Solved Microsoft Edge either does not sleep tabs or does not fade tabs, and how to reduce memory usage

samm · Jul 20, 2023

I suspect that tabs are not sleeping, although when I click on a tab that has been dormant (not accessed) for 5 minutes or more, the first 1/4 second the page is blank, then apparently finishes loading from cache. If that's a symptom of a sleeping tab, I can't see any of the tabs are faded. If I click on tabs recently accessed, the page is immediate. I have efficency, sleeping tabs, and fading tabs all enabled. The sleep tab option to change timing is greyed out, and I can't change it from 5 min. This is Edge used in W11 Home. I originally enabled sleeping tabs to see if memory usage goes down. I noticed a "High Memory Usage" notification sometimes when I have 6 or more tabs open. If there are several apps running, the memory usage sometimes hits 95%. So far, sleeping tabs enabled doesn't look like it's having any effect on mem usage. Also, I disabled preloading new tab, but it doesn't seem to have an effect on mem usage either. I also have nothing under "never sleep" tab option.

Is this high memory usage common with 8GB ram in w11? I never noticed it in w10 using the same set of apps, except I was using Google Chrome at the time.

What does tab fading look like, and what is the symptom of a sleeping tab when you click on it to wake it up? (how long does it take to load the page)

Does anyone know how to tweak Edge to reduce memory usage? (I've been searching for 3 hours on the web and found nothing).

glasskuter · Jul 20, 2023

Hello and welcome to the forum. It is my understanding Edge does not put tabs to sleep until 1 hour of inactivity. However, the user can change this amount of time from 30 sec. to 12 hrs. If a tab is sleeping it appears dim. You can change this setting in Edge settings under System and Performance. Other browsers also can have sleeping tabs but requires use of a third party extension.
This article explains sleeping tabs and how using multiple tabs affect's a system's performance. Microsoft Edge 89: Delivering improved browser performance to get the job done

Windows 11 will run with 8gb of ram, but IMO 16 gb is the bare minimum for it to run at all smoothly. I am surprised Asus would sell a 11th generation core cpu machine with only 8 gb of ram.

To give you an example, right now I have one open app, Firefox, with 1 open tab. My system is using 8.6 gb of my 32 gb of ram. I can close FF entirely and it drops to 7.7.

You can possibly decrease your ram usage slightly by altering your startup apps running in the background but with only 8 gb it won't help you much. Adding additional ram or choosing to not run 6 tabs is about the only thing that will benefit you.

samm · Jul 20, 2023

glasskuter said:
Hello and welcome to the forum. It is my understanding Edge does not put tabs to sleep until 1 hour of inactivity. However, the user can change this amount of time from 30 sec. to 12 hrs. If a tab is sleeping it appears dim. You can change this setting in Edge settings under System and Performance. Other browsers also can have sleeping tabs but requires use of a third party extension.
This article explains sleeping tabs and how using multiple tabs affect's a system's performance. Microsoft Edge 89: Delivering improved browser performance to get the job done

Windows 11 will run with 8gb of ram, but IMO 16 gb is the bare minimum for it to run at all smoothly. I am surprised Asus would sell a 11th generation core cpu machine with only 8 gb of ram.

To give you an example, right now I have one open app, Firefox, with 1 open tab. My system is using 8.6 gb of my 32 gb of ram. I can close FF entirely and it drops to 7.7.

You can possibly decrease your ram usage slightly by altering your startup apps running in the background but with only 8 gb it won't help you much. Adding additional ram or choosing to not run 6 tabs is about the only thing that will benefit you.

Tks for your info. I was able to see tab sleep better after I changed the timeout to 30 sec. So far, my system hasn't bothered me with slowdowns yet. I usually run Edge with 3-6 tabs open. It's only when I'm doing research that I have up to 20 tabs open. Even then I don't see much of a slowdown for some reason. I'll keep in mind what you said about mem size, and maybe in the future I'll upgrade it. From task manager, I can see only 2 apps running over 100MB: Antimalware Defender Service @ 121MB, and Edge @ 600MB with 23 instances. All apps and processes between 10 and 100 all total 418MB, and all the rest are < 10 and grand total is 58% (currently) which equates to about 4.5GB usage.

So here is where I can see that I would need more ram, and where I tend to run out: when I'm using video apps, and some sites use lots of video like Weather.com, IMDB, et al. Also, it appears that Yahoo Mail tab never sleeps, probably because it's constantly putting up new ads. From the link you gave, it also appears that sites running videos with audio muted will never sleep. And when I'm running video processing apps like Nero Video, it becomes very intensive, because the onboard graphics controller's memory is shared with system memory (It's Intel UHD Graphics 730). I would imagine that the system is still well-behaved, since I've not seen any issues with my videos so far. With that said, I'll certainly consider upgrading the memory later on. I'm not a gamer, so I'm not too concerned about it at this time.