I regularly have to test internal systems by adding an entry to the hosts file on my computer. As I keep quite a few tabs open this can cause issues when I need to use the original host system to do some work as I do not want to close all of my tabs to restart Chrome. And when I finish my testing and remove the entry from the hosts file, I need to restart the browser to make sure that I do not have the test DNS entry for my host.
IF you place the following in the address bar:
chrome://net-internals/#dns
You will get a page for DNS that has the following button:
This will clear the browser DNS cache and you can use the list below to see the current state of DNS entries below to verify your DNS is as expected.