Summary
We all have a love-hate relationship with Google Chrome. It is familiar, sometimes fast, and syncs everything across your devices without a second thought. I have tried a bunch of Google Chrome alternatives, and while I have narrowed it down to one, I still can’t let go of Chrome. However, Chrome being Chrome, has a habit of quietly hogging resources you never agreed to give up. I ran into this myself when my laptop kept warming up during nothing more than idle browsing. So, I opened Chrome’s task manager to see what was happening and found that sync was the culprit. Even after reducing background processes, Chrome still feels heavy; sync might be what you need to check. Sync isn’t among your usual troubleshooting steps Sync felt like the last place a CPU problem would hide Before I locked my eyes on sync, I had already gone through the usual troubleshooting. Closed extra tabs, removed extensions, and even disabled hardware acceleration for a bit to rule it out. None of it explained why Chrome kept eating up my PC’s CPU with just two or three tabs open. Upon looking at Chrome’s task manager, which can be accessed by pressing Shift + Esc on Windows, and sorting everything by CPU usage, the same way you would hunt down a resource hog. At the top, I found something that I had never paid attention to: Chrome’s sync utility. Sync doesn’t appear to be resource-hogging. It appears to be lightweight and has occasional handshakes between devices. Turns out it isn’t quite that simple. Chrome’s sync doesn’t just push bookmarks once and call it done. As long as you keep it turned on, it maintains a continuous connection to Google’s servers to monitor changes to whatever you have set to sync. This includes passwords, open tabs, browsing history, autofill data, or extensions. Whenever changes are made to any of these on any device, Chrome updates them across devices. What actually determines how much sync costs you Not everyone is running the same setup How much Chrome data syncing will affect you depends on two things: how many devices you are signed in to and how many categories you have left switched on. Someone syncing just bookmarks on a single laptop is asking Chrome to do far less background work than someone signed in to a phone, a tablet, and a couple of computers. Things get worse when you are syncing everything, right from passwords, open tabs, history, extensions, etc. Each additional device means Chrome has more endpoints to check in with, and each additional category means more types of changes it has to keep itself updated about. This is important to keep in mind before you assume the results will match anyone else’s. Only computers with heavier sync activity will see dramatic results. For those sitting on the other side of the fence, you may not notice much of anything. You can turn off Chrome sync completely Otherwise, you can trim what it’s syncing Now that you know Chrome sync was the reason your computer felt slow, Chrome even has a dedicated internal page: chrome://sync-internals. This page shows you exactly which data types are actively syncing and whether any are throwing errors. This is an important step to see if things still feel sluggish even after you’ve made changes. To turn off Chrome sync completely, follow the steps below:
- Tap the three-dot menu icon in the top-right corner of a Chrome tab.
- Select Settings from the drop-down.
- Click the Turn off sync option. Once you disable sync, you will still be able to see your existing bookmarks, passwords, and history locally; they won’t just update across devices anymore. You will be signed out of other Google services tied to that browser profile. If you think this is too much, Chrome offers an option that lets you avoid losing sync entirely. Head into your Chrome settings → Sync and Google services → Manage what you sync. Select Customize sync. Then under Sync data, choose what you want to sync and disable specific categories instead. You can choose to turn off open tabs, reading list, or extensions while keeping passwords and other data syncing. This is the best option if cross-device syncing matters to you, but you also want to free up a significant portion of your CPU for other tasks. Personally, Chrome was doing too much work because of the setup I was using it in. Across multiple devices with several categories enabled for sync and multiple devices signed in. If you have only a single device in sync or have only enabled a few categories for sync, you won’t see a dramatic change. Just have a look at it Chrome sync is easy to overlook because it runs quietly and rarely announces itself. But if you are experiencing RAM issues and have narrowed down Google Chrome as the culprit, checking sync should be one of your troubleshooting steps. If sync isn’t the issue for you, do not stop there, since Chrome has plenty of other background processes worth a look, including ones that keep spiking your computer’s CPU usage without much explanation.