Safari Memory.

Safari has been notorious for using lots of memory recently. On Tiger, with Safari 3 and even Safari 2. That's one of the largest chunks of memory I've seen Safari take though. Interesting that they haven't fixed that in Leopard. I've asked about Safari on Leopard before but no one has answered. Now I have an answer. Good to know. The best thing to do is either quit Safari and reopen it every now and then or use another browser. Is that the memory usage upon openning or after a while of being open? It goes up after time.

 

Safari is a huge memory hog. Right now, mine's at 320mb. Thank goodness for the 4gb in the iMac.......

 

To be fair i think it is not confined to Safari, FF/Camino both do the same on my system as Safari or are in actual fact worse.

 

Safari and Camino for me both stick around 45MB real 250MB virtual, but after a few hours I've noticed Safari jump up to over 200MB real and over 1GB virtual! Not sure about Camino after some time. Also, Safari just quit unexpectedly for me a few minutes ago. This hasn't happened to Safari for months and months.

 

or looking at it another way

I watched my memory meter as I booted Safari and free memory went from 548 to 515; how do you get your numbers?

 

Activity monitor in Utilities

I just opened up all three and left them for 12 minutes all with multiple tabs and windows all on the same sites and well

 

Ouch! I don't have FF but both Safari and Camino are half of that at least for the first couple of hours after open. I wonder what's happening on your computer!

 

Yeah, that's what Safari looks like for me after several hours, sometimes even after a day. But dang! All of your apps are taking a ton of virtual memory. Besides the kernel_task at 1.02GB all the time, Safari has the highest virtual memory most of the time at around 260MB (sometimes tied with WindowServer). The rest of the processes are much, much less.

 

Thats Leopard, see here for one thread there are plenty others.

At one time my VM size was 105 GBs. It is usually in the 70-90GBs.

 

Safari seems to use a different amount of memory depending on how much total memory your system has. It seems that systems with more RAM tend to see Safari use a larger total amount of RAM than systems where RAM is scarce.