I was hitting this as well and I have your solution. This was happening to me with 16gb of memory on a $1,600 gaming computer. Chrome would literally be using 14+ GBs of memory after having Bubble open for a couple hours on 2-3 tabs.
The complexity of the pages you have open in Bubble seems to greatly effect this. I have a single page app with separate pages for mobile and desktop, so having both open (I often make edits to both in tandem) was crushing my system.
I have (mostly) fixed this now via these two approaches:
1. Disable Hardware Acceleration in Chrome’s performance settings. Seems like this would help performance, but this is only the case when watching movies or playing games in browser. For Bubble, it just puts the load on your graphics card instead of your regular memory/CPU, and your regular memory/CPU will be more capable and efficient at running Bubble.
2. Increase your PC’s paging file size. Your paging file is the portion of your hard drive set aside for use as virtual memory. So basically, if your paging file is set to 16gb, and you have 16gb of regular ram, then you have 32gb of usable memory. Paging file memory is not as fast, but your PC can use it as a backup to avoid memory related application crashes.
- Search for “Advanced System Settings” on your computer, Open it.
- Under “Performance” click “Settings”.
- Go to the “Advanced” tab.
- Under Virtual Memory, click “Change”.
- Select custom size, and set the Min and Max size to your desired size(same value in both). Will probably need to be at least 10gb (10,000 mbs) to make Chrome + Bubble behave. I have mine set to 15,000 mbs).
It’s worth noting that a solid state hard drive greatly increases the performance of your paging file. If you have a hard “disk” rather than a SSD, this might not be as effective.
Also be aware that you are setting aside a portion of your hard drive for virtual memory, which means you are decreasing the amount storage space you have on your computer by whatever amount you set your paging file to. This is the downside to increasing the size of your paging file.
Bonus Tip:
Use reusables to extract out aspects of your single page app onto separate “pages” to allow for easier editing. This decreases the complexity of your core pages and makes them easier to edit as well. Actual end user performance concerns for your app have to take precedence over this of course, but I’ve often found that reusables (when used correctly) can increase performance both in editing and in your live app.