The Discarded Session
Google Chrome is notorious for consuming system RAM. To combat this, Google introduced a feature called “Memory Saver.” When Memory Saver is active, Chrome constantly monitors your open tabs. If it determines you haven’t interacted with a background tab in a while, it will automatically “discard” (or sleep) that tab, freeing up the memory it was using. While this keeps your computer running smoothly, it is disastrous if you have a web application running a background process, an unsaved form on a hidden tab, or a dashboard that needs to stay live. When you finally click back to that discarded tab, Chrome is forced to completely refresh and reload the page from scratch, losing any temporary data you had entered.
Disabling Memory Saver
To ensure your background web applications remain active and stop Google Chrome from automatically refreshing or discarding background tabs, you must turn off the Memory Saver feature.
Open Google Chrome. Click the three vertical dots in the top-right corner of the window and select Settings from the dropdown menu. In the left-hand navigation pane, click on Performance. The very first option at the top of the main window will be the Memory Saver section. You will see a toggle switch next to it. Click the toggle to switch it to the Off position (the switch will turn grey). Chrome will immediately stop terminating background tabs, and they will remain fully loaded in memory indefinitely. If you only want to protect specific sites (like a web-based email client) while letting Chrome sleep everything else, leave Memory Saver turned on, click the Add button next to “Always keep these sites active,” and type in the specific URL.