Pinned Tabs Eating RAM

[Flow39]

Is it normal to have pinned tabs eating up so much RAM. The other day I had a bunch of apps open across 4 desktops and I noticed my computer was running slowly, so I went and checked Activity Monitor, and my pinned tabs each were using 250 MB! Is this normal to have tabs eating this much RAM?

I have a screenshot from just a minute ago, showing what I mean. These are not as bad as they were, but they are still almost at the top of the list.

 

[pastrychef]

I see the similar amounts of RAM usage.

 

[NoBoMac]

Not just pinned tabs, but any open tab will consume about that much memory, at minimum. With sandboxing in browsers, you get a separate process to run the specific tab/window in. So, you get basically a clone of the main browser process and all the extra stuff that comes (Flash, graphics, text, Java, etc) with a given webpage. And the more you're on the interwebs, the more RAM gets consumed, for the tab/window/process.

Have not looked closely in a while, but, Safari does use a fair bit of RAM during the course of a day.

Should see in Activity Monitor a "Safari" process and per the provided screen grab, a process for each tab/window open.

 

[xmichaelp]

I've never understood why webpages consume so much memory. I have some NY Times articles open right now and they're using over 300MB of RAM. Why? They probably only take a MB or so to download.

 

[pastrychef]

Everything seems to be very RAM hungry nowadays. Which is why, personally, I consider 8GB of RAM the very minimum needed on my systems.

 

[NoBoMac]

Just to show how much an open tab/window in a browser is, my homepage is a blank page. And even that chews up 130