Apple Update: Mac Pro vs Chrome: can 1.5TB of RAM deal with Google’s memory hog?

The ultimate memory challenge – opening endless Chrome browser tabs

Take a shiny new Mac Pro, loaded up with a staggering 1.5TB of system RAM – how does one push such a machine to its limits? Forget the standard stress tests or heavyweight benchmarking utilities – what you would like to try to do is open a shed-load of Chrome tabs.

How many such browser tabs can a memory-stuffed Mac Pro 2019 handle? That’s what Jonathan Morrison began to get during a YouTube video (Morrison may be a prominent Apple tech reviewer on YouTube, and one among only a few sent an early Mac Pro to play with).

_________ It seems that Morrison managed to launch 6,000 tabs in Chrome – not just blank tabs, but actually running a spread of proper sites (opened via a script) – which consumed most of the PC’s system memory, with overall RAM usage peaking at 1.49TB.

Apple’s victory was within the incontrovertible fact that the Mac Pro (and macOS) didn’t go over when pulling off this feat, and continued to run normally; actually, it had been still ready to smoothly multitask between a couple of other apps which were running at an equivalent time.

TKO

Although an equivalent couldn’t be said of Google’s browser. With 6,000 tabs open, one among the Chrome processes became unresponsive. While the browser didn’t actually crash, it appeared to stall, and when Morrison force quit that unresponsive process, every instance of the Chrome closed. And unsurprisingly, on reopening, Chrome didn't restore all the tabs successfully (or indeed any of them).

_________ Morrison observed that round the 5,000 tabs mark, the machine ran just fine, and he could freely switch between all the various tabs smoothly.

So at the top of this memory grudge match, the winner – by a TKO, perhaps – was the mighty Mac Pro.

Morrison says that he might repeat the experiment with other browsers like Firefox, or indeed Safari, so we'd see other similar videos within the future, which could bring interesting comparisons.




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