problematic/ok Safari extensions

[benzslrpee]

just got a new machine less than a day ago, fired up Safari + extensions and it hogged 1 gig of ram in 30 min. since Apple doesn't let users rate extensions i figured i'd search here, but aside from adblock, no others seemed to be mentioned. so here's what i've figured out so far:

causes memory leaks... at least for me:
- AdBlock... this one is pretty ridiculous, with only Safari running (on TechCrunch), it ate up 500 mb all by itself
- Ultimate Status Bar... same as above, it just sat there eating ram for no apparent reason

can't figure out:
- Ghostery... sometimes it seems ok, other times it's like AdBlock
- Click to Flash... seems mostly ok

should be ok:
- The Tracktor
- A Cleaner YouTube
- Awesome Screenshot
- Snipe
- Facebook Cleaner
- QuickNuke
- ShowPass

 

[werehamster]

- Ultimate Status Bar... same as above, it just sat there eating ram for no apparent reason

Hi benzslrpee,

This is my first time on your forums here at MacRumors (so be gentle with me).

I'm the developer of the Ultimate Status Bar extension. I've had one other report of high memory usage, but have been unable to recreate the issue with any version of Safari > 5.0.2 (windows). There were some reports of high usage with older versions of Safari (5.0.1) but these appear to have been fixed.

Can you recreate the problem when USB is the only extension that is installed? If so then does disabling any of the options prevent it from happening?

Also what version of Safari and MacOS are you running?

Thanks,

 

[benzslrpee]

hey no prob. this is by far, not a scientific way of testing but i used the 5 websites i visited the most (Facebook, MacRumors [this thread], asymco, Engagdget, TechCrunch) and only USB extension running.

once these pages are loaded, i'll scroll up and down on each to make sure all the crappy flash ads are loaded. when Safari's extensions function is turned off, Safari will hover around ~250 MB of ram. with USB enabled, Safari will slow down around 430 MB and then inch towards 480 MB about 10 min later. i didn't really stick around to see how high it would go.

as for disabling USB options, the only performance difference i could distinguish was between all enabled or all disabled. when all enabled, Safari's ram usage climbed faster than when it was all disabled. again... this was just my observation.

i'm running Safari 5.0.4 on OSX 10.6.6

 

[werehamster]

USB works by adding an extra frame to the page, and displaying all the USB info inside that frame. This prevents the current page from accessing the USB frame and a bunch of other things. It sounds like Safari is not releasing the memory used when a page is unloaded. This might explain why the memory usage appears to double when USB is enabled. But this is only a guess at this stage.

as for disabling USB options, the only performance difference i could distinguish was between all enabled or all disabled. when all enabled, Safari's ram usage climbed faster than when it was all disabled. again... this was just my observation.

So you can enable a bunch of options and the memory doesn't increase, but when you enable all the options only then does it increase? Or is it more a case of each option making a slight increase in the speed of the memory usage.

Sorry, tracking down memory issues can be a huge pain in a multiprocess environment. If I can recreate the problem then I have a reasonable chance of tracking down exactly what's causing it and fixing it. But I get the feeling that it might not be possible in this case.