[andrew davidoff]

All,

This is a problem I have had for a while, and with each release of safari or OS update I hope that it gets fixes, but so far it hasn't. Lately it has seemed worse than normal.

Animations in safari cause cpu usage to spike from 50% to 100%. wtf is going on? I'm sure I'm not the only one that has had this problem. I can look at top and see the cpu spiking, but I can also watch performance over all get chunky and sluggish, and I can feel the computer instantly heat up when it's sitting on my lap...shortly after, the fan comes on.

For example, the animated emoticons to the right of the text box as I enter this entry cause cpu to hover around 50%, with safari eating between 15% and 20% of that. My fan just kicked on. There is nothing else on my system consuming an unusual amount of resources, and I know for a fact that as soon as I submit this my cpu will stop spiking.

If I simply open another tab in front of this one, cpu drops, and safari falls out of the first page of top.

CNN just changed their webpage and they now have flash on it. While the flash loads/plays, my cpu bounces between 90%-100% utilization.

Dragging the map around at maps.google.com does the same thing. It's awful. It's my first big complaint about OS X/OS X apps, and boy, is it a big one.

Can anyone shed some light into what's going on here? Is there a fix? I'm running 10.4.5 will all the newest updates for Safari and OS X.

Thanks,
Andrew Davidoff

[Thinine]

What's your hardware?

Yes, animated gifs and whatnot can be hard on lower end machines. Safari (really WebKit) doesn't implement it in a very fast manner, preferring the easy APIs available rather than a lower level, faster, but much more complicated animation system. I'm not sure, but this performance may be improved if you use the latest WebKit nightlies (nightly.webkit.org) or build WebKit from source and make a copy of Safari use the new frameworks (I can tell you how if you want).

[andrew davidoff]

Originally Posted by Thinine

What's your hardware?

17" powerbook 1Ghz, 2GB ram, 10.4.5 with all updates.

Originally Posted by Thinine

Yes, animated gifs and whatnot can be hard on lower end machines. Safari (really WebKit) doesn't implement it in a very fast manner, preferring the easy APIs available rather than a lower level, faster, but much more complicated animation system. I'm not sure, but this performance may be improved if you use the latest WebKit nightlies (nightly.webkit.org) or build WebKit from source and make a copy of Safari use the new frameworks (I can tell you how if you want).

That all may be true, but this seems a bit wacky. There are a few things a web browser should be able to do without me needing to update source nightly or install some 3rd party app to block inline flash. I just find it a bit odd that all mozilla core browsers, plus opera, behave like this on my system, but I do not see this behavior on linux boxes running mozilla core browsers.

Andrew Davidoff

[andrew davidoff]

No one else is experiencing this?

Thanks for any info...
Andrew Davidoff

[King Bob On The Cob]

Well, Flash is something entirely different, and Flash is terrible on OS X.