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mediahound · Sep 1, 2011, 05:23 PM

Why is Safari 'WebProcess' such a memory hog? This is in Lion with the current version.

mduell · Sep 1, 2011, 06:31 PM

Poor programming.

cgc · Sep 1, 2011, 06:34 PM

How many tabs did you have open, what URL were you at (e.g. was it video, picture heavy, etc.), how many extensions do you use, etc. Lots of missing info that might explain this. My Safari is using 283MB and I've got AdBlock+ and 1Password running and nothing else.

mediahound · Sep 1, 2011, 06:43 PM

Originally Posted by cgc

How many tabs did you have open, what URL were you at (e.g. was it video, picture heavy, etc.), how many extensions do you use, etc. Lots of missing info that might explain this. My Safari is using 283MB and I've got AdBlock+ and 1Password running and nothing else.

Check it yourself, it's not really dependent on what you are doing with/in Safari. Just launch it, browse, and after a few hours, it starts taking more and more ram...

Thinine · Sep 1, 2011, 08:19 PM

It won't start releasing memory until the system needs it. You still have nearly 3GB available.

besson3c · Sep 1, 2011, 08:22 PM

Yeah, if you have all that free RAM there is no problem here, and those numbers are pretty much meaningless. Safari in Lion does suck right now, but likely not for this reason.

mediahound · Sep 1, 2011, 09:29 PM

Originally Posted by Thinine

It won't start releasing memory until the system needs it. You still have nearly 3GB available.

What happens at that point? Will Safari crash?

Thinine · Sep 1, 2011, 10:14 PM

No, programs should never crash. That would indicate a bug. Once the system detects it's low on memory it should start reclaiming memory from Safari, to a certain point. If your memory usage keeps increasing eventually the system will page the the hard drive and you may experience some slowness then, unless you're using an SSD.

besson3c · Sep 1, 2011, 10:58 PM

Originally Posted by Thinine

No, programs should never crash. That would indicate a bug. Once the system detects it's low on memory it should start reclaiming memory from Safari, to a certain point. If your memory usage keeps increasing eventually the system will page the the hard drive and you may experience some slowness then, unless you're using an SSD.

This is derailing, I apologize in advance for this, but if the original poster doesn't mind, I'd be interested in hearing from those with fast SSDs that have tested the limits of what they can get away with in terms of utilizing virtual memory without a detectable performance penalty?

chabig · Sep 2, 2011, 02:57 PM

My experience is that playing around with an 11" MacBook Air with 2GB RAM at the Apple store is faster than my 13" MacBook Pro with 8GB RAM. I've opened every application on the machine in that 2GB and seen no performance degradation.

mediahound · Sep 2, 2011, 05:48 PM

I just don't get why Google Chrome, with the same usage patterns takes up never more than about 400MB of ram for me yet Safari is like 2GB!

On my Macbook, I only have 2GB of RAM so it becomes a real problem after a while of running Safari. The hard drive starts spinning all the time and the whole machine gets doggedly slow.

I guess I'll have to avoid Safari on that Mac. Chrome works well so it's not the end of the world. Just very curious that that Apple native browser is so bad.

kittonian · Sep 7, 2011, 09:03 PM

After thorough testing not only did I find Safari to be a memory hog, but a huge CPU hog as well. I tested the exact same tabs open in Safari and Firefox and found that while Safari was using 45% of the CPU, Firefox was using only 4% (plus it used a lot less memory). I've now switched to Firefox and things are getting done a whole lot faster.

For those who want to stick with Safari the only work around I found for these issues was to close Safari and reopen it once a day. If you let it go for a longer period than that things tend to slow down in a big way.