Safari 14 on Big Sur: How to prevent a webpage from automatically reloading because it was using significant memory?

It's been almost a year since this post and the problem has yet to be solved. Since no one mentioned it, here’s the Safari Feedback link to “suggest” a fix to Apple:

https://www.apple.com/feedback/safari.html

🙄

The problem, Gregory Jones1, is that websites are not supposed to be using so much of any browsers’ resources!

Unfortunately, websites have gotten increasingly lazy in their use of browsers’ memory resources, particularly.

The workarounds are:

1. Access such web-pages through a browser window with only a single tab: this helps isolate the resource use.
2. Other browsers, such as Google Chrome, don’t seem to have this issue.

MartinAS65 wrote:

Lots of comments re being stuck on Vimeo, and other sites, but no solution.

That’s because there are no solutions available to us, as users.

The problem is:

1. Websites are abusing the internal memory of your browser. This should not happen. Websites should be using Server-Side storage (especially for uploads). Only the offending website can correct this.
2. There are, typically, not browser options to permit this abuse, though some browsers are more permissive than others. (This does provide for a workaround, in many cases. Another potential workaround is to isolate the offending website to its own browser window with no other tabs.)

This is the reason for the Feedback recommendations.

Our product may be completely broken by the new "feature" of automatic page reloads due to memory usage.

To give you some context, we are developing an Office.js based add-in (Velixo) that is used to build Excel reports from corporate ERP (accounting) data residing in the cloud.

Some of our clients have enormous reports coming from ~10 ERP tenants, each of which can provide on the order of 10-100 MiB of data!

To avoid re-downloading upon every refresh, the data is cached both in-memory and using local browser storage. Thus,

1. Only new data is fetched upon refresh.
2. We avoid storing this (sensitive) data on our servers.

The add-in is designed to be memory-intensive, and our clients are fully aware of that.

However, since the advent of Big Sur, we started seeing page reloads due to "significant memory usage" and there is positively no way to turn off this feature.

PLEASE ADD A WHITELIST FOR IT!

Welcome, sam9502 and nattiecat, to Apple Support Communities!

Y’all are having some sort of issue with webpages taking up significant memory, and, worse, rather than simply informing y’all, as users, unilaterally, restarting the webpage, unbidden by y’all, the users.

We, your fellow users, in this forum, would like to help.

Would you like our help, to see if this behavior can be corrected?

Or would you rather provide Apple Feedback, by using the Safari Feedback menu option?

Having people «post their woes here» is not the way «to build traction so this issue gets noticed», because Apple is not here, per se. Just your fellow users.

The way «to build traction so this issue gets noticed» is by using the Safari Feedback menu option!

I had the same problem as well, but I was able to solve the problem by watching it on a different window. I don't know why it makes a difference, but try watching it on a different window. I used the activity monitor to see how much memory zoom used. I found out the website used almost 5 GB of memory when I had zoom and many tabs open on the same window, but it only took up about 300 MB of memory when I watched it on a separate window. (I still had many tabs open on another window) Try it and let me know if that solves your problem.

I ran the app "system messages" (spelling? systemmeddellanden in swedish) when the page ran out of memory and reloaded and I found a message reading:

webprocessproxy : : didExceedActiveMemoryLimit

So I went into settings and found under proxyserver a setting "Use Passive FTP Mode (PASV)" and turned it on.

So far I haven't seen the issue appearing again, last 24 hrs. I will see if it works in the long run.

Does this work for you?

I have the exact same issue. So I know it isn't isolated.

I had a message display on Catalina in the past where it says something along the lines of it might be slow because its using significant memory. I always found that very odd and absurd to be frank since I have a 16" top of the line MacBook Pro with more than enough RAM to run a lot heavier applications.

This must be fixed immediately since exams are right around the corner. To make matters more frustrating I have tried every possible work around that I could think of.

Even if you go into terminal and sudo purge, the issue resolves only temporarily and goes right back to committing the same problem.

What is the solution ????

I have posted feedback on Apples site for Safari. But how long would that event take to resolve? I think it will be a while before we see any updates being pushed.

Jakob12345:

«webprocessproxy» is not about proxy servers, in anything like the usual concept, so using «Passive FTP Mode (PASV)» would not be expected to do anything.

Instead, this has to do with the way web processes (primarily JavaScript running within a browser) can use both local storage (RAM and drive) and Server side storage.

The intent is that JavaScript processes that deal with large amounts of data, should be using resources primarily on the Server, where the website resides—not on your local machine.

Now, different browsers have different limits on local storage of data, for web processes. If these limits are exceeded, the browser can either extend the limits, or hold the limits as hard limits. In the latter case, if the web process continues to try to exceed the hard limit, the process may be terminated.

Unfortunately, I certainly don’t know the particulars, in your case.

Yes, Jakob12345.

«GOOGLE CHROME» is well known as a resource “hog”.

So, I’m not surprised that it would permit errant web processes to use exceptional quantities of local storage, rather than properly using Server side storage resources.

Safari keeps reloading my homework page, clearing all the answers. It used to be the fastest of the browsers on that page, but now it's completely unusable. There has to be an option to turn this off...

OperaStarrOS:

Have you reported this as a bug to Apple’s Safari Feedback page?

That is the very best method to accelerate any fix for this issue.

Unfortunately, it does sound like you’ll need to use another web browser as a workaround, for the time being.

I've been having the same issue with my zoom lectures - I can't seem to watch anything on safari anymore without the webpage being reloaded. I hope apple patches this soon, it's really annoying, and I don't like google chrome.

I'm having the same issues and it's so annoying. I'm not even switching tabs for this to happen. I'm attempting to do drivers ed and take notes at the same time with the side by side display. There's a timer that makes sure you watch the whole lesson video before moving on, and the page keeps reloading and reseting it. I've been stuck on the same half an hour video for a while now.

Report the issue, Eddy1015, using the Safari Feedback option.

There’s nothing that writing here will actually accomplish.

The only workaround is to use another browser, when you run into this issue.

(Well. Some have found that, at least sometimes, using a separate Safari window, with no other tabs open, in that window, helps avoid the issue.)