How to Use Chrome Task Manager?

Chrome’s task manager comes very handy when you have some issues with Google Chrome browser. Many people are unaware of this thing that Chrome has its own task manager. You might have seen sometimes Chrome behaves strangely, lagging or even crashing also. In such case, Chrome task manager can helps to troubleshoot if you want to know what causes the problem.

This Chrome task manager is independent of Windows Task Manager or Activity Monitor in Mac. It helps you to see statistics like tasks currently running in Chrome, memory footprint, CPU usage, network consumption, different profiles, start time, JavaScript memory and many other options. In this article let us check how to use Chrome task manager for troubleshooting.

How to Open Chrome Task Manager?

Launching a task manager in Chrome is as easy as in Windows, Mac or in Chrome OS. There are many ways of doing it.

Method 1: Right Click on Menu Bar

Open your Chrome browser. Find an empty area at the top of the browser and right click anywhere on it. You’ll see the “Task manager” option in the context menu. Click on that to open Chrome task manager.

Method 2: Using Menu

You can also open task manager using standard Chrome menu items. Click on the three vertical dots on top right corner of Chrome. Choose “More tools” and then “Task manager” option.

Method 3: Using Shortcut

This is quite easy by just using shortcut keys. Open Chrome browser and then press “Shift + ESC” keys on Windows and press “Search + ESC” on Chrome OS to open task manager.

Note: Remember, the menu access will work on all operating systems. But the shortcuts and right clicking on menu bar may only work on Windows or look different. For example, if you are using Chrome on macOS, right clicking on the title bar will show the menu like below with an option to open Task Manager.

How to Use Chrome Task Manager?

Google Chrome works on an amazing multi-process architecture. This allows Chrome to run every tab as a separate process from each other. In this way if any process gets hang or crashed, the whole browser does not crash. Open Chrome task manager by pressing “Shift+ ESC” keys on keyboard or from the menu. Chrome will show all the running processes in the task manager along with an “End process” button at the bottom.

Now there are lot of columns in task manager, but you cannot see them all within a small window. Right click anywhere on the heading inside the task manager window to see the complete list of available columns. You can enable or disable the columns in the task manager easily by choosing the required options. You can also click on the header row to sort the tasks in ascending or descending order.

Here are some of the important statistics you can view from Chrome task manager:

• Memory Footprint: It shows you the amount of memory that current running process is taking. In our case YouTube is taking more memory than other processes. There are some others like AdBlock extension is also taking more memory here. So, either you can uninstall it or you can use any other extension which takes less memory. You can check out separate article on speeding up Chrome.
• CPU: Here, you can see the CPU usage of your PC as per the process running in the Chrome.
• Start Time: This is the time when a task has been started. You can see how long any particular task has been running.
• Network: Network column allows you to see network usage of a particular task. It means how much internet bandwidth that process is using.
• JavaScript Memory: This is the memory of JavaScript used by each process in the Chrome.
• GPU Memory: This will tell you about your graphical processor usage. You can check by specific task that which process is taking how much GPU memory.

Terminating or Ending Not Responding Processes

Let’s assume you have a process taking more memory and hangs Chrome. Now that you want terminate or kill that process which is not responding or consuming lot of memory. First thing you can do is to sort the memory or memory footprint column and find out the high memory consuming tasks running in Chrome. Select the task consuming more memory or not responding and click on the “End Process” button. This will kill the task and allow Chrome to allocate more memory for other tasks.

Remember to kill only the unnecessary or not responding tasks. Killing the tasks like “Tab: New Tab” will result in showing “Aw, Snap!” error as this process is required by Chrome.

Conclusion

We have learned about how to launch and use the Chrome task manager. It’s essential to use this because it allows you to look the various stats of the tasks running in Chrome. When Chrome is not responding, you can look through each option in the task manager and check where the problem is. On the basis of the memory and other parameters, you can end or kill a task.