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Safari takes up WAY too much memory

BJB Productions

BJB Productions

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Nov 10, 2008
1,314
136
Hey guys,
Just wondering if there was any fix to this, or if anyone else has had this problem...

I'm running Snow Leopard, and Safari 4, of course. But Safari takes up about 3/4s (if not more) of my memory ALL THE TIME. Even when I just have one page open..It really slows down my computer...any fix to this?..anyone else experienced the same problem?

Thanks :)
 
The problem is that you are running Snow Leopard on 2 gig of ram. Snow Leopard alone will take up most of that and Safari is a memory hog. Your best bet would be to quit Safari entirely from time to time so that it will deallocate the memory and clear the caches. A fresh instance of Safari will use much less ram than one that has been open for a few days.
 
zachsilvey said:
The problem is that you are running Snow Leopard on 2 gig of ram. Snow Leopard alone will take up most of that and Safari is a memory hog. Your best bet would be to quit Safari entirely from time to time so that it will deallocate the memory and clear the caches. A fresh instance of Safari will use much less ram than one that has been open for a few days.
Click to expand...

Thank you for the help. I would like to upgrade ram sometime, but don't have the budget for it at the moment. I try to quit safari when I remember. I like safari because it seams to surf faster than Firefox, but I can't stand how much memory it hogs.
 
I have Firefox 3.3.5 and Safari 4 installed on both my Macs (running SL).

Safari 4 does seem to use more memory on average than FFX does, at least in my experience. (probably a tradeoff for it's fast performance).

To tell the truth, I've been very happy w/ FFX 3.3.5 and it runs beautifully on Snow Leopard. The customization is excellent (ie. Weave, Personas, Gears compatibility, etc.). It's my primary browser, Safari gets used only as a backup.
 
zachsilvey said:
You wouldn't see any improvement with Firefox anyway it is known for its issues with ram consumption.
Click to expand...

I've only seen the opposite on my mac with Safari going over 1GB often while Firefox never goes past 500MB (it's now at 150 MB with 6 tabs).
 
Jisuo said:
I've only seen the opposite on my mac with Safari going over 1GB often while Firefox never goes past 500MB (it's now at 150 MB with 6 tabs).
Click to expand...

Thats been my experience...But I like Safari's layout better.
 
JuanGuapo said:
I have Firefox 3.3.5 and Safari 4 installed on both my Macs (running SL).

Safari 4 does seem to use more memory on average than FFX does, at least in my experience. (probably a tradeoff for it's fast performance).

To tell the truth, I've been very happy w/ FFX 3.3.5 and it runs beautifully on Snow Leopard. The customization is excellent (ie. Weave, Personas, Gears compatibility, etc.). It's my primary browser, Safari gets used only as a backup.
Click to expand...

Jisuo said:
I've only seen the opposite on my mac with Safari going over 1GB often while Firefox never goes past 500MB (it's now at 150 MB with 6 tabs).
Click to expand...

You are right, FireFox's memory management has been improved. I personally use FF as my primary browser on OS X and Chrome on Windows. Although RAM really isn't an issue when I have 16 gb.
 
I had my safari take up to 1G ram on snow leopard too. With 4G I still feel the pressure of running out ram. It is really horrible.
 
nbnbxdnb said:
I had my safari take up to 1G ram on snow leopard too. With 4G I still feel the pressure of running out ram. It is really horrible.
Click to expand...

But I still love safari for its speed and graphic design. Hope somebody can figure out what the hell turns it into a hog. Currently, I turned off adblock extension and have activity monitor open constantly. Safari has been using quite reasonable amount of memory for about 1 hour so far. I have multiple pages open, hulu paused in back... I don't know if this somehow proves adblock eats up memory somehow.
 
celticpride678 said:
I'm afraid that's true. Chrome used to take up barely any RAM but it takes up way too much now.

Google needs to get their game together.
Click to expand...

Well, thats true, but also untrue at the same time.

Chrome launches several instances of itself for each page, so while each instance of Chrome takes little memory, put together they take up as much as Safari.

OTOH, for the same reason, when you close a page in Chrome, it deallocates that memory entirely. This is not true of Safari. My biggest issue with Safari is that I might close all windows after running safari for a few days, but it will still be hogging close to 2-3 GB of ram, since its not good at deallocating that memory.
 
Apps will expand to fill up free memory a fair bit. For example, two Macs of mine, both with Leopard, usually run at 75% of RAM being used. One has 512MB, one has 2GB.
 
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