Brave taking up so much memory it keeps crashing or I can't work

Hi,

I’m on Win 7

So I’m opening up this new thread so it’s clear what the issue is by the subject line…

So I just reformated my HD & only have like 4 profiles open whereas I had more open before & less windows even & ONLY 4-5 extensions whereas I had more before.

LastPass, Grammarly, Google translate, Session Buddy & tab suspender.

Every day now Windows tells me Brave is using way too much memory (I have 24 GB) & it wants me to close Brave.

It’s using at least 3-4 GB, probably a lot more.

Now it’s happening 3-4 times per day where Win wants to close it & it’s driving me insane.

In task manager, there’s the Brave (the program, not a profile) that always shows up at the top which of course you can’t close. It takes up the most.

And as you can see, I even use tab suspender which should cut back on the memory.

Even when I have only 3 profiles this happens…

I was part of that other thread from last year re: the memory issues, It’s gotten worse since then & I see someone else just stated the same thing in Sept. & no one responded to her EITHER.

As for what’s running in the background, just the extensions, that’s it. We don’t understand the question.

Thanks

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4 profiles, but how many tabs total are open at the same time?

Have you tried (for maybe a day or so) without those extensions being enabled? Also note that extensions are per-profile, so if you are really running multiple profiles then you may need to disable them in all of them. The idea is to narrow down whether or not it’s an issue with an extension.

IK can’t work with 3 of those extensions. I need them most of the time.

I could maybe remove 2 of them & I don’t have one of them on every profile b/c I knew that Grammarly may have had an issue in the past, but I thought they fixed it.

As for how many tabs, I can’t count, there’s too many.

But my point is that this is a clean reformat & I have less open than before the reformat.

And if no one else was having memory issues then we could say it’s just me, but I see others have posted about their memory issues too.

Thanks

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I dunno. You’ve got multiple profiles running, with maybe hundreds of open tabs, and multiple extensions, and unclear how many copies of each of them. And the code for each extension also can change, as they update themselves. And likewise for each of those hundreds of web sites you’ve got open, each of them can have an enormous and changing # of elements that all consume resources. And to top it all off, it’s on a pretty old OS.

I appreciate that you seemingly have less open than before, but there’s a lot of moving targets here. And there’s millions of users who – presumably – are not being asked to close their browsers.

Right now I’ve got 4 profiles running, with probably 100 to 150 tabs open, and over a dozen extensions if you count them all up across all my profiles; and I have never seen this issue once in my year+ of using Brave.

Not saying it can’t be the browser, but there’s a lot going on here and I am not sitting in front of your computer so it would be a lot easier to get to a positive conclusion if you could inconvenience yourself a bit to narrow things down, maybe find some ways to replace the functionality of those extensions temporarily.

Also, to start fresh a bit here, you mentioned Tree Resizer. What does that do? Is this actually an issue with disk space as opposed to memory consumption? Do you have any screenshots of what it looks like when the error/warning pops up, telling you to close Brave?

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Sorry, I don’t know where I mentioned Tree resizer in this thread.

So I removed one extension & slowly turned off the other 4-5 (I didn’t remove them) from each profile.

They only decreased my memory by 1% except for Session Buddy & Nibus that decreased by 2%.

I couldn’t shut off tab suspension, as that just increased my memory instead of lowering it.

Like I said, most of them are suspended under tab suspension.

I’m not the only one complaining about the memory issues.

I’m glad you aren’t having any problems, but I am.

As for the grey Windows notice I get that says that I need to close down Brave, I’ll have to wait until it happens again to get you the SS.

Thanks

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On phone from a week its a norm for me to crash every single hour, on pc i cant tab switch between others windows.

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@OurFreeSociety,
It’s highly likely that Grammarly is the cause of this particular memory issue. Have you tried disabling it (in any/all open profiles) to see if memory usage goes down?

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No, b/c I don’t have it on every single profile anymore & yes, right now it’s not on, but it’s still in the extensions area.

Before my reformat I had it on ALL of my profiles & yes I had memory issues, but I thought that was b/c I hadn’t reformatted in years.

Right now I don’t have it on any of my open profiles & I’m already at 82% & I just restarted yesterday.

Thanks & can you also deal with our private conversation about the rewards since I’m not making any & none of the popups started after I reformatted.

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@OurFreeSociety,
Can you please open the Brave task manager and share a screenshot of the processes running? Additionally, can you tell me how much memory you have available on your system?

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One thing I alluded to earlier and I think could use clarification, is whether this is a memory vs. disk usage issue. The reference to Tree Resizer wasn’t in this thread, but another one by the OP, and putting 2+2 together made me wonder if this is a concern over disk space and not memory utilization.

I could of course be wrong but the distinction may be important here.

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Ok, I just got another warning by Windows so I got a SS - https://i.imgur.com/jrmHYPG.png

I have 24 GB of memory.

Thanks

I have 100 GB of 238 GB. It’s an SSD which is why it’s smaller, but I have tons of other HDs, but of course Brave only works on C.

When I restarted magically tons more space appeared & I know some of it was b/c I didn’t reinstall everything, but that was a big chunk I got back.

@OurFreeSociety,
Do you get the same results if you have the tab suspender extension disabled?

OK, thanks for posting those shots. Looks like it is a memory consumption question, not disk space, so I think we’re good there. I’ll take a back seat while the troubleshooting continues but I likewise think it would be interesting to see what happens with some (or better yet, all) of those extensions disabled. Sometimes the ‘well-meaning’ ones aren’t what they’re cracked up to be and can cause more issues than they solve.

Also, if some of those extensions seem critical to your particular usage, feel free to chime in with what issues you foresee having without them and maybe we can come up with other ways to solve those issues if the extensions do turn out to be problematic.

So I got my memory down to 69% after closing a few things and even 1 of the brave profiles and re-opening it, and none of the tabs work they just keep spinning and spinning and spinning over and over again even if I stop them they do not load.

I even close down another profile and it wouldn’t help, and I close them all down except for one and it still wouldn’t help, so it only worked when I closed every profile down. I don’t know, maybe that’s how you intend brave to work, but I would think that if I got 69% or less memory being used, that brave should know this and start working again.

And I hope you remember that I wrote up another thread about how brave isn’t closing when I close it or deleting the cache. (I see you responded to one of the threads, there’s 2 & I think it’s all related.)

We figure that out a while ago and I reported but never got a response.

I just closed my Facebook profile and the next thing I know I got a pop up telling me I had a Facebook message even though I closed that brave profile. The pop up actually happened twice.

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Well, I can’t really do that, otherwise my memory will skip go through the roof. If you read the other thread, Or maybe it’s the threat I can’t remember anymore when Jim suggested I turn off all of the extensions, I did turn them all off and it barely made a dent in my memory. When I tried to turn A spender then my memory went back up again so I didn’t turn it off.

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You are welcome, and thank you for trying to help.

I already went through all of the extensions with you, did you see that message? I told you that I turned them all off except for tap suspender and it barely made a dent in my memory and I even listed them off to you. I don’t know if it’s this thread or the one where I was getting upset, but I did list them off and I did turn them off in I didn’t have any brave notices during that time, but my memory didn’t go down and finally I had to reboot because turning off the extensions except for tap suspender didn’t help in the end.

Remember that I just restarted yesterday so my memory was fine with all of the profiles loaded until today. That means it takes not even 24 hours for me to reach 97%.

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OK, I didn’t realize you’d already tried with them disabled, I must have missed that – apologies.

One thing that might be helpful is a screenshot of WIndows’s Task Manager (as opposed to the Brave-specific one). If you press Ctrl+Shift+Esc it should open; and then click the “Memory” heading once or twice, until you’ve got it sorted by memory usage from highest to lowest.

Then take a screenshot of maybe the first 5 lines or so (make sure all of the expandable sections are collapsed so other apps are shown).

The idea is to see how much memory is being used by each of your ‘biggest’ apps. When memory is nearly exhausted, Windows may be asking you to kill off the biggest one, but say for example there’s another couple of processes that are consuming nearly the same amount, that could indicate an issue with another app.

To be clear, not saying Brave isn’t doing anything wrong here, just want to make sure we’re focusing in the right place.

You’ll want it to look something like this; note the descending sort on the Memory column:

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Yes, my website coder has looked at that numerous times. That’s how we know it’s Brave.

Thunderbird also causes issues, but brave beats it every time.

Telegram suddenly started creeping up, but not as much as Brave.

I’ll have to wait until I’m in the 90%+ to take a SS.

No problem if you missed it. I don’t even know where it is now. LOL too many threads happening. I try to keep them seperate.

Thanks

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Sounds good. And really, it doesn’t surprise me that a browser with high usage would be the top memory consumer; you can see the same in the shot from my system where it’s the highest here as well. But every system has limits, so I’m hoping that we might be able to take some guesses as to whether or not the consumption is ‘reasonable’ in light of how it’s being used.

For example, if mine were using that amount of memory with 1 tab open, it might not be reasonable. Likewise, if I had 10,000 tabs open and it used a lot of memory, that would make sense. I think the process counter (‘95’ in my example) should give us a very rough correlation to the total number of tabs open across profiles, and then seeing the memory usage along with that could be helpful.

Could you also provide a link to the Tab Suspender extension you’re using? There’s a bunch of them on the store so I wasn’t sure which it was.

(Thanks for being patient enough to work thru this.)

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