Operating System and Brave Version(See the About Brave page in the main menu):
Mac OS - 26.2 (25C56)
Brave - 1.85.117
Additional Information:
I have only Brave, Finder, and Activity Monitor open currently, and the memory usage is 22GB out of 24GB.
The system is very slow when opening other applications.
By chance, just how many extensions do you have installed? It does appear that you do have an impossible amount of renderers for even 10-15 tabs open.
Normally I’d explain to people they aren’t understanding memory usage correctly, but in your case, you do have a lot of renderers, seemingly pages? (Based on two screenshots and how much the Activity Monitor scrolled, and more unique PID’s).
Also, if you have extensions, what extensions are installed? Something is consuming renderer threads, at a abnormally large quantity.
Brave actually consuming 22GB is a bit abnormal as well, contrary to again, my previous comments that many users misunderstand memory usage. Chromium usually is actually far more efficient than this, so I tested on my side and opened 15 tabs, and only saw 2GB of memory usage, not 22GB.
I’d very much look into extensions first, something is consuming an abnormally large amount of renderers. But also, you aren’t on a website that might be using the GPU for something heavy that needs such large amounts (like cryptomining for example, as that will consume multiple renderer threads for multithreading and RAM)?
@Abhimanyu A lot of what I was seeing is kind of normal in quantities of RAM being used until I got to the part where it’s straight up showing GB used. I’m not sure what’s trying to be rendered on those and what issues it might be facing. Unfortunately your screenshot made sure to exclude the tab or process related to it.
What you’re showing is the system level activity monitor which isn’t going to share as much. You should look at Brave’s task manager as it will detail every specific process in the browser being used and what it is that’s using so much.
You can pull up Brave’s Task Manager via Shift + Escape or you can go to the three dot menu → More Tools → Task Manager within Brave.
Doing that can show you like below, which lets you see what each extensions, specific tabs, etc is using the resources. And this is what will help point in the right direction of what’s happening.
In have installed the Beta version, but I can’t switch to it completely as Brave is not syncing all my settings even after setting up the Sync.
So, I will be continuing with the stable version.
So with GPU acceleration on, it would reduce the renderer threads, and some memory, but not the big amounts of GB’s we need reduced. My major issue is that Gmail alone consumes more RAM than a 32-bit PC can address (in your screenshot). A bit mind boggling even to me, so that’s absolutely a problem to me.
What’s also an issue is how much CPU each process is actually using. Now with GPU acceleration on, that usage should go down but likely not as much as we’d like. I think an extension is misbehaving at this point. (In my opinion).
Since we can see Gmail is consuming alone a lot of gigabytes, what happens if you use a Private Window and open Gmail? Does it continue to use an abnormal amount of RAM? I’m still thinking an extension is going south somewhere here.
