MacOS – Unkillable Google Chrome main process

google-chromemacos

On my 13" MBP 2015 I'm often getting strange error – Google Chrome tabs all become clean white pages, after several seconds it stops responding and can't be killed via process pid through terminal. When I close Google Chrome window and open it – it doesn't reopen tabs and open white page instead. Other apps get some strange behaviour too – for example I can't open ssh sessions in terminal.

Soft system restart doesn't work – I think it is because of that unkillable process. I'm doing hard restart via on/off button – the black screen stucks and doesn't show an Apple sign, the second restart most of the time launches the os normally.

How can I start to debug this problem?

Best Answer

Whenever I kill Chrome via Force Quit under the Apple symbol on the left corner, it does reopen the chrome pages for me. Although you have to ensure to select the option under Chrome preferences:

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Now for the unresponsive Chrome, I would suggest

  • first trying to check under Google Chrome's own Task Manager as to what processes are still running and which one's are taking in more memory. Trying killing any memory hogging processes from there initially

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  • Also checkout the list of Extensions to ensure none of those are causing Chrome to fail. Would be better to run chrome in Incognito mode for a while to troubleshoot this as most extensions should not be running in Incognito mode unless that option is explicitly enabled.

  • Finally, my personal learning for Chrome browser is that I am better off not keeping them open across days of personal session on laptops. It's better to use fewer tabs and close them as you are done with it, then trying to keep those tabs open for longer. I found the laptop is more responsive and my work happens faster that way rather than trying to fight with an open tab that's been in process for days on end and is starting to hog more RAM.

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