Google Chrome Helper

[Cablekevin]

Hi guys!

I've got a question regarding "Google Chrome Helper", it's taking up quite some RAM and it's not even responding.

I'm getting a new macbook in 2 months but for the time being i still need to do some web development on my Mid-2010 MBP with 4GB of ram, which is at 99% capacity for most of the time.

I'm running 10.10, but can someone explain me why i've got a lot of GCH that aren't responding?

If downgrading from 10.10 to the latest Mavericks would benefit my performance i'm happy to do so (but how?).

Hopefully someone can help me out, i'm quite annoyed with the current performance of my MBP.

 

[maflynn]

Reboot and use another browser?

 

[Cablekevin]

Reboot and use another browser?

A reboot is a temp fix unfortunately, and as for switching browsers, i'd prefer Chrome over Firefox, so i'm eager to fix this issue.

 

[maflynn]

A reboot is a temp fix unfortunately, and as for switching browsers, i'd prefer Chrome over Firefox, so i'm eager to fix this issue.

I think you'll need to wait until Google fixes it, but since the OS is in beta I'd not hold my breath

 

[w0lf]

It's not actually not responding so don't worry about that. This has been a bug in the past and iirc they fixed it by basically hiding it.

It also looks like it's using a pretty normal amount of ram. You just have a bunch of tabs open. Each helper (for the most part) represents one tab.

Downgrading would not make Chrome run any better.

Being near max ram capacity means nothing unless you're actually hitting swap or experiencing slowdowns. As the saying goes 'free ram is wasted ram'. Wired Memory is the real memory that cannot be moved around, App Memory and File Cache can both be emptied/filled by your OS very quickly to provide the best experience.

The only time you should really worry about ram is if you see something with a memory leak which are generally easy enough to spot. Keep in mind that any modern browser with 10+ tabs open is going to be using like 1-2GB ram, this is normal. You would expect problems if you for example closed all your tabs and opened up some other stuff but none of your old tabs memory was released.

Hope that clears things up for you.