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neilw · Sep 10, 2003, 02:50 PM

Safari still routinely gobbles up roughly 150MB - 180MB before leveling off on my PowerBook. At this point, is this considered a bug to be fixed or just normal behavior? Seems excessive to me, and pretty much guarantees that my system will be swapping. Does the 1.1 release in Panther address this at all?

IronPen · Sep 10, 2003, 08:42 PM

I don't think that is a common Safari problem. An application using that much memory is ridiculous. Did you see this in the process viewer or something else?

neilw · Sep 10, 2003, 10:45 PM

Process Viewer, top, whatever, all shows the same. Safari is currently holding about 156MB. If I restart it, it will go back to normal, then work its way up to that range. It has always done this for me, since the betas.

Right now I have two windows with a total of 7 tabs open, but I could close both windows and it would have little effect (have tried that in the past.)

I'm running Safari 1.0, v85, on OS X 10.2.6.

proton · Sep 11, 2003, 12:21 AM

Which number are you looking at?

If you're looking at VSIZE in top that isn't the amount of RAM it is using, RSIZE (sort of) displays that.

Currently my copy of Safari is at RSIZE 44.5MB, of which 16MB is shared (RSHRD) with other applications, making Safari's actual RAM usage 35.7MB (RPRVT). VSIZE on the other hand is 156MB. You can ignore VSIZE at it is simply a measure of the amount of the 4GB of virtual memory address space has been allocated in the applications RAM space. It doesn't indicate any of that is being used.

- proton

neilw · Sep 11, 2003, 08:31 AM

From "top":

Code:
  PID COMMAND      %CPU   TIME   #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT  RSHRD  RSIZE  VSIZE
  561 Safari       4.1% 10:47:24  30   620  2838   151M  67.6M   160M   626M

It really truly is taking 160 MB (or so), and has always done this.

Sosa · Sep 11, 2003, 08:53 AM

Slightly off topic here, but in the top command, PhysMem "used" and "free" refers to your RAM right?

Thus:

PhysMem: 37.1M wired, 103M active, 111M inactive, 251M used, 4.64M free

tells me I have 111M of RAM inactive, 251M used, and 4.64 free. Since I have a total of 384 megs, it would seem that RAM is used in groups, explaining why I have 4.64 free and not 115 right?

proton · Sep 11, 2003, 09:19 AM

Originally posted by Sosa:
Slightly off topic here, but in the top command, PhysMem "used" and "free" refers to your RAM right?

Thus:

PhysMem: 37.1M wired, 103M active, 111M inactive, 251M used, 4.64M free

tells me I have 111M of RAM inactive, 251M used, and 4.64 free. Since I have a total of 384 megs, it would seem that RAM is used in groups, explaining why I have 4.64 free and not 115 right?

Inactive is memory that has been freed, but the system still has in memory because it may be useful later on. For example, it may contain the code of a program you just quit. If you were to open that program again it doesn't need to load a lot of that from the disk.

For (almost) intents and purposes, you can treat the "Inactive" part of that as "Free" memory.

- proton

Sosa · 10:03 AM

Ok, how is this for a Safari problem: I was navigating a legal research site, suddenly Safari froze. I waited perhaps a minute or 2 before force quitting. I did notice my VMometer red (informing me the disk was being written to). Check my available HD memory: 4 gigs less! WTF?!

I've checked all my applications, utilities, can't find where that 4 gigs went to. Any ideas? I've restarted and they are still missing.

Update: Safari went crazy with its cache. I deleted it using preferences and problem resolved! Weird though. I wonder what it was downloading?