The test machine runs on Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4 Ghz (x2) with 2GB RAM. I tried loading single page PHP manual (16.5 MB) on Windows Vista from our local server with 100Mbps LAN connecting it. At the same time I was running the Javascript console to measure performance of page loading. I was also searching for the term cgi in the page being loaded. It takes about 2 minutes to load it in Firefox. 20 minutes later the page was still loading in Google Chrome!

The page up / page down keys were pretty unresponsive in the tab as well as the Javascript console. It appears Google Chrome parses pages as it loads the. As of the time of this writing the single tab with PHP manual has consumed 576 MB of RAM and still increasing. I could see the Javascript Console was using the same process which explains which it was hanging along with the browser tab. Read after the break for more details.

Google Chrome has potential memory leak issue and massive memory misuse problem. To load a 16.6 MB file it consumed over 600 MB of RAM and was still increasing when I decided to kill the process. It consumed 100% of one CPU (you will see near 50% in the display because it is a dual core machine) in my core 2 duo machine during the entire time. There was no network activity indicating that the page content was fully loaded by the browser. There is something seriously wrong here.

I repeated the experiment but this time without loading the Javascript Console and without searching, just plain page loading with the task manager to show resource consumption. This time it loaded the 16.5 MB page (17300829 bytes to be exact)  in 333,820K memory! I couldn't drag the scrollbar to the end of the page, it simply wasn't moving. Pressing the Page down worked with a noticiable pause. I decided to refresh the page using Ctrl-F5. This time the memory again started shooting up and stopped at 454, 188K!

The same page took less than 2 minutes to load on same hardware in Firefox and all the keys were very responsive. This is not a dummy file. This is the PHP manual which we PHP developers use on a regular basis.

Google Chrome needs to address the serious memory misuse - 454 MB to load a single 16.5 MB page! Google Chrome developers also has a potentially big memory leak issue in its hands.