Safari 5.1 Memory Leak in Lion

I've noticed scrolling and such getting more jerky over time but even quitting Safari and reopening it does not correct that issue. Only a reboot seems to help.

I've actually thought about going back to SL until the little things in Lion get pinned down an update or two down the road....but two things leave it hard for me to go back.

1. Safari, other than bumpy scrolling at times, is fantastic in Lion.

2. Lion handles my laptops display and external display much more appropriately. If I want to only have the external display running I just close the laptop. That just shuts down the laptops display and I keep going on my main display. With SL it puts the system to sleep and I have to wake it back up.

Have you guys considered that the entire OS is a little slow after installing it, while Spotlight builds its indexes? I'd bet that would explain a good deal of what some of you have described.

PeterHolbrook said:

Have you guys considered that the entire OS is a little slow after installing it, while Spotlight builds its indexes? I'd bet that would explain a good deal of what some of you have described.

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Been using it for days...indexing was complete within the first 10 minutes. These aren't knee jerk reactions on my part at least.

I really love some things about Lion that would make it difficult to go back to SL.

I like a lot of stuff but it wouldn't hurt me to go back.

Very few actual issues I've noticed. Very limited on that front.

How many tabs do you have open and are you on websites that have a lot of flash or watching a lot of youtube video's?

MacBookPro13";12874964 said:

How many tabs do you have open and are you on websites that have a lot of flash or watching a lot of youtube video's?

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I do IT for a living. I am experiencing said stuttering scrolling even with 1 tab open and no flash/video/anything else intensive running...even on a freshly opened Safari UNLESS I just rebooted.

I already cleared cache and reset Safari.

iammike1 said:

I do IT for a living. I am experiencing said stuttering scrolling even with 1 tab open and no flash/video/anything else intensive running...even on a freshly opened Safari UNLESS I just rebooted.

I already cleared cache and reset Safari.

Click to expand...

This is probabaly the wrong thread but my Safari after I installed the GM crashing on loading Any idea what could be wrong or what should i check ? Is anyone else having this problem , I using Chrome now as my browser but would love to get back into Safari

I have noticed memory leaks with Safari with DP1 threw DP4, so far I haven't seen it with the GM.

Cynicalone said:

I have noticed memory leaks with Safari with DP1 threw DP4, so far I haven't seen it with the GM.

Click to expand...

Honestly I have a feeling this is something with the display drivers for the dedicated card in my MBP.

I have the base model 2011 15" MBP. Can't remember the specific dedicated GPU but I'm using that pushing to a 1080p. In Snow Leopard scrolling was silky smooth, not as much in Lion but not end of the world. Just enough to be annoying.

Now, on my 2008 MBP with the 9400 pushing to the 13" screen, scrolling is silky smooth in Lion.

I know the 15" is pushing more resolution but I wouldn't imagine it to be so much that the power difference isn't more than making up for it.

Usually: When Safari is huge: It is Flash going crazy.

Have seen 1gig + safari on 10.6.

But there are something that is leaking memory in 10.7. I have 8 gig memory. Use Safari/Flash, Mail, macpar deluxe, ical and the computer is swapping 2.5 gig.

And when computer starts swapping i/o goes up and kernel_tast takes 20% CPU time. (on a dual i7 2.66ghz)

I'm having the same problem. Safari started to choke, so I checked AM and "Safari Web Content" was using 3GB of RAM.

In my experience, Safari has always been a huge memory hog, even going back to the 10.4 days. It doesnt take long for Safari to start eating memory, even with only a few tabs open. However the kind of memory usage you guys are seeing on 10.7 definitely isnt normal, even for Safari. I havent done much testing with Safari in DP4 (which is what I have installed), I tend to stick with Chrome most of the time.

What's the difference between the two apps? One's the Safari.app and the other one is "Safari Web Content", which is a separate app?

I've been getting Spinning Beach-balls a lot of Safari lately on mine. Thought it was a Flash related issue at first but still getting them even though Flash is uninstalled. It's weird being I've had the GM installed since it was released and this just started yesterday.

Mine stays around 300mb. I think it is because of the webpage previews (screenshots for browsing history). Use terminal to disable it. I did it using Cocktail (there is a free beta available) @ http://www.maintain.se/cocktail/index.php

Memory/CPU problems in Safari...

I have been struggling with this problem in SL and Safari 5.0.5 for one month. I am downloading Lion now to see if it will help end this problem for me. I also downloaded Safari 5.1 today - hoping for improvement - but it provided none for my machine (2009 Macbook Alu 2.4 Core 2 Duo 4gb RAM 9400 GPU). I have used terminal to disable website previews (completed several months ago) and trashed and re-installed the latest flash software too. I have also tried disabling extension add-ons (ad-blocker) and click to flash.

I can only provide this anecdote as a suggestion to consider with regard to cause and effect: I use a customized Google News page as my start/home site in Safari and it seems that as this page has become more (flash) or (HTML 5) intensive? since the last release (consider all of the graphic mouse-over features - etc) - the Safari memory/CPU problem has grown for me. I look forward to a solution but have largely switched to Firefox as Safari is unusable for me in this state.

Ugh Memory goes thru the roof

I start with 2.38 GB free and as soon as I open up Safari I can watch it steady drain. Any one have a solution besides using google chrome.

Having all kinds of issues with Safari. Beachballing, VERY slow loading, general weirdness, computer crunching/working hard, etc. Going back to snow Leopard.

Having the same memory leak issue from the Safari Web Content process. Slowly increases overtime until all available RAM is used up, then Safari starts to bottleneck and run poorly. Only solution is to close and reopen the browser.

This is pretty unacceptable as a major release that was beta tested. Apple has a finite number of computers they have to test compatibility with... there's really no excuse.

Hope they fix it soon.

Here is mine with 4 tabs open, memory seems steady with me.