Safari 3 - Major memory leak?

[Eluzion]

I love using Safari 3 (in Leopard) but I've been experiencing a major memory leak with it. After Safari 3 has been open for a while, the physical memory usage will be 500+ mb! I've ran Camino for the same amount of time with just as many, if not more windows open and the physical memory usage never exceeds 150mb.

I did some searching around on Google and noticed there were some known memory leak issues in the past, but I couldn't find anything recent. I'm just curious if anyone else is experiencing these memory leaks as well? Something is obviously causing it, I just hope maybe some way we can find what it is and get it fixed. Safari 3 is an awesome browser but the memory leak is pretty bad.

 

[Jeremy1026]

I love using Safari 3 (in Leopard) but I've been experiencing a major memory leak with it. After Safari 3 has been open for a while, the physical memory usage will be 500+ mb! I've ran Camino for the same amount of time with just as many, if not more windows open and the physical memory usage never exceeds 150mb.

I did some searching around on Google and noticed there were some known memory leak issues in the past, but I couldn't find anything recent. I'm just curious if anyone else is experiencing these memory leaks as well? Something is obviously causing it, I just hope maybe some way we can find what it is and get it fixed. Safari 3 is an awesome browser but the memory leak is pretty bad.

I am currently having the same problem, I hbe to close out safari every couple hours to keep its memory usage down.

 

[ntrigue]

What's the best way to experiment and contribute? Use for a few hours without quitting and open Activity Monitor?

 

[thenewguy]

I've experienced something similar - but not in memory, in CPU usage. This was in tiger as well, and I would find that if I had Safari (or Firefox for that matter) open for more than an hour or 2 it would start using 50% of my cpu. Sometimes if I close certain sites like Gizmodo or Digg, it would stop.

 

[Eluzion]

I don't know what it is but I've just been monitoring the activity monitor for the past few hours while using Safari while doing some research and the physical memory usage just climbs, and climbs... right now I'm sitting at 300mb.

 

[Eluzion]

Can anyone figure out what's wrong with this picture?

Ridiculous.

"Just use another browser", right? I do, Camino, but I prefer Safari (much faster imo). But with memory leaks like this...

 

[KurtangleTN]

I have the same problem, it seems to constantly use 80+ Mb of ram and if I have a couple of windows open its near 120-150mbs constantly. It's frustrating but until other browsers are more Leopardy I'll stick with it.

 

[akadmon]

I have 6 MB RAM in my Mac Pro and I don't give a rat's ass about a few spilled drops of this kitten's milk

 

[Eluzion]

I have the same problem, it seems to constantly use 80+ Mb of ram and if I have a couple of windows open its near 120-150mbs constantly. It's frustrating but until other browsers are more Leopardy I'll stick with it.

I only had three windows open for about an hour and it got that high. It eventually got up to 860mb so I restarted the browser again. Certain things cause the memory leaks but exactly what they are, I have no clue.

akadom - that's great that your MacPro has 6MB of RAM. I hope you didn't pay too much for a computer with 6MB of RAM. (I'm sure you meant GB)

Regardless of how much RAM you have, it's a huge flaw in the browser. It's not not a few "spilled drops" either. A web browser should never be using 800mb+ of physical memory, let alone 500mb, or even 300mb. Camino, at most, has reached 200mb for me and that was with 2 windows open with almost 9 tabs each.

Safari should be able to print money for that much memory use... ;P

 

[mshepherd]

i got 4gb ram in my macbook and never notice anything

 

[yellow]

Again, I cannot recreate your memory hogging experience.

Are you using any 3rd party plug-ins that might be the contributing factor?

 

[DoFoT9]

I have 6 MB RAM in my Mac Pro and I don't give a rat's ass about a few spilled drops of this kitten's milk

wow good to see u put the massive investment into that 6MB of RAM!!!!

 

[plinden]

Is it a "memory leak" or just using what free memory it can? Is "Wired" memory high or is it just "Used" memory? Remember, unused memory is wasted memory.

When it reaches 860MB usage and you use another memory intensive app (e.g. rip a DVD using Handbrake) how does its memory usage change? Do you see lots of Page Outs?

 

[Eluzion]

Again, I cannot recreate your memory hogging experience.

Are you using any 3rd party plug-ins that might be the contributing factor?

No third party plug-ins what so ever.

 

[Eluzion]

Is it a "memory leak" or just using what free memory it can? Is "Wired" memory high or is it just "Used" memory? Remember, unused memory is wasted memory.

When it reaches 860MB usage and you use another memory intensive app (e.g. rip a DVD using Handbrake) how does its memory usage change? Do you see lots of Page Outs?

It is physical memory (active), not cached memory. When I try to use another memory intense program (VMWare Fusion for example), it errors and will not run because it cannot allocate 512MB to virtualize. I know what you mean about unused memory is wasted memory (like Windows Vista's superfetch, OS X has it's "wired" memory that is RAM that isn't actively being used by cached for whatever program needs it). This is not the case with Safari.

 

[shinji]

Same problem here, though that's always been an issue. I find it gets unwieldy around 600-700 mb of RAM.

Ironically, Firefox is using even less when open for the same amount of time with the same amount of tabs.

I would switch to Camino in a heart beat if it had decent ad-blocking like adblock plus.

 

[Eluzion]

It was an issue for me in Tiger as well but it usually capped out at about 500mb (which is still a ton). In Tiger, Safari also caused a 90-100% CPU usage when viewing flash stuff. That problem went away for me in Leopard with Safari but I still have this memory leak issue that has climbed as high as 800mb+, as mentioned before.

I don't know what it is either. I keep and eye on the activity monitor and it's not like a certain website makes it jump up real quick in memory usage. It just gradually increases, and increases, and increases... and seems to never stop. I bet I could get it over 1gb of physical memory usage.

 

[Mydel]

Yeah same here. I've just checked. Im now on MBP 2.4 with 4Gb RAM and have safari open for the last 5-6h and it reached 780Mb in activity monitor. When looked first time few hours ago it was 230Mb.
I use only safari but lately have some problems. For example safari just refuse to download files from my bank ( Im having "no response from the server" error), but both Camino and FF has no problem whatsoever. Also from 10.5.1 update some pages doesn't want to load, need to reload them to make them work. haven't notice that before.
No plugins installed

 

[akadmon]

wow good to see u put the massive investment into that 6MB of RAM!!!!

Yeah, I just bought some plastic lawn gnomes for my $7MM beach house

 

[lil'homunculus]

Using TinkerTool you can enable the 'Debug' menu in safari. In that menu you have the option to 'disable the webcore caches' and "Always check for world leaks". I often have 20 to 30 tabs/windows open. Once in a blue moon she slows down, depending how 'graphics intensive' or how stupid the original web page design(er) is...
cheers.

 

[shinji]

Using TinkerTool you can enable the 'Debug' menu in safari. In that menu you have the option to 'disable the webcore caches' and "Always check for world leaks". I often have 20 to 30 tabs/windows open. Once in a blue moon she slows down, depending how 'graphics intensive' or how stupid the original web page design(er) is...
cheers.

Interesting, and that cuts down the RAM it eats up?

 

[Foxglove9]

Memory was a problem for me even in Tiger, as soon as it got big enough it would just crash the program. Then when I reloaded it, it would be frozen for a good 5 minutes while I hear the hard drive spinning reckless with what I assume is it clearing its cache.

Safari 3 doesn't crash as much, but eats up even more ram now! I'm getting the same huge numbers as everyone else. I thought all browsers behaved that way.

 

[shinji]

I've tried switching to Opera which has come a looooong way but the interface pisses me off each time I try to get used to it.

 

[DoFoT9]

Yeah, I just bought some plastic lawn gnomes for my $7MM beach house

care to donate a bit to the poor

ive never really had a massive memry leak with safari... its never really above 200mb-300mb.. i just think that it is normal, apple does what they want to do with their coding. if they wanted to use less amounts of memory then they would.

 

[lord patton]

Same here. It went up to 400-500 MB when I had 20 or so tabs open. But later in the day (after quitting and relaunching) I noticed it again at 400 with just one window open.