Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
care to donate a bit to the poor :rolleyes:

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.

Haha. It's not normal, it's a problem. I love when people try to justify everything from Apple. Surely Apple would never have any flaws in their software. ;) It was a widely known problem back in 2004-2005 if I'm not mistaken. I found some articles from the webkit website asking for people to run a debugger and try to isolate memory leaks to specific issues. I'm guessing they fixed a few but there's obviously still some issues left.

Also, I always delete my history every couple of days.
 
Well, I'm running the latest nightly build of Webkit so we'll see how this goes. So far it seems to use far less memory. For those that don't know, Webkit is the rendering engine Safari uses (Firefox uses Gecko). You can get it from here http://webkit.org/

When you download it and run it, it's basically a tiny launcher program that points Safari to the latest Webkit and runs it.
 
No third party plug-ins what so ever.

You have Flash turned off/removed? At one time Flash was notorious for its memory leak and remember, a lot of sites use Flash for their banners so you're running into it all the time even if you don't plan on it.
 
Nah, I have flash on and I need it. I know someone submitted a bug to the Webkit guys about flash causing memory leaks though.

I'm running the latest nightly build of Webkit for the past few hours and my physical memory usage is sitting at 183mb. Usually it would be over 200-300mb by now so things are looking good.
 
Haha. It's not normal, it's a problem. I love when people try to justify everything from Apple. Surely Apple would never have any flaws in their software. ;) It was a widely known problem back in 2004-2005 if I'm not mistaken. I found some articles from the webkit website asking for people to run a debugger and try to isolate memory leaks to specific issues. I'm guessing they fixed a few but there's obviously still some issues left.

Also, I always delete my history every couple of days.

lol ok fair enuf.. so maybe they do have a problem. fair enough just look at M$, they are one big problem :p.

i dont think ive ever deleted my history in the 14months that ive had my computer....and it works fine for me.
 
I am having this same issue as well

This is on an iMac, Leopard, 4GB memory. I normally only run between 6-10 open tabs and right now Real Memory is up to 346MB and Virtual at 1.43GB - if I don't reboot or shut down Safari it will continue to grow.

I only noticed last week when Safari started running a little more slowly. I checked Activity Monitor and it was over 800MB then. Definitely seems to be an issue.

I actually am seeing the same thing with Dashboard, although not as severe. It generally start around 60MB but grows about 10MB a day...the other day all widgets had actually locked up and I had to force quit the dashboard and reload them to get them to work again.

:(
 
Glad I saw this thread, have had safari opened for about 3 hours. Used it to DL a 800mb file, and then left it going. I have inquisitor installed, thats it.
Im up to 880mb! pretty annoying.
 

Attachments

  • Picture 4.png
    Picture 4.png
    154.4 KB · Views: 155
Well, running the latest Webkit didn't fix it. Physical memory usage still grows beyond 800mb+

I noticed iTunes also grows quite a bit. When I first open it, it's only 40-50mb of physical memory usage. After being on for a few days I see it hovering at 130mb+

iTunes isn't a huge deal but still, the applications should be "cleaning up" after themselves. I'm no programmer but I do know Safari shouldn't be using 800mb+ just to display a few websites. Hopefully Apple knows about the problem...
 
Well, running the latest Webkit didn't fix it. Physical memory usage still grows beyond 800mb+

I noticed iTunes also grows quite a bit. When I first open it, it's only 40-50mb of physical memory usage. After being on for a few days I see it hovering at 130mb+

iTunes isn't a huge deal but still, the applications should be "cleaning up" after themselves. I'm no programmer but I do know Safari shouldn't be using 800mb+ just to display a few websites. Hopefully Apple knows about the problem...

come on u cant be serious.....
of course its going to go up in size after that amount of time. it caches everything.

have u tried turning things off?? what about resetting safari? that always works
 
That's nothing!

I had this ridiculous memory leak a few weeks ago running Safari 2. Noticed that my MBP with 4GB of RAM was being rather sluggish, pulled up Activity Monitor to discover that my memory usage was almost 17 million terabytes! :confused: :eek: :confused: :eek: And look how it screwed up the column sorting!

View attachment 92529


...but notice: no page-outs :D
 
HOW THE $%^&!??!?!?!

I have no idea! I think at the time I had about 30+ tabs open across about 4 or 5 Safari windows. But still, wtf?!! I thought it were funny that such a high number totally screwed up the column sorting - I had to sort it ascending rather than descending to see Safari at the top of the list.
 
I have no idea! I think at the time I had about 30+ tabs open across about 4 or 5 Safari windows. But still, wtf?!! I thought it were funny that such a high number totally screwed up the column sorting - I had to sort it ascending rather than descending to see Safari at the top of the list.

hahaha 16million TB.... its so crazy. does the world even have that much storage??

are u sure your not google or something, but probably even they wouldnt have that much free space :p
 
hahaha 16million TB.... its so crazy. does the world even have that much storage??

are u sure your not google or something, but probably even they wouldnt have that much free space :p

Well it took 3 lemons before I got a fully-functioning MacBook Pro; I guess they gave me an ultra-special one, huh? :D
 
How much money did it cost you to buy 17 million terabytes of ram?! You must be a zillionaire!
 
come on u cant be serious.....
of course its going to go up in size after that amount of time. it caches everything.

have u tried turning things off?? what about resetting safari? that always works

That's funny, because no other browser has this issue. Obviously it caches files from websites (images, cookies, etc.), but not to your RAM. Again, it is not normal for Safari to be using 800mb+ of physical memory, period, dot. I don't understand why people try to argue this being normal.

And to answer your question, no, I don't turn things off. That's one of the beauty of OS X, stability.
 
That's funny, because no other browser has this issue. Obviously it caches files from websites (images, cookies, etc.), but not to your RAM. Again, it is not normal for Safari to be using 800mb+ of physical memory, period, dot. I don't understand why people try to argue this being normal.

And to answer your question, no, I don't turn things off. That's one of the beauty of OS X, stability.

ok yes, 800mb is a bit too much for memory. i will admit that. 100mb is a bit too much aswell.

i wonder if they will fix it?

btw i dont turn things off either, but my safari is only on 110mb....
 
ok yes, 800mb is a bit too much for memory. i will admit that. 100mb is a bit too much aswell.

i wonder if they will fix it?

btw i dont turn things off either, but my safari is only on 110mb....

800 is definitely too much. 100 is normal (the Safari cache will intentionally go up to 256MB depending on how much ram you have installed).

For those who are seeing an improvement in the nightlies (particularly very recently): do you use flash video sites much? youtube, etc...

The reason I ask is that there was an issue where flash videos would use huge amounts of ram and not give it back, which bdash fixed three days ago. I've noticed moderate improvements even when not using flash video simply due to the same fix applying to ads. This change reduced memory usage on one extreme test case from 400MB to 22MB.

As for whether they'll fix it, it's definitely a major focus. Recently I've been helping test some changes to the custom memory allocator they use that are specifically geared at making sure memory is given back to the system when not in use.

If any of you have a *small* set of pages that reliably trigger very large (>300MB or so) memory use in nightly builds newer than three days ago, please let me know. They would make a good test case.
 
800 is definitely too much. 100 is normal (the Safari cache will intentionally go up to 256MB depending on how much ram you have installed).

For those who are seeing an improvement in the nightlies (particularly very recently): do you use flash video sites much? youtube, etc...

The reason I ask is that there was an issue where flash videos would use huge amounts of ram and not give it back, which bdash fixed three days ago. I've noticed moderate improvements even when not using flash video simply due to the same fix applying to ads. This change reduced memory usage on one extreme test case from 400MB to 22MB.

As for whether they'll fix it, it's definitely a major focus. Recently I've been helping test some changes to the custom memory allocator they use that are specifically geared at making sure memory is given back to the system when not in use.

If any of you have a *small* set of pages that reliably trigger very large (>300MB or so) memory use in nightly builds newer than three days ago, please let me know. They would make a good test case.

Great to hear! I'll try the latest nighty build and see how it goes. Typically I do visit a lot of websites with flash, but it's random on how much memory usage Safari will be at. I'll check it out though. Thanks for the info.
 
It's been two days of using the latest nightly build from the 28th and I'm sitting at 468mb of physical memory usage. Normally, I'd be much higher than this so I have to say it's been a great improvement. I'm going to keep running it to see if I can get it up to that 800mb+ range again but I definitely think that flash memory leak was one of the major ones. My guess is there's probably another small one because 468mb is a bit high for a web browser. The highest I've ever seen Camino get is maybe 250mb.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.