Internet, web browsers: tracking memory usage

Self-tutoring about browsing the Internet: the tutor mentions checking memory usage by tab.

The following is according to my understanding.

Today I was researching gdp per capita by Canadian province. From the search results, I clicked one entry, expecting some text and maybe a bar graph. What happened immediately was the CPU kicking into high gear – indicated by the sudden hum of the fan. A few seconds later the page loaded, revealing the content more or less as I’d expected: a line graph, some text, then a bar graph, and more text. Yet, the fan accelerated to a high-pitched whine.

My source told me the page was safe – I even believe it is. Next, I checked the page’s memory consumption – would you believe 2.6 GB? I hardly could believe it, except that the laptop was struggling to display it.

I closed the tab. Not immediately, but maybe a minute or two later, the laptop settled down again, the fan no longer audible. The question remains: why would such an ordinary-looking page consume so much memory? (That’s for one, or several, further posts.)

Just by way of reference, a YouTube video actively playing might occupy around 450MB. A web page might typically consume 60-300MB.

How does one check how much memory a tab is using? In Edge, Shift+Esc seems to show a listing of some of the tabs open in Edge with their memory consumption. However, it doesn’t necessarily show them all, in my experience.

In the Norton Private Browser, and in Brave, one can simply mouse over a given tab, and its memory use is shown.

This is a big topic, of which this post is a beginning.

Source:

learn.microsoft.com: Monitor memory use in realtime (Microsoft Edge Browser Task Manager)