How to Reduce RAM Consumption in Google Chrome

Google Chrome's reputation as a ruthless RAM devourer is well justified. Despite Mountain View's efforts, the browser's behavior still follows the line of dumping everything into memory and hoping for the best. There are even more efficient features that aren't activated under some configurations, and one of them is NoState Prefetch, which replaces the old pre-rendering system. Besides loading pages faster, NoState Prefetch can save up to 105 megabytes of RAM in the best case, a non-trivial number when physical memory is scarce.

The current technical situation of the main browsers leaves much to be desired. Microsoft decided to throw in the towel and turn Edge into another Chromium clone, Firefox continues to drag old problems and lose market share, and Chrome... well, Chrome is the new Internet Explorer of our era. 70 out of every 100 computers use Chrome (or at least that's what the available numbers say) and its presence on the Android platform is even broader, but the lack of competition doesn't help. Google's browser still fights two very old demons: heavy processor usage and excessive RAM consumption. Many users insist that the problem is not Chrome, but those who refuse to update their computers, yet there are a huge number of systems where expanding RAM is impossible, and changing an entire computer is not something to be taken lightly. The alternative is to reduce RAM consumption in Google Chrome and try to optimize it as much as possible.

How to Enable NoState Prefetch in Google Chrome

One of the resources at our disposal is NoState Prefetch. This feature debuted in December 2017 with Chrome 63, and replaces the previous pre-rendering system, now considered deprecated. Google explains that NoState Prefetch is not an API, but a mechanism to implement other APIs. Its priorities are two: on one hand, facilitating support for features on new web platforms, and on the other, reducing memory consumption.

Pre-rendering requires 100 megabytes of RAM on average, with a cap of 150 megabytes. It may not seem like much on computers with 8 or 16 GB of RAM, but we can still find netbooks/cloudbooks/chromebooks on the market with a 2 GB ceiling, and low-cost Android devices ranging between 512 megabytes and a gigabyte of RAM. NoState Prefetch reduces that average to only 45 megabytes.

Forcing the activation of NoState Prefetch is very simple: Type chrome://flags in the address bar, search for 'NoState', and change the option from 'Default' to 'Enabled'. The browser will ask for a restart, and the change should be permanent across updates, unless Google develops something better in the future and NoState also becomes deprecated. Of course, we make no promises. The most likely thing is that the most humble systems will benefit from this adjustment, and that high-end computers won't even notice it.