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rMBP - Mountain Lion - Safari - IRONIC LAG

P

photosaurus

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 22, 2012
108
0
OK, I've been reading the lag complaints on this forum over the last few weeks, and never really experienced any lag that was enough to bug me in the least... until today. The irony? It was a positive review of Mountain Lion linked to on Apples own website... Safari's default home page.

Open this link in Safari, scroll up and down: http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/25/os-x-mountain-lion-review/

Ok, a little rough? Now pinch zoom the page a bit, and try it. It just about freezes. Now look at Safari's cpu usage. 70 - 80 percent just sitting on the page!

I tried the page in chrome beta, works just fine.
 
Hm, I tried your link then scrolling up and down and also doing pinch zoom in and out many times and it was smooth on mine. CPU Activity Monitor barely moved at all.
 
watergun said:
Hm, I tried your link then scrolling up and down and also doing pinch zoom in and out many times and it was smooth on mine. CPU Activity Monitor barely moved at all.
Click to expand...

mine practically died... what are you're specs? and are you running ML?
 
20% While scrolling like a normal person on LION.

35%-40% while scrolling like an OCD lunatic on LION.
 
watergun said:
Admittedly I am using the higher spec rMBP 2.7/16 on ML. But, is the difference really that much?
Click to expand...

I really hope not... I'm on 2.3/16. It's alright normally scrolling, still a little lag. As soon as I pinch and scroll, the screen literally stutters.
 
Last edited:
I can see what you guys are referring to. I was looking at Safari's CPU usage. It didnt move at all. But Safari Web Content's CPU usage hits 71.9% if I scroll the web page like crazy.
 
Absolutely no lag at all, even zooming in and out by pinching.

edit: After zooming in, scroll lag is very noticeable and present indeed.

On Mountain Lion - Macbook Retina 2.6ghz/512gb/8gb
 
on a 2.3/16.. little lag both scrolling and pinching.. but not too bad.

sitting on the page usage varies.. from 5% to 34%.. but usually under 10%
 
A little update... it's not the pinch zoom itself that lags, but the scrolling after zooming.

The more you zoom in, the worse it gets... to a point that you nearly can't scroll at all.
 
Aside from that link, safari just seems slower at loading pages after the ML update. It occasionally hangs, like I've got a bad internet connection. Chrome beta is having none of these issues. I've always used chrome, but was willing to give Safari a chance this time around. I'm going back to Chrome.
 
photosaurus said:
Aside from that link, safari just seems slower at loading pages after the ML update. It occasionally hangs, like I've got a bad internet connection. Chrome beta is having none of these issues. I've always used chrome, but was willing to give Safari a chance this time around. I'm going back to Chrome.
Click to expand...

the latest chrome beta has gpu acceleration disabled. if anything its way slower than safari right now.
 
CPU stayed 87% idle for me while scrolling up and down for about twenty seconds. I have a couple big programs open as well.. and about eight safari tabs.

as for lag. a tiny bit? it's tough for me to tell having just upgraded from a 07 MBP 2.4 c2d..
 
retinarob said:
CPU stayed 87% idle for me while scrolling up and down for about twenty seconds. I have a couple big programs open as well.. and about eight safari tabs.

as for lag. a tiny bit? it's tough for me to tell having just upgraded from a 07 MBP 2.4 c2d..
Click to expand...
Did you zoom in? What's your specs? You'd notice the lag... it almost won't scroll at all. Lion or Mountain Lion?
 
Buttery smooth scrolling used to be one of the things I look forward to the most on a Mac computer, and now we are discussing about the severity of scroll lag which is present in almost every rMBP. Even a 2011 MBP's scrolling feels smoother than rMBP. :(
 
Same here, rMBP 2.3/8Gig RAM, Safari is a lagger... I just barely noticed it today. Still running Lion here, haven't gotten my redemption code for Mtn Lion yet!!
 
photosaurus said:
Did you zoom in? What's your specs? You'd notice the lag... it almost won't scroll at all. Lion or Mountain Lion?
Click to expand...

2.6GHz i7 MBPr 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD. I'm running Mountain Lion, and zoomed in the lag is noticeable, but still scrolls. As for the CPU is peaks at 15% with Ableton and Photoshop CS5 running.
 
alexmarchuk said:
Absolutely no lag at all, even zooming in and out by pinching.

edit: After zooming in, scroll lag is very noticeable and present indeed.

On Mountain Lion - Macbook Retina 2.6ghz/512gb/8gb
Click to expand...

I tried the very same thing my 2011 17" Macbook Pro running integrated graphics. Same result so its not only a rMBP issue.
 
I see some lag on that site with my 2009 MBP and ML Safari 6. Clearly not a rMBP issue.
 
I think you will find at the end of the day that all these so called issues are nothing to do with the mac itself but the endless scripts on webpages to draw them correctly for all the various browsers coupled together with webkit, the open source webpage rendering engine. Put together gives a lot of work stitching complicated webpages together, like BookFace and other sites that do advertising or dynamic content.

Sometimes I think the web should get back to grass roots text and graphics as if you put just these on a webpage you don't get overhead problems, but as soon as you try to take into account the differences people code in to display a page perfectly between IE, Safari, Firefox, Chrome and more with javascripts and other clever things plus throw in some Flash adverts and you have a pretty heavy bloated mess. But that is the way the web is going so I don't let it bother me.

If people are really letting there lives be affected by the web requiring a million GHz computer to provide buttery smooth scrolling on websites that utilise sloppy bloated code then further into the future I think you may be disappointed.

Even good old Google, which used to be literally just text on a page is starting to get 'clever' so in the future even that will get coded badly and begin to strain your web rendering engine.

So if anything you should be onto these website designers and start harassing them to develop clean web code and not the bloat rubbish that they get away with because computers are fast enough to render pretty perfectly.
 
It's this piece of garbage:

Adtech AdVisibility JS Library v_0_5_8 Copyright 2011 AOL Advertising.

Taking 45 seconds to load completely and preventing other JavaScript on the page from executing until it's loaded. Blame TechCrunch and http://at.atwola.com


-- f9a
 
You'll be able to tell if it's a hardware or software problem by testing it in Windows too. If it doesn't lag there, then it's just OS X being flimsy somewhere.
 
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