Google's Spectre fix increases Chrome's RAM usage by 10%

Written by Team Zyxel | 7/14/18 3:00 PM

Google Chrome

Wondering what's using up all your computer's RAM? Google recently fixed a Spectre CPU vulnerability in its Chrome browser, but unfortunately the fix uses up more of your computer's memory.

“Site Isolation does cause Chrome to create more renderer processes, which comes with performance tradeoffs,” admits Google software engineer Charlie Reis. “There is about a 10-13 percent total memory overhead in real workloads due to the larger number of processes.”

Google is working to reduce the impact of the fix, which will increase across Windows, Mac, and Chrome OS. When Chrome 68 launches later this month, users will be able to verify whether Site Isolation is on or not by typingchrome://process-internals into the address bar, however, this does not work on the current version, Chrome 67.

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