Try to think about this from an optimizer's standpoint. Here are some excellent reasons why giant memory footprints are a good thing:
1) Freeing memory is expensive. In order to do it properly in a running process, you need to check that each piece of memory is not in use, and that typically requires traversing large graphs. It's only something you want to do when absolutely necessary. (Hint: it's not necessary when you have 16 GB of RAM.)
2) RAM is really fast. Things in memory can be read in a few CPU clock cycles. On disk, you need to wait for a plate of metal moving at 50 mph to swing by.
3) It's totally free! It's not like unused RAM can enter power-saving mode or anything. If your RAM usage isn't at 100% you are wasting valuable space. This isn't a checkout lane where lower usage is a win for everyone. It's like an everlasting candy fountain: it all rots if you leave it, so get the whole neighborhood in for a piece.
So honestly, what are you complaining about? So chrome wants to cache hour-old pictures just in case you hit the back button 45 times. What's the big deal? YOU HAVE 6,600,000,000 FREAKIN' BYTES LEFT! You could probably fit Project Gutenberg in there. If and when you run out of memory, and pages take 15 seconds to load because your hard drive is swapping like crazy, then you have a problem. But you won't have that problem. And just because chrome is taking up 3 GB at the moment doesn't mean it won't be a nice citizen when the operating system starts to cry about low memory, which it won't do because YOU HAVE 6 MORE GIGABYTES.
Certainly all true points. However, for the people without the luxury of 16GB (I'm running on an old machine, with 3gb of RAM), Chrome consistently freezes the computer due to the resource hogging. I've learned my lesson and switched to Firefox.
1) Freeing memory is expensive. In order to do it properly in a running process, you need to check that each piece of memory is not in use, and that typically requires traversing large graphs. It's only something you want to do when absolutely necessary. (Hint: it's not necessary when you have 16 GB of RAM.)
2) RAM is really fast. Things in memory can be read in a few CPU clock cycles. On disk, you need to wait for a plate of metal moving at 50 mph to swing by.
3) It's totally free! It's not like unused RAM can enter power-saving mode or anything. If your RAM usage isn't at 100% you are wasting valuable space. This isn't a checkout lane where lower usage is a win for everyone. It's like an everlasting candy fountain: it all rots if you leave it, so get the whole neighborhood in for a piece.
So honestly, what are you complaining about? So chrome wants to cache hour-old pictures just in case you hit the back button 45 times. What's the big deal? YOU HAVE 6,600,000,000 FREAKIN' BYTES LEFT! You could probably fit Project Gutenberg in there. If and when you run out of memory, and pages take 15 seconds to load because your hard drive is swapping like crazy, then you have a problem. But you won't have that problem. And just because chrome is taking up 3 GB at the moment doesn't mean it won't be a nice citizen when the operating system starts to cry about low memory, which it won't do because YOU HAVE 6 MORE GIGABYTES.