Many process of Google Chrome (32 bit)

When multiple automated tests are getting executed through Google Chrome you must have observed that there are potentially dozens of Google Chrome processes running which can be observed through Windows Task Manager’s Processes tab.

Snapshot:

GoogleChrome_processes

As per the article SOLVED: Why Google Chrome Has So Many Processes for a better user experience Google Chrome initiates a lot of background processes for each tab that have been opened by your Automated Tests. Google tries to keep the browser stable by separating each web page into as many processes as it deems fit to ensure that if one process fails on a page, that particular process(es) can be terminated or refreshed without needing to kill or refresh the entire page.


However, from 2018 onwards Google Chrome was actually redesigned to create a new process for each of the following entities:

  • Tab
  • HTML/ASP text on the page
  • Plugin those are loaded
  • App those are loaded
  • Frames within the page

In a Chromium Blog Multi-process Architecture it is mentioned:

Google Chrome takes advantage of these properties and puts web apps and plug-ins in separate processes from the browser itself. This means that a rendering engine crash in one web app won’t affect the browser or other web apps. It means the OS can run web apps in parallel to increase their responsiveness, and it means the browser itself won’t lock up if a particular web app or plug-in stops responding. It also means we can run the rendering engine processes in a restrictive sandbox that helps limit the damage if an exploit does occur.

As a conclusion, the many processes you are seeing is pretty much in line with the current implementation of


Outro

You can find a relevant discussion in How to quit all the Firefox processes which gets initiated through GeckoDriver and Selenium using Python

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