Chrome is a speedy little browser, but that speed comes with a tradeoff: It also eats tons of memory. If you’ve got plenty of RAM, that may not be an issue; if not, you can reclaim that memory with a simple click.
As Lee Mathews over at Download Squad discovered, the most recent Chrome dev builds come with a command line switch (--purge-memory-button) that, when run with Chrome at startup, adds a Purge memory button to Chrome’s task manager.
Like other browsers, Chrome and Chromium can get a little RAM-hungry after extended browsing sessions. By adding the —purge-memory-button switch to your command line, you'll get exactly that — a purge memory button on the Task Manager screen.
Press shift + ESC after you’ve been browsing for a little while in Chromium top bring up the task manager. Press the purge button, and you’ll notice several of your memory figures drop (some quite drastically).
To put it to use, just edit your Chrome shortcut like so: Right-click the shortcut, select Properties, and paste —purge-memory-button at the end of the Target field in the Shortcut tab. Then just launch Chrome using that shortcut, hit Shift+Esc to bring up the Chrome Task Manager, and you should see the shiny new Purge memory button.
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