I’ve noticed that Chrome sometimes goes crazy with RAM usage. My main clue comes with Spotify getting choppy. When I shut down Chrome, though, I’ve noticed that a phantom process keeps running. Looks like a whole ‘nother Chrome browser is open (doesn’t show up when I alt+tab, but you can see it on the Task Manager). After shutting down the iteration with the largest RAM usage (the others are plug-ins/extensions), available RAM goes back to the normal zone.
I like Chrome a great deal. However, I need to run Firefox in order to deal with these continued issues. Hardly the worst thing I’ve ever dealt with, but still a source of aggravation. I really wish Google would deal with this.