Well, it works, the problem is you don’t understand how it works now.
Chromium changed it, it doesn’t just discard tabs after 1 hour (by default) and done, that was terrible, just discarding for discarding not even caring what it was in the page.
Also, If you have a powerful PC… why do you even care about memory saver? if you don’t use RAM, you are wasting RAM, you want programs to use more RAM, not less. Unless you are at 90% you shouldn’t even care about Memory.
Chromium already does a lot of backgrounding of tabs and processes, so they will use less CPU if you are not using the tabs, which you might care more than RAM.
But that logic is exactly why (I think) Chromium team changed it.
Brave should have a flag brave://flags/#heuristic-memory-saver-mode
and you can see it doesn’t have time anymore, like before where it said 30seconds, 2minutes, 1 hour, 4 hours… (terrible times anyway).
Now it is Aggressive, Balanced and Conservative.
Now it uses two logics to Memory save a tab, and not just time, first a threshold for the memory, and then the time.
It can easy be seen in Chromium code what they mean, but basically, Aggressive 30/30, Balanced 15/60, and Conservative 5/120.
The comments in Chromium Source code pretty much explain what the threshold means
Threshold
The amount of available physical memory at which HeuristicMemorySaverPolicy will start discarding tabs. The amount of available memory must be such that it’s both lower than the “Percent” param when expressed as a % of total installed physical memory and lower than the “Mb” threshold.
For example, if the params are set as: - kHeuristicMemorySaverAvailableMemoryThresholdPercent to 20% - kHeuristicMemorySaverAvailableMemoryThresholdMb to 2048
A device with 8Gb of installed RAM, 1Gb of which is available is under the threshold and will discard tabs (12.5% available and 1Gb < 2048Mb)
A device with 16Gb of installed RAM, 3Gb of which are available is under the percentage threshold but will not discard tabs because it’s above the absolute Mb threshold (18.75% available, but 3Gb > 2048Mb)
If your read it, you will understand that, Balance, which is the default, will only start discarding tabs until you have 15% memory available, not before that, and the tabs should have been 1 hour idle in the background.
Aggressive means your computer have gone above 70%+ of memory usage and then tabs have been 30 minutes in the background.
That’s why your powerful computer will not discard anything, it’s not necessary. discarding a tab will only completely remove it as a process and all, but that means you will refresh the page one you visit it again, they are not being put to sleep like Edge does.
If you want to test it, you can start Brave with --enable-features=HeuristicMemorySaver:threshold_percent/90/minimum_minutes_in_background/1
That means you will be using more than 10% memory and after 1 minute, tabs should get discarded, SOME tabs don’t get discarded immediately. And they only work by minutes, in the past you could add the switch and set it to ms, s, m, and h. but not anymore, only minutes.
Depending on some tabs, they should get discarded, some tabs will not get discarded.
I use Nightly, but Stable and Nightly are on Chromium 114, so it should be the same change for both. There is even the flag brave://flags/#memory-saver-savings-reporting-improvements, because I don’t know if the memory saver messages will appear without it.
