There is no such thing in chrome as a max-memory setting (but general improvements coming on each release).
From a more general standpoint, however, on Linux you can use
control groups to set the memory limit of any kind of app. If you do that will chrome, that the result will be that tabs will die and be discarded very easily (you'll get lot of "aw snaps").
Example:
sudo apt-get install cgroup-bin
sudo cgcreate -a $USER -s 666 -g memory:chrome
cgset -r memory.limit_in_bytes=500M chrome
cgexec -g memory:chrome /opt/google/chrome-beta/google-chrome