I recently noticed Chrome is running multiple processes, immediately after launch, before I even open a new tab or start browsing. Why is this happening? And obviously it is consuming lot of resources, any way to limit this?
OS: Windows 7 (32-bit)
Chrome version: 58.0.3029.81
That's Chrome's sandbox in action.
Chrome runs some of its components as separate processes. There's one main process, a GPU renderer process and then (roughly) a single process for every tab, extension and plugin. (Actually, a few tabs can be run in a single process under certain circumstances.)
It's how Chrome's sandbox works. Sandboxing is a technique used to increase program's immunity against malicious actions of untrusted code (such as code of websites you're visiting). Running independent pieces of code in separate processes makes these pieces of code unable to affect Chrome's core, which is the most privileged part.
Extra processes don't necessarily use that much resources. Some of the memory is shared between them and dormant processes use negligible amount of CPU time. Nothing to worry about here.
I'd double check that you don't have any Chrome processes still running after you tell it to close / exit, your list does have a lot of 90ish mb entries for only a single (blank?) tab... maybe old ones aren't quitting. And I'd suspect extensions / add-ons too (I'll +1 Yisroel's answer too), try & compare to a new empty profile.
In general, I think the multiple processes is a design decision, and it makes it easier to see what webpages are using cpu/ram - there's (at least one) process for each tab in addition to a few for "general Chrome stuff". But it does really clutter up normal process viewing, especially "top-three" type lists.
Chrome's built-in task manager (shift-esc?) is an easy way to see tab processes & descriptions.
On linux, Chrome/Chromium is similar in showing multiple processes instead of just one like Firefox, but they're both comparable in resource usage. FYI There's a way to see all Firefox's "hidden processes" too so it's similar to Chrome, I don't know how to do that in Windows though.
For your first question, why this happens. It is very hard to say for sure without checking it out, but my guess is that you have some Chrome Extension/Apps installed which run in the background right when you open Chrome.
To check out more detailed I'd suggest you open the Chrome task manager (Shift+Esc when you are in Chrome) and see if you can see there what exactly is running.
