Chrome 55 uses ~30% less memory than Chrome 54
We use headless Chrome to drive our service so we were very interested in the alleged memory improvements of Chrome 55 reported 2 months ago. Weather.com was the first site to crash our service due to a 300MB memory cap we had on a Docker container.
| Weather.com | Chrome 54 | Chrome 55 | Memory reduction |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chrome task manager | ~340 MB | ~250 MB | 26% |
| heap snapshot | 87 KB | 85 KB | 3% |
| w/uBlock heap snapshot | 30 KB | 28 KB | 5% |
| Reddit.com | Chrome 54 | Chrome 55 | Memory Reduction |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chrome task manager | ~160 MB | ~110 MB | 30% |
| heap snapshot | 11 KB | 9 KB | 19% |
| w/uBlock heap snapshot | 10 KB | 9 KB | 10% |
The improvements are more apparent when looking at the Chrome task manager than the heap snapshots.
We waited at least 30s before taking a snapshot or looking at the task manager because the numbers moved up and down (mostly down). In all cases, the tab was left in the foreground. All extensions were disabled (except uBlock while testing with that).
- MacOS, El Capitan (10.11)
- MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014)
N.B. see the Chrome team's official memory benchmark process in their blog post for more "real world" tests. The tests used here were mere heap snapshots and task manager investigations.