Google Chrome slow with many tabs open

Jammy Duel

Honorable
Dec 4, 2013
3
0
10,510
Since changing from windows 7 to windows 8.1 Chrome has started becoming almost totally unresponsive when I have enough tabs open, in the region of 30-40 if there is only one window, less if more than one window. By almost totally unresponsive I mean it takes in the region of minutes to actually load pages, and often images on those pages will not load at all. On windows 7 it could easily handle hundreds of tabs in multiple windows without showing any sign of slowing.

I guess it's just windows 8.1 being crap compared to 7, but does anybody know if there is a way to fix this?

p.s. I know it's a ridiculous amount of tabs to have open at once, but it happens by the way I tend to browse before anybody says anything about the sheer amount of tabs :)

p.p.s. It's a very sudden drop in performance rather than an incremental one. It will work perfectly fine up until a certain point, and then suddenly drop off, and will take closing several tabs to fix it again.
 

Socio

Distinguished
May 19, 2002
2
0
18,510
Are you running 64bit?

You need to have a 64bit OS and Chrome 64bit to make use of that ram, which would allow for more tabs without performance consequences.
 

spazonymous

Estimable
Apr 1, 2015
2
0
4,510
Chrome uses a separate process per tab, which Google claims is a good thing. But in practice it can slow your system down. Personally, I don't like the mult-process approach of Chrome. I use Firefox and it never crashes for me and I have plenty of tabs open often - even hefty web dev stuff. I don't need each website to be isolated on its own. For me such per-website isolation is overkill that I don't need. Each to their own.