Safari just eats too much Ram!

[mohammad]

Over the past years I've been using Firefox on my MacbookPro.. but since I reinstalled my Mac OS Snow Leopard 2 months ago I decided to be more loyal to Apple and started using Safari instead.

But the experience has been somewhat disappointing mainly that Safari just eats too much Ram over time (2GB or more) and gets slow at some points.. I have to say that I usually don't reboot my machine for days/weeks and don't have the tendency to close Safari and re-open it from time to time.. but since it gets slow I have to restart Safari once every 1-2 days.

My usage profile from the Firefox days has not changed a bit.. but the overall experience I had with Firefox was never like this? Does anyone else experience the same?

 

[mattia]

I run FireFox, but that also can fairly easily eat up a gig or two of RAM if I've got several windows and a couple dozen tabs open (= standard forum browsing mode for me, one tab per thread). But if FireFox worked better for you, why stick with Safari?

 

[S.B.G]

Wow, 2GB or more RAM used for Safari! I'm a similar user to you, but I only average about 3 tabs open consistently. Right now I am up to 286MB of RAM used for Safari. But I have never seen it over 500MB. Currently I haven't restarted my MBP for 5 days and usually goes a lot longer than that.

 

[Hellhammer]

If you want very RAM friendly browser, try Chrome. I read yesterday that it treats every tab as its own process so when you close the tab, it releases the RAM too. Safari doesn't do that and the only way to release the RAM used by Safari is to relaunch it.

When I did some testing, Chrome never used more than 300MB of RAM, yet it was very fast. I relaunched Safari about 10 minutes ago as it crashed and it's already using 470MB of RAM.

 

[S.B.G]

Safari hogging RAM might be Apple's key to making it super fast. I wonder if Google has a patent on Chrome's individual process per tab feature. It would be nice for Safari to have that too.

I think part of the Safari RAM issue is the Top Sites feature. I think it downloads the sites in the background and holds them in RAM for quicker launch. I also notice that ads are displayed on pages when viewing them in Top Sites. So there is more RAM usage there. The ads go away when launching the site due to adblock.

 

[daneoni]

Can't say i have/noticed this issue

*shrug*

 

[S.B.G]

I upgraded my iMac to 6GB RAM which topped it off for this build and Safari now hovers just under 600MB used. When I had 4GB RAM it always hovered under 500MB used.

Funny how when the system gets more RAM, Safari uses more.

 

[pier]

Yeah try chrome. It's damn ugly but very lightweight and fast.