Safari using 640MB of memory, Does Lion fix this

[sclawis300]

I have just about had it with Safari. I left a couple of windows open when I went to lunch and when I got back I was getting beach balls all over the place. Looked at the Activity Monitor and Safari was using 640MB of memory. Does Lion fix this????? Is there anything I can do?

 

[ratzzo]

While this might sound obvious, try switching to a different browser. Safari is known to beachball every now and then. If it is just hogging inactive memory you can terminal 'purge' which will wipe it all. I have however experienced a less 'hoggy' attitude going from SL to Lion regarding RAM usage. On SL I was always at 4GB easily without too many things open (5 tabs, itunes and some minor stuff like BetterTouchTool, Caffeine...). Now it's at like 3 GB with a few more things thrown in. I did upgrade to 8 GB because of this annoyance from SL

 

[sclawis300]

While this might sound obvious, try switching to a different browser. Safari is known to beachball every now and then. If it is just hogging inactive memory you can terminal 'purge' which will wipe it all. I have however experienced a less 'hoggy' attitude going from SL to Lion regarding RAM usage. On SL I was always at 4GB easily without too many things open (5 tabs, itunes and some minor stuff like BetterTouchTool, Caffeine...). Now it's at like 3 GB with a few more things thrown in. I did upgrade to 8 GB because of this annoyance from SL

I tried Chrome the other day and while the actual Chrome browser was only around 90MB it was running two Chrome renderers which were each over 100MB. Did not seem worth sticking with. I should say that Safari is not usually in the 600s. I will look up the terminal purge. Thanks.

 

[JRoDDz]

640mb? That's nothing.. check this thread out regarding how much Lion is using up 😀 https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1181523/

 

[RRmalvado]

What was Safari rendering in those two windows you left open?

How much do you think it should be using, in your scenario, with the two windows being open for your lunch period?

 

[ToastyX]

Looked at the Activity Monitor and Safari was using 640MB of memory. Does Lion fix this?????

No.

I tried Chrome the other day and while the actual Chrome browser was only around 90MB it was running two Chrome renderers which were each over 100MB. Did not seem worth sticking with. I should say that Safari is not usually in the 600s. I will look up the terminal purge. Thanks.

The difference is Chrome runs each tab in a separate process, so when you close a tab, the process quits and the memory gets freed.

Safari just keeps eating more and more memory and never stops. In Lion, they moved the renderer to a separate process, but it's still one process that continues to eat more and more memory.

 

[sclawis300]

What was Safari rendering in those two windows you left open?

How much do you think it should be using, in your scenario, with the two windows being open for your lunch period?

No clue but not that much. I think the big jump came when I was logged into a site using VPN.

No.


The difference is Chrome runs each tab in a separate process, so when you close a tab, the process quits and the memory gets freed.

Safari just keeps eating more and more memory and never stops. In Lion, they moved the renderer to a separate process, but it's still one process that continues to eat more and more memory.

That is very useful information. Maybe I will give Chrome another go. I use Safari's favorites screen all the time though. Does Chrome have something like that? (I think that is what it is called, when you can display the top X sites you visit and just quick launch them)