Our users rely heavily on Google and Zoho web applications, and their memory usage has grown noticeably over the past year. On machines with 16 GB of RAM, users can struggle when they keep several browser tabs open. I'm considering enabling Chrome's Memory Saver, possibly in its more aggressive configuration, across the company. I don't personally enjoy tabs being discarded and reloaded, so I'm wondering how noticeable the behavior is in practice. Has anyone deployed this organization-wide? Did users complain, did important web applications have problems, and did it make a meaningful difference on systems with 16 GB of memory?
2 Answers
We use Edge, where the equivalent tab-sleeping feature has been enabled for quite a while. We configured known-sensitive sites—such as our call-queue dashboard and ERP system—to never go to sleep, then allowed ordinary tabs to sleep after about an hour. We haven't received any complaints or had any incidents since rolling it out. It's difficult to measure the exact memory savings, but it should help people who keep many tabs open. I'd enable it gradually and maintain a policy exception list for applications that shouldn't be suspended. So far, we haven't needed to add anything beyond the initial exceptions.
We've also had the feature enabled without adding exceptions, and nobody has reported a problem. The actual savings are hard to quantify, though.
Windows is generally good at reclaiming memory when applications actually need it, so having 16 GB doesn't automatically mean that a few browser tabs are exhausting the system. Unless users are seeing out-of-memory errors, aggressively managing tabs may not provide much benefit. Tab sleeping is harmless enough, but it makes more sense to verify that Chrome is the cause of the slowdowns before deploying it everywhere.
That was my assumption too, but we've recently had more complaints about sluggish systems, and Chrome is effectively the only major application users run. I'll test it against real machines before making a broad change.
That sounds like a reasonable approach. I'll enable the aggressive setting for myself first and watch for sites that don't handle being suspended well.