RAM Usage is Off the Charts, Why?

I’m finding that Brave is chewing up 15 to 20 GBs of RAM, and that’s without anything streaming. And the biggest culprits are:
GPU Process at 5.6 GBs & 42% CPU
Browser at GBs @ 22% CPU

So that means the browser alone & the GPU process are eating nearly 8GBs of RAM, without any pages open using video or anything much. Why is this so very, very high? By the way, I do have Hardware Acceleration turned off, as well.
Is 8 Gigs supposed to be the base level of Brave? I thought Brave is supposed to use LESS RAM than most other browsers. What am I missing here?
I’m using the latest version 1.14. 84
On a Mac with 40 GBs of RAm

6 Likes

Hey @StevenCee

Have you tried to turn off your hardware acceleration? brave://settings/system

Guess you overlooked it, but I mentioned I have it off.

Yes i did. :blush: I had to reread :blush:

I’ve been wondering the same.

I’m not seeing RAM usage on that scale, but it doesn’t take long before BRAVE goes from circa 300MB (following a Mac OS restart) to 1 GB of RAM. At that point, things are getting very slow. Like molasses.

BRAVE Release / Mac OS Mojave

Yeah, it’s weird, as some sites take forever to open, or not open at all!
It makes me wonder if my WiFi just cut off, or dropped way down. But when I test my speed, it’s up at like 80mbps! So it’s not my WiFi it’s this browser…

Even I have the same problem, but it’s on windows, it’s takes upto 15GB of RAM in 16GB of RAM, nearly 96% of RAM and even eats 50-60% of CPU also.

But it happens only at night, so I thought it might be trying to update itself. I even asked the same question but none have replied

Maybe this is an issue that @Mattches can say something to!

One thing you can try is to go to Brave’s Task Manager: Top-Right options > More Tools > Task Manager (or just press the Shortcut Key Shift + ESC)

That may help you identify which tab and which extension is consuming resources, and determine if it’s Brave related.

If you right click inside the open Brave Taskmanager you can select a few more details which give you the chance to find out where the consuming comes from.
e.g.

For anyone seeing this much active memory being used in Brave, please share the following:

  1. Close and quit any/all Brave applications entirely
  2. Open one new Brave Window, with only one tab open to the new tab page. Nothing else. Not your opening tabs, not Youtube or some site where you normally see high memory spikes – open one window, one tab, to the new tab page. Nothing else.
  3. Open the Brave task manager, then open your system task manager (or Activity Monitor for macOS users). Ensure that Brave is viewable in the list in both task managers, then share a screenshot of the usage here in this thread. Your screenshot should look similar to this:
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Well, I tried opening in a new profile, but everytime I opened the Task Manager it showed the total for me, and the new profile. And at this moment GPU Process is up to 6.8 GBs and the Browser at 2.2 GB, together alone using 50 to 60% of my CPU!!

This happens every time I open Brave, why is this GPU Process alway so high (never lower than 5.2, even with nothing at all streaming), as is the browser, not even counting each individual tab’s memory usage. And when I close Brave, my memory cleaner show about 20GBs free, once it’s closed!

I repeat:

I’m not sure how you fixed this, are you saying making Brave your default browser fixed it?

Hi Steven. That’s weird about the usage. I’m not getting near that much with 29 youtube tabs open

Task manager Brave

What are your hardware specs?

I’m on a fairly new iMac, with 40 gigs of RAM, and pretty speedy WiFi. I don’t know why it could be so absurdly high. Right now the GPU Process is at 7.3 GBs, and just the Browser is at 2.2 GBs, so that’s 9.5 GBs already, not counting each individual tab/window, and their memory usage. And I’ve not got a single stream happening! Weird…

Mine too, it took 1.5 gb i dont even have extensions and only 1 tab opened

In my case, I don´t know why LinkedIn and Gmail are using a lot of memory. I have a fresh install of the OS (2 weeks), My browser has a various plug-in installed but no one of these are using a lot of memory. Could you please tell us why? Thanks.

> That may help you identify which tab and which extension is consuming resources

I find that extensions use very little RAM.

The main culprit in my case is Brave itself, which quickly climbs toward a gigabyte of RAM usage. Second in line are the documents created in Google Docs. Those also tend to bulge like an expanding balloon.

That said, Brave does not tend to crash. The dramatic performance slowdown is the problem.

Same issue here, only on certain sites it crashes. Followed your instructions @Mattches , please see below. Already tried clearing cookies/cache and disabling hardware acceleration. At the minute the issue is forcing me to use another browser, would rather stick with Brave if I can get it working.