In chrome developer tools, every time a page loads I click on "Network" tab and see the "record" button active / red. Even if I disable the recording of network traffic, when I refresh the same page or open another website I see that Chrome is recording traffic in the "Network" tab.

When developing big web applications that have A LOT of traffic - 3rd party apis, statics CDNs from Amazon, Google and all the app's assets that must be downloaded like images, js files, css files, etc etc - this "Network" tab works very slowly and my browser gets stuck a lot. This causes my development time to be less productive because I must wait every time I want to check something in the "Networks" tab.

Can I turn the recording off by default? Can the "Record" button be grey and when I want it to start recording I just click on it and start seeing the traffic?

In chrome developer tools, every time a page loads I click on "Network" tab and see the "record" button active / red. Even if I disable the recording of network traffic, when I refresh the same page or open another website I see that Chrome is recording traffic in the "Network" tab.

When developing big web applications that have A LOT of traffic - 3rd party apis, statics CDNs from Amazon, Google and all the app's assets that must be downloaded like images, js files, css files, etc etc - this "Network" tab works very slowly and my browser gets stuck a lot. This causes my development time to be less productive because I must wait every time I want to check something in the "Networks" tab.

Can I turn the recording off by default? Can the "Record" button be grey and when I want it to start recording I just click on it and start seeing the traffic?

• javascript
• google-chrome
• network-programming

• F12 after your page is loaded,it shouldnt slowdown your website.Or disable network logs and reload your page while dev tools are opened. – mpm Commented Jun 26, 2014 at 8:36
• Thanks man, but the solution I'm looking for is a way to disable in the first place all network monitoring, I want to open and see the "grey" circle. Then if I want to monitor the traffic, I can click on the circle and it will turn red and start recording.. I think that's the way a record button is supposed to work actually. – Alexandre Commented Jun 26, 2014 at 9:21
• Have the same problem here. I use SVG-Image-Maps so every icon makes his own request (which is of cause cached, so the actual request will not be made). This adds up to a view thousand requests pretty fast. Would be great to have an option to disable recording by default. – Stephan Hoyer Commented Sep 16, 2014 at 12:16
• Same thing here. I'm developing an application which does several requests per second and having the "rec" going on by default is something that slows the browser. Actually in my case, If I don't stop it, it consumes a lot of memory until my puter stop responding. A "temporal" solution doesn't work as I need to refresh the page every now and then. I couldn't find any bug report about that. – lepe Commented Jul 4, 2016 at 8:15
• Recording is a bad word for it, it's really just showing you the HTTP requests. If you didn't have it on by default, what would you even be checking in the network tab? There'd be nothing to check re: I must wait every time I want to check something in the "Networks" tab – shmup Commented Aug 22, 2017 at 12:23

4 Answers 4

2018 solution: The only thing that works for me is opening this page:

chrome://serviceworker-internals/

And then Unregister and Stop all workers there.

I don't know of an option to turn off the default recoding BUT you can do the following:

1. Open a new empty tab
2. Hit F12
3. Disable Network Recording
4. Paste the url of your application to the adressbar

This way you don't have to load the page once before disabling network recording, which is your problem from what I understand, because you have a lot of resources loading.

There's a button in the top left of the Network Panel. It looks like a little red circle, you can hit that to stop recording network events.

I just disabled it, refreshed this page and saw nothing in there. Is something like that what you were looking for?

By default, it's not recording anything until you have the F12 tools open (even though the circle is red when you first open it). If you don't have the F12 tools open, it won't record the history. When you first open it, if you notice at the bottom, it tells you that nothing has been cached, and refresh the page if you want to see the network traffic. If, when you open the F12 tools, your site is still doing a lot of traffic, it'll start reporting it at that point, but nothing prior.

I'm pretty dubious that it's the source of your slow-down. It's really just capturing all the HTTP traffic and saving the request/responses, it's not a lot of work, very little in fact. The resources/profiles/timelines parts that can be more consuming are all off by default.