Brave Linux Uses Huge Amount Of Ram (5-7GB with few tabs open)

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Brave (Chromium in general) seems to keep hogging up system memory & making massive writes to SSD even with a few tabs open on Linux based distros.

On further checking via htop, I found crashpad-handler to be the culprit. While It might be a safety feature to have, I don’t really need it, and was wondering if it can turned off via a flag or someway.

Also here’s an older post from forum on same issue. While the issue was mentioned, it was never worked upon & still remains present.

Description of the issue:
How can this issue be reproduced?

  1. Open Brave Browser On Linux
  2. Open up htop
  3. Every process has crashpad-handler enabled
  4. After a few hours of use, all system memory is used, and doesn’t free until full system restart.

Expected result:

Add a option to start Brave without Crashpad enabled.

Brave Version( check About Brave):

Additional Information:

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It’s been 3 years, and it still isn’t migrated, and highly unlikely in near future.

A workaround maybe to add a seperate Flag to toggle this function On or Off, at the user’s discretion.

While I am not sure how Brave builds it’s binary, adding a condition to enabling crashpad should certainly be possible, even if Chromium insist on having it enabled (not sure why though?)

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How Brave Browser is developed:

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Are you a bot by any chance?

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I have a similar problem. I open Brave and RAM slowly get higher and higher and then it comes back to normal. This process takes about 1 minute. After that it is fine until I have a few tabs open, then it climbs again until I close tabs. It is also crashing on streaming sites.

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Yes. It usually takes around 1GB/tab opened, despite brave reporting it to be 100-200MB.

It’s becoming a big issue for me, given I have other applications & local servers running, system keeps crashing despite having 16GB ram.

Just having crashpad as disabled can reduce it by 50% in my opinion.

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Rayz, ChiramM999

Notes of mine:

Quit everything and restart your Linux machine.

In a terminal window on your Linux machine, the following command might show the Brave Browser processes (if I wrote the following correctly):

top -o %CPU -p $(pgrep -d ‘,’ brave)

If that fails, simply try:

top

Even though Brave Browser is not yet running, leave that terminal window open/running.

In another terminal window, you might also try . . . one of two slightly different Linux commands for starting Brave Browser from the command line.

I do not have a Linux machine available, and I’m not quite sure if “brave” or “brave-browser” is the correct process, here. But, the remaining command line character strings for each, are the same, after the process name:

brave -n --args --disable-gpu --enable-leak-detection --crash-on-failure --incognito

brave-browser -n --args --disable-gpu --enable-leak-detection --crash-on-failure --incognito

The idea, here, is to somehow get Brave Browser running, from the command line, and using flags that might reduce its thirst for CPU/RAM.

If this test works, then go to, and ENABLE both:

brave://flags/#brave-adblock-cosmetic-filtering

brave://settings/?search=crash+reports

The first - adblock cosmetic filtering - can reduce CPU thirst.

The second - would allow you to get some Crash IDs and send them to Brave Support.

Both of those possibilities, are mentioned in Brave Support replies by “Mattches” - - - who may be interested in your findings.

Good luck.

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