Safari's RAM use is horrendous

[andymac2210]

I've been sitting watching safari's RAM usage tick gradually up for the last 2 minutes, 915.5...915.6...915.7 and so on.


I just upgraded to 8Gb of ram yesterday and frankly I'm glad I did - you NEED it with Lion if you're going to run safari.

This has got to be some sort of memory leak.

 

[JasonHB]

It is pretty awful.

I use a MacBook Pro and this issue has seriously destroyed my battery life.

The RAM usage rockets up when you scroll and my battery performance has reduced by more than half.

The major concern that I have is my battery condition as a result - it has gone from 94% down to 86% since installing Lion and my cycle count is flying up as I am having to charge it all of the time.

This is very disappointing.

Jason

 

[marc11]

Firefox with BTT and Maximizer you can have full screen as well as all the gestures (and more, like swipe between tabs) same as Safari. Doesn't fix Safari, but a viable alternative.

I would prefer they fix Safari, but for now I had to go back to Firefox, kept pissing me off that every once in a while extensions, like Omnibar would just become removed for no reason and require reinstalling. Not to mention to occasional BRUTAL scrolling performance, automatic zooming for unknown reasons and crashing. So for now,　Firefox is a better solution, less memory use, lower temps when using flash (why I do not know) and pretty solid performance. Like I said with BTT you can have all the Safari gestures.

 

[soloer]

I had to move away from Safari a couple days ago. Between the two safari processes, it was consuming like 2.5GB of my 4GB of RAM (2GB for safari web content). I had a few extensions, but not many. With the beta of Firefox 7, I don't think I've seen higher than 800Mb or so. I'll try Safari out with each patch to see if it's improved, but I'm thinking I'll be stuck with Firefox (or Chrome) until I get a new machine that can handle more memory.

 

[Segun]

My Safari on MBP 15" 2011 used 500mb for both processes. That is with lion too.

 

[tootall]

Is this a specific memory management problem for laptops?

My iMac shows that safari is only using about 215 Megs of memory (and I have about 10 tabs open)?

 

[paulsalter]

mine does the same, I can watch it in activity monitor just going up

usually gets to about 530MB then lowers itself to 470MB and repeat, if i stop using machine for a few mins it gets better at releasing more ram

for me it looks Java related, its the Apple Discussions forums that causes my RAM to shoot up (think this uses lots of Java as site doesnt work well if i disable it)

.1 release has been a big improvement for me, with .0 it would eat up all the available ram and then start paging out, doesnt do this now