RAM creeps up, RAMMap says Chrome running 7,000+ processes when closed

Hello all,

Over the last several weeks I’ve noticed my baseline RAM (i.e. when everything is closed) creeping higher than usual over time. I know this is completely normal and nothing a reboot can’t fix. But whereas before my baseline might get up to 30% (of 16 gb) after a month, now it’s up to around 40% after a week.

I think the culprit is Chrome. Using RAMMap I found that it was running thousands of processes even though it was closed (see screen capture). I did a rough count and it came to about 7,280 -- page after page after page of chrome.exe processes using anywhere from 20k to over 5,000k. Chrome is not set to run in the background (see Resource Monitor portion of screen capture).

This is not a performance issue, obviously. But it is different behavior as far as I can tell, and any time something on my computer is behaving differently I want to make sure nothing is wrong.

So, two questions: what on earth is going on with Chrome running so many processes even though it is closed? And is there any way to stop this from happening besides rebooting?

Thanks.

Have you run something like Process Explorer or Process Hacker to see if Chrome is actually running? Maybe another program is using Chrome (or an executable called chrome.exe) in the background for some reason.

I did a CTRL+F for Chrome in Process Explorer with it closed and nothing came up. Just tried Process Hacker for good measure, same thing. I'm not technically savvy enough to have any idea what would be running chrome.exe besides Chrome itself. I have Windows Defender and Malwarebytes Pro and neither have raised any alarm bells.

Is this what a memory leak would look like, or would that manifest itself differently?

Just to confirm, did you enable Show Details for All Processes?



This does look like a memory leak. However, normally when a process is terminated the OS should release all its memory allocations. So it's not clear to me what exactly is going on with Chrome.

I'm assuming you're running the latest version of Chrome. Are you running any extensions?

Thanks for helping out PolarNettles. I gave "all processes" a try and still no results even though they're still showing in RAMMap. I am running the latest version of Chrome. I have a few extensions, all trustworthy to my knowledge.


Edit: I should add that I haven't installed any new extensions lately.

You will not see those instances of chrome in Task Manager or Process Explorer because they are not running. They are remnants of chrome which for some reason cannot be removed. I have this problem with a different process but in my case the memory consumed is trivial and investigating it is not a priority. In my case I suspect the problem is with the process. I wouldn't think chrome would have such a problem but possibly an extension.