Can you say memory pig? Safari eats 792MB for dinner!

[CristobalHuet]

I've always been aware of Safari's infernal memory leaks, but this time it reached a whole new level.

Running 4GB of RAM doing some routine sound cleaning in Sound Studio, Photoshop open, iTunes, Safari, iCal, Adium...the usual, and I'm shocked to see how sluggish my Mac is, it's never in the entire year I had it taken so long to perform regular tasks.

I fired up Activity Monitor and to my utter HORROR, under the colour palettes next to "Used:", there's a fugly number: 3.86 GB.


So I sort by Real Mem and there's our exotic friend Safari, towering above all else with a footprint of 792MB. Safari didn't even have 5 tabs open, let alone the number that SHOULD be required to reach such a high level of memory usage. There were 3 tabs open. Three. None of them flash or video heavy, just regular text websites/forums.

Rule to self: quitting Safari less than the number of times you bash Mac OS X , weekly, will cause severe repercussions. (aka I never quit it).

Running 10A411 and 4.0.3, in case anyone's wondering.

Just thought I'd share. Wish I had a screenshot before I quit Safari.

 

[miles01110]

I fired up Activity Monitor and to my utter HORROR, under the colour palettes next to "Used:", there's a fugly number: 3.86 GB.


So I sort by Virtual Memory and there's our exotic friend Safari, towering above all else with a footprint of 792MB.

Virtual memory is not the same thing as physical memory. You should have sorted by RSIZE.

 

[pbasser2]

Virtual memory is not the same thing as physical memory. You should have sorted by RSIZE.

can you explain? what is the difference and what is RSIZE? thanks.

 

[Jisuo]

I've experienced the same thing, I noticed things getting slow and fired up Activity Monitor and Safari was using over 1GB of (real) memory. 1 tab open, this forum. I had 5MB free RAM of 4GB.

That's when I changed back to Firefox. It stays around 150MB forever.

 

[CristobalHuet]

Virtual memory is not the same thing as physical memory. You should have sorted by RSIZE.

I meant real memory, I apologize.

 

[Steve-M]

Just for comparison
Safari 4.0.2 two tabs open
63.01 MB Real Memory size.
424.07 MB Virtual Memory size.

 

[dmorgan]

I have Safari 4 running with five tabs open.

According to Activity Monitor it's using 240.88 MB of real memory. I think you may have a problem?

 

[gamera~]

I recommend reading this article on memory in OS X, it's quite good and interesting.

 

[mackmgg]

Running 10A402 and 4.0.3, in case anyone's wondering.

Now THERES your problem. First, your using a BETA software, expect bugs. Second, its an OUTDATED beta software. Updated to the newest (two newer builds i believe, as one came out today)

 

[iMacmatician]

Just for comparison:

Safari 4 Public Beta (5528.16): 3 windows, 91 tabs, 505 MB real memory, 1.77 GB virtual memory.

I've never gotten anywhere near 792 MB (unless I open up a really big page in Safari).

 

[DoFoT9]

just for comparison..

41 tabs open in 5 seperate windows.

RSIZE: 629mb, 2.13GB VSIZE
UPTIME: 10d, 23hr

10.5.5, Safari Version 3.1.2 (5525.20.1)

it doesnt bother that its using up so much, OSX easily clears up RAM when it has to

 

[sammich]

Safari chews up memory over time. It really doesn't matter how many tabs you have open at the time, it does matter how many different sites you've loaded up since you started Safari.

Just quit/open Safari and hit 'History -> Reopen All Windows From Last Session'.

 

[sammich]

Well, I decided to make this little script for Safari. Just for the lazy people.

All it does is close Safari and reopen it with the pages you had from before. Plus a handy, if poorly implemented little message at the end of it all. This isn't the most elegant way to do it, but it's the best I can do with my knowledge of AS and google You'll need to open "Script Editor" (spotlight it), copy and paste the code below in, and then press run. You can save it as a standalone app from within Script Editor if you like.

Enjoy.

-- will only work with "Safari" and "Webkit"
set brwsr to "Safari"

set before_mem to -1
if my isRunning(brwsr) then
	set before_mem to my getProcMB(brwsr)
end if

tell application "System Events" to set open_apps to (get name of every application process)
if open_apps contains brwsr then
	tell application brwsr to activate
	tell application brwsr to quit
end if
tell application "System Events" to set open_apps to (get name of every application process)
set counter to 1
repeat while open_apps contains brwsr
	delay 0.3
	tell application "System Events" to set open_apps to (get name of every application process)
	set counter to (counter + 1)
	if (counter) is greater than 30 then
		display dialog "Safari is taking too long to close, script will end now"
		break
	end if
end repeat
tell application "System Events" to set open_apps to (get name of every application process)
tell application brwsr to activate

tell application brwsr to activate
tell application "System Events"
	tell process brwsr
		tell menu bar 1
			tell menu bar item "File"
				tell menu "File"
					click menu item "Close Window"
				end tell
			end tell
			delay 0.1
			tell menu bar item "History"
				tell menu "History"
					click menu item "Reopen All Windows from Last Session"
				end tell
			end tell
		end tell
	end tell
end tell

--
-- below is adapted from code by "NovaScotian" from http://forums.macosxhints.com/archive/index.php/t-64782.html
--

if my isRunning(brwsr) then
	set after_mem to my getProcMB(brwsr)
end if

if before_mem is not equal to -1 then
	tell application "Safari" to display dialog "You just freed up " & (before_mem - after_mem) & "MB of RAM. Nice work! :D"
end if
on isRunning(appName)
	tell application "System Events" to if exists process appName then return true
	return false
end isRunning

to getProcMB(procName) -- as string
	try
		return ((last word of (do shell script "/bin/ps -xc -o command,rss | grep " & procName)) as integer) / 1024 -- result of a division will be real
	end try
end getProcMB

 

[DoFoT9]

wow awsome script!! i might just steal it!! hope there are no bugs

 

[sammich]

wow awsome script!! i might just steal it!! hope there are no bugs

There shouldn't be any *fingers crossed*. EDIT: yeah I fixed and updated the code above with a few little tidbits.

Spread the word! (I'm thinking of making a thread about this, waddya say?)

 

[CristobalHuet]

Now THERES your problem. First, your using a BETA software, expect bugs. Second, its an OUTDATED beta software. Updated to the newest (two newer builds i believe, as one came out today)

On 10a421, was on 10a411 when the problem happened actually.

And yeah I expect bugs, but come on, that's just redonculous lol

 

[Jisuo]

Safari chews up memory over time. It really doesn't matter how many tabs you have open at the time, it does matter how many different sites you've loaded up since you started Safari.

Just quit/open Safari and hit 'History -> Reopen All Windows From Last Session'.

You don't have to restart Firefox, that's why I changed back after using Safari 4 since beta -> 4.0.1