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Safari is using close to 700MB ?! Why ?

LevMac

LevMac

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Feb 23, 2008
413
2
QLD, Australia
Hey guys,

Since updating to Lion, with only Safari open on my Mac, I checked through Activity Monitor, and its running around 700-800 MB with Safari and Safari Web Content combined, why is this ?!

How do I go about making it use less memory ? Never used to do this in Snow Leopard ?
 
It sometimes uses over 2GB on my iMac with 4GB of RAM. It looks like Safari uses more RAM in Lion but there isn't really a way to reduce the RAM load. Personally I use Chrome which is better IMO.

If you don't experience slow downs, then the heavy RAM load isn't harmful.
 
two answers for you


1/ don't use it :D


are you running out of ram if no then do not worry about it , ram is there to be used not kept for a rainy day like savings the same goes for CPU usage :apple:
 
Yeah, there's definitely some kind of memory leak, specifically with the "Safari Web Content" process that needs to be addressed soon.
 
My Air only has 2 gigs of ram and Safari quickly eats up all of that and then moves on to my HD. A day or two of normal web usage in Safari leads to a loss of about 4-6 gigs of my HD space. If this is "normal" for Safari, then it's perhaps the worst browser on the market. This has to be a bug of some kind, which I hope eventually gets fixed. Until then, I'm going exclusively with Canary.
 
I had the same issue in Snow Leopard. Safari just hogs ram and keeps collecting it every time you visit a new page. It doesn't seem to dump the unused ram unless you quit the application.
 
saxon48 said:
Yeah, there's definitely some kind of memory leak, specifically with the "Safari Web Content" process that needs to be addressed soon.
Click to expand...

I would actually be more worried about the main Safari process taking up and holding on to a lot of RAM. The Web content process gets terminated automatically anyway, whenever there have been no more Safari windows open for a short while.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A5274d Safari/7534.48.3)

Safari 5.1 is horrible!!!

Firefox is still getting worked on. I saw a lot of critical tickets for Lion. They are working on releasing Firefix 6.
 
nfl46 said:
Safari 5.1 is horrible!!!
Click to expand...

I disagree. It's superfast, scrolling to go back and forward is intuitive and allows you to rapidly switch between pages in your history, zooming into a page couldn't be easier or more delightful, the Reading List function is useful, although I still prefer Instapaper, and it releases most of its memory after you've closed your windows. Whenever you feel Safari or other apps slowing down due to memory usage, just restart Safari and you're back exactly where you were thanks to Resume.
 
tkermit said:
I disagree. It's superfast, scrolling to go back and forward is intuitive and allows you to rapidly switch between pages in your history, zooming into a page couldn't be easier or more delightful, the Reading List function is useful, although I still prefer Instapaper, and it releases most of its memory after you've closed your windows. Whenever you feel Safari or other apps slowing down due to memory usage, just restart Safari and you're back exactly where you were thanks to Resume.
Click to expand...

Or just use a real browser coded by people that know what they're doing. A browser that devours your ram and then moves on to your HD is not a good browser.
 
CapnJackGig said:
Or just use a real browser coded by people that know what they're doing. A browser that devours your ram and then moves on to your HD is not a good browser.
Click to expand...

And which browser would that be? I'm pretty sure the Safari guys know what they're doing. With Google Chrome separating its tabs out into distinct processes, it actually takes up more RAM for me. Of course it gets freed again when you close the tabs, but that's easy when you terminate a process, Safari does the same thing once you close all windows.
 
LevMac said:
Hey guys,

Since updating to Lion, with only Safari open on my Mac, I checked through Activity Monitor, and its running around 700-800 MB with Safari and Safari Web Content combined, why is this ?!

How do I go about making it use less memory ? Never used to do this in Snow Leopard ?
Click to expand...

Just checked, my Safari 5.1 on 10.6.8 uses 95mb, plus 152mb web content 6 tabs open.

Camino, my usual browser is using 392mb 1 tab, this one.
I often have 70+ tabs open in Camino, ok but a bit slow closing windows.
I Bookmark all, quit, re-open, then open say 20 BM's at a time regains speed.

Not measured mb used in that state.
 
Quit App and Launch it again. You don't lose that much time. Although I have 8 GB of RAM, when Safari start using much RAM, I restart app.
 
I get the memory leak problem as well. The Safari Web Content process RAM usage creeps up and up when Safari is just sitting there.
 
I had this issue but in fact it was adblock that was causing the safari web content process to balloon. I uninstalled adblock, and instead installed clicktoflash and gimmerblock and now everything is running the way it's supposed to.
 
tkermit said:
The posted number is meaningless when we don't know how many windows and tabs have been opened on that system :confused:
Click to expand...

For me it's 1 browser, 1 tab. It eats whatever remaining RAM is available and then goes on to devour the HD, and as it does so the browser becomes more and more sluggish. This is not how you competently code a browser. Name another browser that does this. I can't think of one. I'd like to be using Safari and its new two-finger swipes/animations, but its' so shoddy in design that I can't. So it's back to Canary for me and hopefully Google will show once again why theirs is the vastly superior product.
 
CapnJackGig said:
For me it's 1 browser, 1 tab. It eats whatever remaining RAM is available and then goes on to devour the HD, and as it does so the browser becomes more and more sluggish.
Click to expand...

ok, that's bad and shouldn't happen. My suggestion remains though, to make sure you have closed all of your Safari windows from time to time, so Safari can terminate its web content process. Or do you have the same problem with Safari's main process?
 
Im currently using Safari 5.1 and while the new features are nice it uses more RAM than before.

Still waiting for a Lion compatible Chrome update
 
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