Macos – Force Chrome to run each tab as a process

command linegoogle-chromemacosprocesstabs

Chrome is running all of it's tabs in a single process, and when I open a large number of tabs it really slows down my machine. Considering Chrome's original marketing played up running each tab as a single process, I was surprised to find out that Chrome no longer does this.

I tried the --proccess-per-tab flag, but I got an error (-43 to be exact).

The argument I tried was 

open -a /Applications/Google_Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google_Chrome --args --process-per-tab

Running Mac OS 10.6.7 and Chrome 13.0.761.0

Update: Just opened chrome, and its grouping my tabs into 4 different processes.

tab list

As time goes on, the processes will merge into one.

Best Answer

You should usually open an application bundle, not the actual binary within. So I suggest you use:

open -a "Google Chrome" --args --process-per-tab

open -a "/Applications/Google Chrome.app" --args --process-per-tab

Nevertheless, I cannot reproduce the issue with either Chrome 11, 12 (beta) or 13 (dev).

Activity Monitor output when using Chrome 13.0.761.0 dev, launched as open -a "/Users/danielbeck/Applications/Google Chrome 13.app" --args --process-per-tab:

enter image description here

After demonstrating that there's no issue with Chrome, here's what you did wrong:

You simply specified the wrong path. There are no underscores, only spaces, escaped by a leading \ or wrapped in quotation marks.

Wrong: open -a /Applications/Google_Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google_Chrome --args --process-per-tab
Right: open -a /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --args --process-per-tab
Alternative: open -a "/Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome" --args --process-per-tab

For future reference: Tab-completion properly escapes spaces. You should be able to type /A[tab]Goo[tab][tab]Ma[tab][tab] and it'll work.

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