I have a large number of windows open in these programs but in trying to diagnose the issue I find that this problem doesn't happen in Windows 7, it only happens in Linux.

I've tried clearing the cache and it still persists until I get enough control of the system to kill the entire process.

I'm using Chrome 42.0.2311.152 and Chromium 38.0.2125.111-1 but this has been a problem in many previous versions of these programs.

Has anyone else experienced this or been able to solve it? Thanks!

I have seen something vaguely similar with Opera under Ubuntu. One of my CPUs gets maxed out, but I am not certain about hard drive thrashing, though I think I was hearing a lot of disk head activity. I believe this was associated with leaving a video window open because when I killed it, things settled down. I don't normally have more than 5 or so tabs open at once. ... FWIW!

how many ?
5 or 5000 ?

what is the CPU and how much ram

if you have 4 xenon cpu's and 128 gig ram
then there should be no problems

but
if you have a LAPTOP i3 or i5 and 2 to 4 gig of ram ????
then there might be issues with too many windows and processes going

Same here, it settled down for a while after removing the window that had a video playing, but then the thrashing came right back. I can tell it's thrashing because the hard drive light stays red unlike any other time. When the system cedes control back to me, the hard drive light dies down. My hard drives aren't loud enough, it seems, to make a telltale noise. Linux might tell realtime hard drive activity but this doesn't help when the system is utterly frozen.

It seems that Chrome no longer has an option to not cache at all; if it did I would at least try and test that out. Am I missing something and there actually is one?

1 members found this post helpful.

Chrom(e)ium is simply more demanding. Personally, I use Firefox for normal browsing, and Chrome only for apps or specific things I need when using my netbook w/slower processor. If you would like a good cleaning app which will clear cache from detected end user applications as well as system if run as SuperUser, check out bleachbit.

Oh I can't believe I missed this.
My system has 16 gigs of RAM, and I typically have about 24 tabs open.
This isn't a problem for me in Windows, though. I usually have about 30+ windows open there.

---------- Post added 05-26-15 at 14:28 ----------

I'm actually looking for a utility that will prevent caching in Chrome, not cleanup afterwards.