AFAIK, each tab in Chrome is a new process, rather than a thread. It's a lot easier to waste memory on duplicate stuff. The operating system will try to re-use

AFAIK, each tab in Chrome is a new process, rather than a thread. It's a lot easier to waste memory on duplicate stuff. The operating system will try to re-use as much memory as it can, but that's just a conservative guessing game. I just opened 'example.com' 6 times in new tabs, and mapped out the memory of the new processes. Total memory size: 10GB. Resident set size: 427.28 MB. Private dirty rss: 104.23 MB. I did the same thing with two new pages & processes just to make sure: 3.3450 GB, 144.532 GB, 36.876 MB. example.com is a tiny html page. So, yeah, I don't know what the hell it's doing with all that memory. I don't think the devs care how much memory they're using.