Google Chrome is known to be a lightning quick browser but that doesn’t mean it can’t get bogged down from time to time, especially as you started expanding it’s functionality by adding extension after extension. Every tab, plugin, or extension increases Chrome’s memory footprint on the system. Logically this isn’t a situation specific to Chrome, but how can you determine system resources usage at any given time?

At this point, many users would turn to Windows Task Manager and sure enough, some memory numbers are available there. The problem is Chrome runs everything in a separate process; every tab is it’s own process as well as plugins like Adobe Flash. Consequently, what you see in Task Manager is a number of chrome.exe processes and little detail as to which belongs to what.

For a more detailed breakdown pertaining to system resources usage, Chrome actually includes it’s own version of a task manager. You can launch the Chrome Task Manager with the keyboard shortcut SHIFT+ESC or locate it through the user interface under Tools -> Task manager.

Now you can see exactly what each of those chrome.exe processes correspond to; with breakdowns of memory, CPU, and network usage. With this information uncovered you may find yourself questioning whether extension A or plugin Y is worth being loaded. For example, on my multi-gigabyte desktop PC I’m content with my Google Reader and Gmail Checker extensions taking up over 10MB but on resource starved platforms, like a netbook, perhaps it stops making so much sense.

With the extension identified you can now begin removing the ones that are a bit too heavy for what they are providing under chrome://extensions in the address bar.