Why is Safari Being Such a RAM Hog?

[HappyDude20]

I've attached a picture:

Normally on my Mac I have iCal, Safari, Mail, iTunes & OmniFocus always on (though not "open at login") and recently Safari has been an incredible RAM hog.

I've seen Safari at almost a 1GB of RAM and Mail at times close to 300MB's.

I'm wondering if it could be Safari Extensions or something, but in all honesty don't know. Any help is appreciated.

 

[iBug2]

It's not really particular to Safari. I've seen Safari use 3GB ram with 150 tabs open, I've also seen Firefox use 3GB ram with 100 tabs open.

 

[HappyDude20]

It's not really particular to Safari. I've seen Safari use 3GB ram with 150 tabs open, I've also seen Firefox use 3GB ram with 100 tabs open.

But i've had less than 5 tabs open. Never more than 10.

 

[SE30]

Yes! You are not the only one. I attached a screenshot that shows Safari with 5 wopping tabs active - five - that's right - numero Cinqo!

In the activity monitor window you will notice that Safari is consuming a measly 851 megs of RAM and 672 megs of VM.

Now that's a pretty efficient heap if I ever saw one!

I have an older machine (iMac 2.16 Core2Duo) with 2.5 gigs of RAM - running 10.6.7.

 

[karohan]

Safari sucks with RAM management for me. Then again, so does Chrome and Firefox.

 

[HappyDude20]

Safari sucks with RAM management for me. Then again, so does Chrome and Firefox.

Surely there must be a solution or way to manage this?

 

[chrono1081]

Ram is meant to be used. I'm not sure what the problem is here. The internet is chock full of media now-a-days so its not surprising that browsers use more ram. There is no "set amount" to how much ram a browser can use. If you have it, your system will utilize it to speed things up.

 

[Žalgiris]

Ram is meant to be used. I'm not sure what the problem is here. The internet is chock full of media now-a-days so its not surprising that browsers use more ram. There is no "set amount" to how much ram a browser can use. If you have it, your system will utilize it to speed things up.

Well the less it uses the better. Leaves more for other things, logical?

 

[MacStu09]

Safari used 3.1gb's of my ram before. Then I discovered there were other non-freezing/crashing/slow browsers. I've grown to hate firefox and safari. Chrome has been amazing the past 4 months for me. Not a hiccup or any other problem.

 

[iammike1]

Well the less it uses the better. Leaves more for other things, logical?

Unused memory is a waste of resources. What matters is not how much RAM is used total because the system will purposely use more RAM than it has to in order to speed up the system. If you then run a program that needs more memory than what is available the system will give up some of the memory it was using to speed things up.

Hope that makes sense. It's harder to write well when I'm typing on an iPhone. Lol

 

[chrono1081]

Well the less it uses the better. Leaves more for other things, logical?

Not really. Everyone gets too hung up on this stuff not realizing that many different factors contribute to ram usage.

If the OP was running no other programs and was running out of memory because of Safari alone then it would be a problem but that isn't what is happening here. If there are free resources, OSX uses it.

When I turn on my machine, open safari, xcode, maya, unity, zbrush, photoshop and iTunes OSX usually uses about 12 gigs of ram (out of 24). If I close everything and just use OSX it uses 2 gigs of ram. People may say that my programs are being ram hogs but they aren't. They are simply utilizing free resources to run optimally. If I run the exact same programs on my Macbook Pro which is lesser specced then when I open the above programs it uses 6 gigs of memory (out of 8) and if I close everything then the OS uses 1.3 gigs of memory roughly.

Programs will scale to the amount of resources available if programmed correctly.

 

[SE30]

Unused memory is a waste of resources. What matters is not how much RAM is used total because the system will purposely use more RAM than it has to in order to speed up the system. If you then run a program that needs more memory than what is available the system will give up some of the memory it was using to speed things up.

Hope that makes sense. It's harder to write well when I'm typing on an iPhone. Lol

What is Safari "[using]" those 850 megs for with 5 tabs open?

This is a bug people. On my system if I open 8 or so tabs, Safari will actually consume all available RAM. We're talking about 1.5 gigs for 8 tabs. Is this a feature?

Safari won't stop there either - it will continue to munch away as apparently all that "[used]" RAM isn't enough for a big boy's appetite. It will continue to eat away into VM until it approaches the allowed maximum.

This is a problem with Safari's own memory management. If you were affected by this bug (which is probably a memory leak of some sort), you would know and you would recognize that this is something quite beyond dynamic RAM allocation.

 

[iammike1]

What is Safari "[using]" those 850 megs for with 5 tabs open?

This is a bug people. On my system if I open 8 or so tabs, Safari will actually consume all available RAM. We're talking about 1.5 gigs for 8 tabs. Is this a feature?

Safari won't stop there either - it will continue to munch away as apparently all that "[used]" RAM isn't enough for a big boy's appetite. It will continue to eat away into VM until it approaches the allowed maximum.

This is a problem with Safari's own memory management. If you were affected by this bug (which is probably a memory leak of some sort), you would know and you would recognize that this is something quite beyond dynamic RAM allocation.

This is obviously a problem with your system and not a wide spread Safari memory management problem then. I can use and leave Safari running for weeks at a time with no issue what so ever and no slow downs.

 

[chrono1081]

This is obviously a problem with your system and not a wide spread Safari memory management problem then. I can use and leave Safari running for weeks at a time with no issue what so ever and no slow downs.

Same here. I have no problems at all and my Safari stays on all the time.