Microsoft Edge was eating all my RAM — these fixes finally stopped it

Microsoft Edge and I were getting along just fine until it started swallowing every last drop of my PC’s RAM. One moment everything was smooth, and the next my laptop’s fans were spinning like a helicopter. When I opened the Task Manager, Edge was sitting there at the top, consuming almost all of my PC’s RAM.

Since I wasn’t ready to ditch Edge, I did the next best thing. I investigated every active extension, tweaked Edge’s performance settings, and after a bit of trial and error, I was able to bring Edge’s RAM usage under control for good.

Stop tabs and extensions hogging memory

Spot the culprits

Before you blame Edge, it’s worth opening the built-in task manager and seeing what’s actually causing the trouble. Sometimes, it isn’t the whole browser misbehaving. It might be one rogue tab streaming high-resolution video, or an extension chewing through the memory in the background.

In Edge, press Shift + Esc to open the Browser Task Manager and click the Memory column to sort everything by RAM usage. If a single tab is hogging far more memory than the rest, close it and reload the page.

Extensions can be just as guilty. Some of them run constant background tasks and end up consuming far more than they should. If you see any extension sitting near the top of the memory list, disable it and see how it affects the memory usage. Sometimes, turning off a single misbehaving extension is enough to bring RAM usage under control.

Enable the sleeping tabs feature

Save resources without sacrificing convenience

If you’re like me and have a habit of leaving dozens of tabs open, Edge’s RAM usage is bound to spike. It’s a classic case of tab hoarding. The good thing is that you don’t have to abandon your precious collection or close everything manually.

Enabling the sleeping tabs feature in Edge allows the browser to put inactive pages to sleep so they don’t use any system resources in the background. This way, you still keep all your tabs, but the ones you aren’t using take a quiet nap until you return to them.

To turn on the sleeping tab, head to Settings > System and performance > Performance and turn on Save resources with sleeping tabs. You can even specify how long Edge should wait before putting an inactive tab to sleep. The wait period can be set anywhere from 30 seconds to 12 hours. From the same menu, you can also set exceptions for specific tabs so they're never put to sleep.

Use Edge’s performance detector

Let Edge point out what’s slowing you down

Another way to stay on top of Edge’s RAM usage is to use the performance detector tool. This built-in feature keeps an eye on your open tabs and flags anything that starts acting greedy with system resources. When a tab starts using excessive RAM or CPU, it shows a red dot on the heart-pulse icon on the toolbar. Click it, and Edge will even suggest actions like putting the tab to sleep or closing it to get memory usage back under control.

To turn on the performance detector in Edge, go to Settings > System and performance > Performance. Then, toggle on Enable performance detector. If you don’t see the performance toolbar (the heart-pulse icon), click the three-dot icon, go to More tools, and select Performance. You can also pin it so it’s always visible.

Once enabled, the performance toolbar gives you a snapshot of how much RAM Edge is using at any moment. It also shows how many tabs are currently asleep and how much memory you’re saving.

Reduce RAM allocation to Edge

The most effective trick

Even with all the helpful features like sleeping tabs and performance detector, Edge can still balloon in memory usage if it’s allowed to grab all the resources it wants. The most effective approach to keeping Edge’s memory usage control is to set a limit on how much RAM it can use in the first place.

Edge actually gives you a built-in way to do this. Go to Settings > System and performance > Performance and turn on Enable resource controls. You can then use the slider to specify how much RAM Edge can use at any given time. You can set it as low as 1GB or go all the way up to the maximum RAM your PC has.

Now, it’s tempting to slam the slider down and starve Edge into submission, but that can backfire. If you’re too aggressive, Edge may run slowly. The sweet spot is usually a few gigabytes, enough to keep the browser responsive while preventing it from running wild. My laptop has 24GB of RAM, so I set Edge’s limit at 15GB, and that’s been more than enough.

One more thing to keep in mind. By default, Edge will have this memory restriction only when you’re gaming. Make sure to change the option to Always, so the limit stays in effect no matter what you’re doing.

Since most of my work happens inside a browser, it’s important that Edge behaves. Thankfully, reducing Edge’s memory usage wasn’t difficult. The built-in tools make the entire process surprisingly easy.