How to run Google Chrome in a single process?

Question

Is it possible to run Google Chrome in a single process?

I found the only flag – --single-process – but running Chrome with it shows me the following message:

You are using an unsupported command-line flag: --single-process. Stability and security will suffer.

and it still runs in multiple processes...

Is there something similar?

I've already understood that :). Is there something similar? — VladL, Oct 04 '13 at 22:06
Not with Chrome, as far as I know. You could check if `Chromium` still supports the flag. — Rik, Oct 04 '13 at 22:10
I remember Chrome had some sort of option in it's preferences, but as I don't use the browser I can't tell for sure. — Doktoro Reichard, Oct 04 '13 at 23:27
Would you please explain why you want to run the browser as a single process? — , Oct 05 '13 at 02:47
Is it because of something like this: http://futureoptimistnow.blogspot.in/2012/12/single-process-mode-in-chrome.html ? — , Oct 05 '13 at 02:53
Presumably to reduce the ridiculous RAM usage. An Opera heavy-research session with 50+ tabs has less RAM usage than my typical chrome session. — Mark K Cowan, Jun 27 '14 at 10:51
Tried --process-per-site, and it's no longer working as well. — access_granted, Apr 17 '17 at 23:23
**Chromium** seems to still work with `--single-process` but does give a warning. — Jonathan Cross, Sep 29 '19 at 14:44

EvgenKo423 · Answer 1 · 2022-07-09T16:52:30.943

The --single-process option you've found is not officially supported, so it's not guaranteed to work, may still use more than a single process and may cause additional performance or stability issues.

There are a couple of other Chromium options you could use instead:

Since Chromium 67 you may want to disable Site Isolation using flag chrome://flags/#site-isolation-trial-opt-out or --disable-site-isolation-trials command line option. This will force subframes to run in their pages' processes and allow you to use the next option;
You could explicitly limit the amount of renderer processes using --renderer-process-limit=2 command line option. This will force all the tabs and extensions to use a single process (per each type);
With --in-process-gpu option it will run the GPU process as a thread in the main browser process. These processes consume most of the CPU time and the GPU driver crash will likely crash the whole browser, so you probably don't wanna use it.

Warning!
Most of these options will reduce the security of your browser! You use them at your own risk.

I was testing these options on Vivaldi 3.3 (Chrome 85) with 5 Super User tabs, 3 other tabs and 4 extensions. Here are the results I've got:

Default:                                    24 processes
Default - Site Isolation:                   19 processes
Default - Site Isolation + Renderer Limit:  10 processes

How to run Google Chrome in a single process?

1 Answers1