The Google Chrome Helper process is one of those things that can eat up a lot of CPU power. And it’s becoming quite the issue for most people, unless you have a very powerful CPU. Even then, you want your overall resources to be used more effectively, so finding a fix is very much necessary. Thankfully, there are ways to get around these problems, and here’s what you need to focus on.
Why does the Google Chrome Helper process require a lot of CPU?
A lot of the time, the Google Chrome Helper can lead to a high CPU consumption due to a multitude of things. Maybe you are visiting resource-intensive sites, the browser is not updated to the latest version, or you might have conflicting hardware. The same thing is valid if you have a lot of tabs open, the browser has corrupted files and so on. All of these things can increase the CPU consumption of the Google Chrome Helper. And that will naturally have a negative impact on how the app works, but also the overall experience you have right now.
Monitoring the CPU usage
Before you get into any fixes, a very good idea is to check the CPU usage. The Activity Monitor is a very good tool for this, as it will help you identify the CPU usage and figure out when the Google Chrome Helper is getting out of hand with the resource consumption. Some other third party apps like Mac cleanup tools also have CPU monitoring that tends to be added to the menu bar for easy access, so that can be an option too. That way, at least you know, can Google Chrome Helper use high CPU on Mac and when does it happen exactly.
Reducing the Google Chrome Helper CPU usage
Disable the browser plugins
You can enter the Settings/Extensions panel and here you want to disable extensions that you are not using. It might not seem like much, but the truth is that disabling those plugins is a great idea and it will help optimize things more than expected. Plus, some extensions and plugins might have malware, so keeping those things at a minimum will help more than expected.
Update Google Chrome
It’s a simple fix, but a very good one to try out. And that’s the thing, you always want to have Google Chrome up to date. It gives you the best security features, the latest patches and all the other benefits that you may need. And in the end, it will allow you to save quite a bit of effort and time. It’s totally worth considering, especially if you are serious about using the app often. Also, update your Mac OS as well.
Find alternatives to resource-hungry apps
Chrome is not the only resource hog, there are also others. You want to limit the CPU consumption as much as possible. That’s why it makes sense to find alternative apps that are less CPU-reliant when compared to existing ones you are using right now. It’s going to take a little bit, but in the end, this will always be worth your time.
Declutter your desktop
A thing that will help lower CPU usage is decluttering your desktop. Remove files and stuff that you don’t use. As you do that, it will help optimize things, and make the process much easier to manage. Plus, the advantage is that you can also optimize tabs in Google Chrome in an effort to help you save CPU and other resources.
Disable the hardware acceleration in Google Chrome
It’s actually a very good idea to do this because it will lower CPU consumption. You can go to the Chrome Settings/System and here you want to disable the option to use graphics acceleration. It might not be a hard thing to do, but it can have quite the impact, and that’s totally something you will appreciate doing, because it comes in handy.
And of course, you want to clear the browser data. That does end up requiring system resources that could be freed otherwise. So it makes sense to try and clear the browser data if you can. In the end, we think it’s a great idea to try and clear the browser data often, especially if you use Google Chrome every day. Those things accumulate and getting rid of that stuff becomes very important.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, the Google Chrome Helper can sometimes get out of control when it comes to its CPU usage. It’s up to you to narrow down how to solve this problem. All the ideas shown above can be great, it depends on when and how you can implement them. But it will be worth it if you do so, as it will improve the overall Google Chrome performance.
