Google Chrome Helper Sophos

[DrWho]

I am a noob, regardless of a computer degree and years of using computers, I have not really grasped the complete knowledge why this happened, and really would like an proper (English) translation (layman’s terms)

I know that Mac aren’t usually subseptable to Viruses/Malware, but I have Sophos Home
V 1.2.6, and Malware Bytes that I run occasionally (once a month) I try to make sure it is ok (running properly) I am no Apple Genius but want to make sure it is ok

I also use Chrome and have a bunch of tabs open, hundreds!! which uses a lot of Ram (no idea why) and I have no idea what Google Chrome Helper is. Like I said I know I am doing something wrong, but don’t understand why it’s wrong or the whole inner mechanics if you will

I was running a scan, with Sophos, and it was saying over 3 million files to scan, this was taking forever, and not slowing anything down, but within 3-4 days of leaving the computer on, the fan is going nuts, switching between programs was slowing down, and Sophos went to a crawl. Looked into a few YouTube videos and Activity Monitor, and it was almost completely dominated by Google Chrome Helper. I took YouTube’s advice, backed up my session, force quit Chrome, and the second I did the scan on Sophos went faster than I had seen it in ages

Even now with Chrome closed, looking at Activity Montior, there are still Google Chrome Helper Processss but Chrome is not open. The computer is much faster, programs are responding again, things are better... but I am still left in th dark here.

I need a middle ground, I religiously use Chrome, is there a way I can use it without slowing down (potentially damaging) my computer?

 

[MacGizmo]

The short answer is no. And yes.

ALL browsers eat RAM the more tabs you have open—and unfortunately for you, Google Chrome is by-far the worst offender. Modern browsers treat each tab as a separate process, which is why when one website in a tab crashes, the entire browser doesn't crash and the remaining tabs keep working fine. This uses a lot of RAM, particularly if you have Flash installed and the sites you've got open use Flash. Google Chrome Helpers are essentially just website pages, scripts and plugins running within those tabs.

I'm not one to tell anyone how to use their Mac in general, but having more than around 5 to 10 browser tabs open is bordering on extreme. "Hundreds" is just ridiculous and unnecessary. You can tell yourself that it is, or come up with any other half-baked excuse as to why you do it, but you're only fooling yourself.

The fractions of a second you're saving by not having to load those sites only when you need them is completely overshadowed by the massive slowdowns you experience on everything you do on the computer by having all the tabs open all the time.

If you don't change your preferred way of working by closing all but a few tabs (like around 5 to 10), then you're going to experience slowdowns, crashes and other random issues. Having tabs load at start slows down the browser launch to begin with, and it only gets worse as you open more tabs.

How to fix the problem. Sort of:

Adding more RAM to the computer would help a lot... 8GB is simply not enough, no matter what anyone tells you. 16GB of RAM should be the minimum. However, in your case it won't help. Hundreds of Chrome tabs open will just continue to soak-up all the RAM you have.

Remove as many Chrome extensions you have installed as you possibly can.

Good luck. I know breaking a long-standing habit is difficult, but in your case it's probably the only thing that's going to help.

 

[GGJstudios]

If you want to improve performance, I recommend you uninstall Sophos. There are zero viruses that exist in the wild that could infect your Mac. If you're careful about what software you install, you generally don't need to worry about malware on macOS, and you don't need any antivirus app running constantly. It is relatively rare for any Mac user to encounter malware unless they're overtly doing risky things, like installing pirated software.

As for Chrome, I agree with the other poster that you're taxing your system's resources unnecessarily by having hundreds of tabs open simultaneously. You can't possibly be using that many tabs simultaneously. I routinely find it useful to open 10-30 tabs for short periods of time, but I close tabs that I'm no longer referring to. I don't experience any degraded performance, but I have 16GB of RAM.

 

[MacGizmo]

I'll second what GGJstudios just said. Get rid of Sophos—it's a resource pig, and is easily circumvented anyway.