Ever had the fan on your MacBook Pro just run continuously while Chrome was open? Me, too! I knew it was Chrome because I opened Activity Monitor and sorted the CPU column. When I did this so the highest CPU usage (which is what causes the fan to kick in) was at the top, it indicated Google Chrome Renderer was the culprit.
So, how can one tell what page is causing the high CPU usage? It’s actually pretty simple.
Switch over so Chrome is front running application. Once you’re there, click on the three horizontal lines in the upper right hand corner. Like so:
When you click that a menu will open. Select Tools, then Task Manager, like so:
Now, you can see the pages you have open. You can sort this by CPU by clicking on that column head. When you do, you should see the page that’s rocketing your CPU and thus your fan. For me, it was a page on box.com
Close that page and the fan should crank down. That’s it!
Simple and easy.
Now, get back to work 🙂
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Thank you so much for this one. This was driving me insane and I had no idea why it was happening. I followed your instructions and the fan stopped running!
So glad it helped!
Thank you for this. Solved my issue too. For some reason iGoogle was chewing up major CPU bandwidth. Guess it’s good they are shutting it down in 22 days.
For me it always seem to be gmail that jumps the CPU (and temperature) to 100%.
I installed Chrome last week and it has now done it 5 times.
I have removed the offline gmail plugin but that did not help. Have no other gmail plugins installed.
Any insights?
Jake, that does seem odd, yet if leaving Gmail open is doing it, I’d suggest using another method of reading your Google Mail. Mailplane is one choice. Any email client, including Apple Mail, which can connect to IMAP is fine. There are many email clients to choose from.
And if Google Chrome Helper is using too much CPU, try this:
Go Google Settings > Show Advanced Settings > Content Settings (Under Privacy)
Then choose the ‘Click to play’ button under the Plugins section.
From now on you have to click whenever you want to run a streaming video or other plugins, but it’s worth it. You will observe much less CPU usage.