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Safari eating more than 1GB of RAM

N

Nobita

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 5, 2008
425
2
La la land
I switched to Chrome a few months back, but decided to switch back to safari...

Updated Flash player, installed clickToFlash, installed youTube5 extension. I'm only opening three tabs without Flash and without any videos and without any funky javascripts. How come it's eating up 1.3GB of RAM? It reminds me of why I switched to Chrome...

Screen%20shot%202011-03-01%20at%206.40.38%20PM.png


Any ideas?
 
I did the same thing. Tried going back to Safari yesterday (must have caught the apple fever, after the iPad event) but 1 hour later, i was back to Chrome.

Safari was using 1,05 gb of ram, and got considerably slower over time, even though i have 8 gb of ram in my MBP. In the end i had 2 open tabs, and no flash playing. I had a few extensions installed, but i removed them and the problem persists.

I don't think there is anything one can do, as it is well known that Safari is a big memory hog. I've personally decided to give Safari another go when Lion comes out, but until then it's Chrome for me
 
Do I ever feel your pain. I've always felt like Safari was very RAM hungry, but lately it has been particularly bad! I don't know what the culprit is, but it just keeps going up and up until I relaunch it, then it starts over again.

I don't know how long it's been since I last restarted Safari (someone should make an `uptime` for Safari, haha), but it's currently using 3.30GB RAM according to iStat!!!

I have 7 windows open with 35 tabs, which I will admit is a fairly large amount, but honestly, that's nothing for me - and should be nothing for this computer with 8GB RAM, Core 2 Duo, SSD, modern OS, etc. I've frequently been fine with ~1GB RAM usage with closer to 70-80 tabs open.

I've started to Google this a little tonight - no solid leads yet - but one obvious contender would be 1 or more extensions that I'm using.

If anyone comes up with anything, let us know.
 
This is typical of Safari. The more RAM you have the more it will consume. I have 16GB RAM in my iMac and just before the OS/X update yesterday, Safari was using over 2.5GB of RAM. Right now it's at 1.17GB. Plus I usually only have 2-3 tabs open consistently.

It eats all the RAM as it downloads pages and stuff in the background to improve speed and performance.

If it's eating too much, just Command +Q and it will clear the RAM and then open it again.

EDIT:

Here are a couple previous threads regarding this.

Safari killing me with memory usage

Safari uses 700mb of memory
 
revenent said:
That is strange. My Safari is showing 378.3MB....
Click to expand...

I'm getting similar results. 327.9MB.

Granted, I've only got this page and facebook open, but still. Unless you have hundreds of tabs open, it doesn't look like it should be a huge problem. Who keeps more than 10 tabs open at one time anyway?
 
For me it varies. On most occasions, it'll stay in the 300-400 MB range but when I start opening tabs with media, I've seen it jump past 1 GB. I thought this was normal because once I quit, all the RAM becomes free. Never seen it as a problem w/ 4GB of RAM

(Monitored with iStat menus).
 
I have to quit Safari every so often as it does seem to accumulate RAM over time; Firefox is just as bad (if not worse). Presumably they're caching everything they come across and not letting go in order to try and win the browser-performance pissing contest we seem to have arrived at.
 
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