Safari killing me with memory usage

[samh]

OK. I tend to start Safari in the morning and open a tab for my email (Google hosted on my own domain). Throughout the day, I open and close other tabs and Safari windows but it's not uncommon to go very logn stretches without closing Safari outright. Lately I've noticed that Safari seems to be eating up a lot more memory than reporting in Activity Monitor.

Today, Safari claimed to be using a few hundred MB. But I was completely out of Free Memory (down to 14 MB) without much else going on. I close Safari and BAM. 2.4 GB free.

I had walked away from the computer and Time Machine had started a backup. The machine was unusable for ten minutes while I force quit safari and listened all the page in/out going on. I thought my HDD was going to explode.

My usage of safari hasn't changed much in the last six months but this problem seems worse over the last few weeks. Any suggestions?

 

[bmcgonag]

OK. I tend to start Safari in the morning and open a tab for my email (Google hosted on my own domain). Throughout the day, I open and close other tabs and Safari windows but it's not uncommon to go very logn stretches without closing Safari outright. Lately I've noticed that Safari seems to be eating up a lot more memory than reporting in Activity Monitor.

Today, Safari claimed to be using a few hundred MB. But I was completely out of Free Memory (down to 14 MB) without much else going on. I close Safari and BAM. 2.4 GB free.

I had walked away from the computer and Time Machine had started a backup. The machine was unusable for ten minutes while I force quit safari and listened all the page in/out going on. I thought my HDD was going to explode.

My usage of safari hasn't changed much in the last six months but this problem seems worse over the last few weeks. Any suggestions?

You can try a different browser like Camino, Firefox, Chrome, Opera...see if those are better on memory usage.

You can also try iFreeMem, a little utility that helps free up memory that's not really being used.

Hope that helps some..you could possibly uninstall and reinstall safari as well. Not sure how integrated in to OS X it is though.

 

[samh]

You can try a different browser like Camino, Firefox, Chrome, Opera...see if those are better on memory usage.

You can also try iFreeMem, a little utility that helps free up memory that's not really being used.

Hope that helps some..you could possibly uninstall and reinstall safari as well. Not sure how integrated in to OS X it is though.

Closing safari and reopening releases the memory. I also use Firefox and Chrome for specific purposes, but I like Safari as my default go-to browser. Chrome has, for me, been the most unstable and FF the most sluggish (and I don't care for the UI, either).

I just don't feel like I should have to restart my browser every so many minutes or hours just becaus eI have gmail open.

 

[Morley7]

I usually restart safari about once a day on average. Although its not really because I need to. If I keep it open all day it ends up using about 300-500 MB of RAM. I don't think I have ever seen it above 7-800. My suggestion is to try Click to Flash.

 

[Morod]

Could you set up your email account through the Mail app so you don't have to leave a browser open to it all day?

 

[smirk]

Any chance you have some Safari extensions installed that could be eating up your RAM?

 

[samh]

Any chance you have some Safari extensions installed that could be eating up your RAM?

None are listed under "Extensions."

 

[smirk]

Like someone else mentioned, maybe it's a Flash issue. You could install Click to Flash to see if your memory usage drops, and maybe visit Adobe's site to insure you're running the latest version of Flash, just in case.

 

[mulo]

safari, like any other app, keeps a cache of usage since last launch in ram for quick access should you go back to any of these sites. this memory is listed as inactive and will be dropped should you open other apps that need the space.

 

[samh]

safari, like any other app, keeps a cache of usage since last launch in ram for quick access should you go back to any of these sites. this memory is listed as inactive and will be dropped should you open other apps that need the space.

That's fine in theory, but that's not what has been happening on a few occasions over the last two-three weeks. I updated to Flash 10.2 yesterday so I guess we'll see what happens with that.