pointed out Shockwave Flash is the runaway memory hog which quickly exceeds 1 G of memory within moments of activating. Now to figure out how to throttle its usage.

  • chrome’s memory hunger has became a notorious problem,especially gmail RAM usage is unbelievable,it flies up to the sky.l installed Wise Memory Optimizer,amazing little thing that puts chrome under control surprisingly well.

  • Completely useless information I’m sorry. Both chrome’s have gone insane the last few months [2nd quarter 2015] using 150mb PER TAB and 10-20 % of a Quad3.0 PER TAB. A few weeks ago I could open 10 tabs streaming, today 4 and done. Obviously Chrome is doing some google stuff behind the scene as usual, time to find a new browser. BTW, NO addons, no nothings just chrome streaming. Why do I ever trust google crap.

    • Try using the AdBlock extension. I just discovered that a major reason why I was having problems with Chrome is that I had set AdBlock not to run on websites I want to support, but the ads themselves were causing the CPU and memory problems. Once I blocked ads on those pages, total Chrome CPU usage dropped from around 40% to 3%. Ads are web page killers.

      • Is this what it is? I can’t do an adblock because of the work I do- Close captioning, I can’t turn off the adblock.
        Chrome is using up my whole system for the last few days, it is crazy.

        • You could at least test whether AdBlock would solve the problem. Even if you can’t enable it while working, you could try installing and enabling the extension on your own time, then open a few tabs in Chrome and see what happens. In my case, I was seeing 40% of CPU going to one of several Chrome processes. I had a tab open to a website where I allow ads to load (I had disabled AdBlock for that domain), so I tried enabling AdBlock and my problem was solved immediately. I didn’t even have to reload Chrome or close and re-open the tab, it just instantly removed the ads and the CPU for that process dropped to zero because the rest of the content was static.

        • You could at least test whether AdBlock would solve the problem. Even if you can’t enable it while working, you could try installing and enabling the extension on your own time, then open a few tabs in Chrome and see what happens. In my case, I was seeing 40% of CPU going to one of several Chrome processes. I had a tab open to a website where I allow ads to load (I had disabled AdBlock for that domain), so I tried enabling AdBlock and my problem was solved immediately. I didn’t even have to reload Chrome or close and re-open the tab, it just instantly removed the ads and the CPU for that process dropped to zero because the rest of the content was static.

          • hey I put in the CCleaner program- and then I also put on the adblock extension on google chrome. I can enable and disable it in the tools menu of chrome. It ended up being an extension I was using that was causing the high cpu and I removed it. but the ad block and Ccleaner also work well for me now.

  • in ubuntu everything is ok even with chrome that sometimes misbehaves but u get everyday updates

  • You can use One tab, Hibernation extensions on your browser to reduce the CPU and memory usage. Always keep the eyes on number of extensions you are using on your browser. remove unwanted extensions.
    Go to Google chrome task manager by pressing Shift+esc, identify which one does the same and do terminate that.

  • I just left Chrome entirely. At this point it is more of a liability to have it open. I have no choice but I need to run some pretty memory intensive programs at work. I went back to IE for a while. I then tried Polarity out. Works pretty well so far.

  • A tip for you: Pay your freelance writer more money. Your site requires it. Or fire your current one, and get another.

    • Absolutely agreed! “Method 2 : Remove all the extension in Google Chrome ” . What a stupid solution. I NEED all my f*** extensions running! The intelligent solution is to move to another browser as i did.

  • Many thanks Lovejeet. Great article and more importantly, it helped me to alleviate the majorly annoying high CPU issues I’ve been abruptly experiencing with my laptop.

  • Simply, uncheck “hardware acceleration” from setting.. And the your CPU usage will be dropped.

  • I realize that I’m a little late to the table. I just wanted to thank the writer for an informative article, and the posters for their informative posts.

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