Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Am I asking too much of my Macbook Pro?

T

thetruth1985

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 17, 2010
371
4
I thought my Macbook Pro would be able to handle this load but apparently in can't. Right now, I have 4 safari windows open with a total of 28 tabs running, 3 Microsoft office documents open, and Safari mail open. This is all distributed through 4 spaces. The Mac seems to be stuttering and I get beach balls constantly. I have "click to flash" installed in safari although I only have 1 tab that is flash enabled (hulu). Even as I am typing this, the mac is taking 3 to 4 seconds to display what I am typing.

My specs are the i5 2.53 17 inch model with 8gb DDR3 ram and a kingston 128gb SSD. Is there something I've mentioned that is slowing it down or can my Mac just not handle this workload? There is nothing in the activity monitor that stands our other than safari, which is at the top of the list.
 
Do you really need 28 tabs open? I checked my ram usage, and with 6 tabs open I end up with 300 mb ram used just for the browser, and none of them had animations or video going, so I'm not supprised its moving slow.
 
wow are you really browsing 28 tabs? Or are you just testing the limits of your MBP?
 
Well I cut down on the amount of tabs and it seems that it's moving better. Activity monitor only says that safari was using 1.5 GBs of ram. I figured it wouldn't be a problem since I have 8gb. I guess I don't need 28 tabs open but I usually have at least 1 window open with all my things open like forums,sports, and news. I also like to keep a separate window open with all the sites/iillustrations open for my college work. It looks like I will just have to find a way to cut it down a little.
 
I missed the part about 8GB of ram and we are both using the same SSD.
It`s a lot of tabs to have open but 8 GB should handle that especially if, as you say, safari is only using 1.5GB
Anything else in activity monitor showing a big memory usage?
 
umm seriously.. a simple question. What does Usage and Free memory read??

It's not uncommon for me to open close to 20 tabs and I only have 4 gig of memory.

Something is not adding up right here.
 
I have 20 tabs open in Firefox right now, plus two windows of Safari, and a couple of documents, and I'm on my old G3 600 mhz iBook which is maxed out at 640 mgs of RAM. I'm not boasting of blazing performance here, but still.... I would imagine you would be doing a lot better than me with your machine! (Unless the newer versions of the browsers are bigger "hogs" or something.)

I'm just getting my new MBP 13" up and running and I would be a bit dissapointed if it couldnt handle what you are describing (it has 4 g RAM but I plan to upgrade to 8g --- I do love my tabs :D )

Miss Terri

2002 iBook 14" G3
2010 MBP 13" 2.4
 
question i gotta ask is.......how many of these browser tabs have Flash content running on them? more than a few will grind your laptop to a halt due to the sheer amount of CPU usage, regardless of how much RAM or if you have an SSD
 
I don't think you should have to cut down. I regularly have 4 or 5 browsers open with 10-15 tabs each while I work. These are usually google search results and I'll discard them when the problem is solved, so the situation only lasts a few hours or a couple of days at most. If I saved bookmarks then I'd have thousands.

Try something other than safari and see if it helps, like chrome or something.
 
Well I only have about 10 tabs open now and it's going fine so I will work my way up to my normal usage and see if it starts to slow down again. If it gets bad again, I may try firefox and see what happens. Thanks!
 
Safari is a memory hog. I'll have only one or two tabs open and it will take up 70% my available memory. I can't imagine 28 tabs.
 
Fubar1977 said:
Worse than FF?
Gives me even more reason to steer clear of Safari (not a big fan)
Click to expand...

In my experience Safari seems better than Firefox. I get more beachballing with Firefox than Safari (shoot, when I open up Firefox, once it actually opens, after a minute it beachballs for a few minutes. It's to the point that I know it is going to happen so try to open it up when I am doing other non computer stuff to pass the minute or two).

(though I just counted the amount of tabs I have open on it and I'm worse than the OP!!!! And I have FF save my tabs when I close so it has to open them all when I start it).

And honestly, I don't get beachballs constantly (I did on my Macbook though). It seems to be able to handle it ok (not great, but ok).

So yeah, I'd say that is wierd (or Safari really is that bad but I thought FF was king of being piggy about RAM usage). Especially considering I just have a MBP 13" with core 2 duo processor and only 4GB of RAM.
 
I regularly do this on my 2009 Macbook Pro Unibody 15" 2.53Ghz C2D 4GB Ram without any issues at all.

Something is up with your machine.
 
I believe the newer versions of safari use much more ram than the previous versions.

I have an early 2002 imac G4 (still works fine :p) with 128MB of ram and it works fine, not at all slow until more than 4 tabs are open.

Compared to my newer 2008 imac with 1GB or ram which slows down with any more than 8 tabs open.

Of course neither imac would run 28 tabs without delay.
 
The question again is really why you have 28 tabs open in the first place...
 
I'm not sure about Safari, but I'm sitting here running FF4 b12 (PC) with probably around 180 tabs total (within several groups). Only 6gb ram at about 42% mem use even with Chromium (15 tabs). Not much flash going on atm, but even with several flash tabs in Chrome, it still performs fine.

I sure hope I don't regret getting a MBP if I can't do this in OSX. Working fine within W7.

Looking forward to the MBP refresh! :)
 
jvmxtra said:
umm seriously.. a simple question. What does Usage and Free memory read??

It's not uncommon for me to open close to 20 tabs and I only have 4 gig of memory.

Something is not adding up right here.
Click to expand...
Yeah....Like Ive said a million times over. Ive frequently run some pretty insane amounts of programs with like 30 tabs open. Never had the thing freeze on me once..and yes I have 4GB of RAM..
 
Reading your top post, it kind of sounds to me like it may be SSD stuttering. What kind of kingston drive is it? Was it a cheaper model? Check that model number online, see if other people reported any issues. Maybe run some benchmarks see if random read/writes are consistent. When SSDs first appeared, the models with the cheaper flaky controller chips with stuttering issues. They would freeze up and beachball every once in a while. That's why I opted for a more expensive intel model.

You've got 8GB and i5, I don't think any naturally occurring amount of tabs should ever slow you down.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back