Multiple iexplore.exe *32 when opening Internet Explorer

Recently I have encountered an issue of one or more extra iexplore.exe *32 in my task manager window, that use high physical memory, when I open Internet Explorer. If I close the instance of IE I originally opened, they all will close as well. However if I browse on IE for a while, eventually the extra iexplore.exe *32 (single or multiples) get so high, that pages stop loading proper.

Things I have tried to fix the issue:

- Manually close the extra iexplore.exe *32 in the Task Manager. They immediately open again, and begin rising, unless I close the original IE I opened. Then they will all close.

-I have ran various virus scans including Malwarebytes, AVG, SUPERAntiSpyware, Spybot A&D, and Kaspersky. And even ran CCleaner after a scan with both Spybot and SUPERAntiSpyware.

-The problem, although primarily effecting IE, seems to go beyond. I attempted to browse through Google Chrome, and began getting multiple instances of it opening in the Task Manager window.

- At one point during my poking around the internet for a solution, someone had a similar issue, and it was recommended that they try temporarily disabling IE Add-ons, to see if it was the source of the problem. I tried this, and it did not correct the issue. In fact, I am pretty sure it reactivated the add-ons, without me having to go back in, and turn them back on.

As stated before, the main issue with this multiple iexplore.exe *32, is that it increases the Physical Memory to a point where pages will stop loading.

Any advice or assistance on this would be appreciated. I am a bit of a computer tech novice, but have been able to problem solve many issues over the years, with various computers, by just poking around, and researching online.

Thank you in advance.
CMJ

What you see is perfectly normal and expectable. It's a known design flaw intentionally put in IE to make it more "reliable". Fundamentally, the browser starts a new process for each tab and addin in order to keep them isolated from each other. As far as I know, there is no way to disable this "feature".
It's documented here: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ie/...d-reliability/

Since you also mention Chrome, it also has the very same feature, that works in a similar way. Google also has documented this here: Chromium Blog: Multi-process Architecture

Other browsers may or may not be subject to this abomination. Firefox, for example, does everything in a single process (except some particular plugin tasks). It's also not related to something particular in your computer, you just happened to try with 2 browsers flawed in the very same way.

UsernameIssues said:

No, IE does not do that. Not even close.

Your own screenshots shows IE opening multiple processes. The fact that it limits itself to 16 is a nice thing, but it's an implementation detail anyway, it's not my intention to discuss the exact behavior (which I don't know in detail), just noting the general, relevant things.

What the OP says and what I've pointed out remains, IE (and Chrome) opens multiple processes, when only one is really needed.

UsernameIssues said:

Chrome and IE use this as a security feature. The "children" present the websites to the user and they operate with fewer privileges.

That's not the idea of the multiple processes. Security is irrelevant to each design, multiple processes don't provide any security benefit by themselves. What actually makes improvements is the low integrity thing, that some of them use. That's nice, but also flawed. If you look at your own screenshots, you'll see that the master process has still medium integrity, so that one remains at the same level as the rest of the computer.

Looking closer, you'll see that the windows are owned by that master process too. That implies that there is some communication from all others, so it knows what to draw to the screen and can direct user input. Problem with that is that this minimizes benefit of the low integrity, as still a medium integrity process is receiving data from an unreliable source, at least indirectly, effectively making IE very similar to the Firefox in that regard.
To get any protection from UAC you need to run the whole thing as low integrity (which has an impact on usability), be one or millions of processes.

The real usefulness of that whole design is to isolate addins. They are run in its own private memory space, so they can't corrupt the whole thing. They're threated as unsafe, since it's fundamentally third-party code.
Everything else in the multiprocess architecture are drawbacks, including higher system resources consumption, slower processing and possible leaks.

As I stated: IE does not create one process for each tab. Your "general" claim that it does was not even close.

IE's low integrity processes render the websites. Exploits in a website's code can attempt to overcome the isolation between the low integrity processes and the single medium integrity process (parent). That parent process paints the frame(s) that holds the tabs. The frame does not process code from websites.

For Firefox, the single process that is running at the medium integrity level is the process that has to deal with exploits from websites. Exploits in a website's code already have access to a process that is running at the medium integrity level.


As far as RAM usage, that depends very much on the website.
A continuous stream of stellar images made by the community





Firefox 43.0.4 stopped loading the images once I reached 2 months ago on that website. I restarted the VM (W7pro64bit 4GB RAM) and tried again. It took 5 tests to get 4 months back and FF was using 1.3GB. I used an AutoIt script to repeatedly click on the scroll bar. The same script was used for both FF and IE11 - clicking/scrolling/loading the website at the same rate. IE11 never missed an image. I stopped the comparison at 5 months back in IE11 and it took far less RAM.

Chrome 47.0.2526.111 (32bit or 64bit) has no problems with the images. It rendered them faster than IE or FF. But Chrome crashes most of the time on that website. It took 2GB of RAM to go 5 months back.

You can let me know how Opera handles that website

I have a script that watches for IE's processes to exit RAM - then the script lets me know that it is clearing temp files and things. Sometimes, IE exits RAM in less than a second after I've closed IE's window. Other times, it can take about 20 seconds. I have wondered what it is doing during that time.