On my Mac, OS X lags substantially when browsing through Chrome. I've researched things and understand that inactive memory is part of the free memory, that can and should be freed at a moment's notice:
Even opening a new tab, scrolling through Facebook or Gmail makes things slower. I own a Macbook Pro 13" early 2011, 8GB RAM, OS X Mountain Lion.
Can I affect Chrome's use of RAM in any way?
Edit: Thanks @bmike, Great edit! I just want to make clear that I have also fiddled around with plugins and extensions in chrome settings, even chrome://flags. Flash instance is indeed a big problem, so I have flash blocker and chrome's inbuilt flash blocker.
I was wondering whether this has anything to do with having non-mac memory in my MBP?
Best Answer
Here are samples of data from my 13 inch MacBook Pro with 8 GB of RAM before and after opening Chrome:
The setup of the test is a system that's been running for 6 days, and is otherwise not misbehaving. Here are the commands I run to make sure the system is in balance:
I set Google chrome up to have 10 blank tabs and quit it and then ran the test above to measure exactly how much RAM changes before and after launching it. As you can see, launching Chrome took about 76k free memory pages out for the free pool and caused the inactive pool to grow by about 11.5k pages.
Given these numbers, Chrome seems highly unlikely to be causing a leak itself and your web pages might be causing the load. If you can run these tools in terminal, you'll likely see that your system had other issues with memory management and Chrome is likely the straw that puts the final load on the system before it starts swapping. Look for paging activity before you launch Chrome and also have a look at my answer here on why inactive memory is almost never the actual problem and this post hopefully explains how to convince yourself whether you have an actual problem with the memory manager or a specific program.