Why does the GMail web page use so much RAM? [closed]

Gmail's web page is running MANY scripts in the background on timers, etc. These take up memory as they work. Your "Saved" copy won't have these scripts (at least not in a working/running manner), and their associated objects in memory.

If you use a memory profiler (built into most modern browsers' development tools) you can see what's actually using memory.

When I take a snapshot of my "idle" gmail page, there's 136,441 objects loaded in memory.

Those objects range from using 32 bytes of memory, to a few kilobytes, up to over 4 megabytes, depending on the object.

And that doesn't include the memory used by the browser to actually render the page to you.

• Perhaps try the "Basic HTML" version, as it should use much less memory. It's available at https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html.