Safari reloading websites because of "significant use of memory".

Hi till66,

Welcome to the Apple Community where some of us do our best to help each other.

With Safari open, you might want to click on Safari in the top menu bar, and choose "Preferences".

Under "General" you can customise Safari to suit.

If that works for you ... great!

ELSE:

I may be wrong, but it seems to me you may need to check on your memory / storage.

Lack of memory/storage space, may be the root cause of Safari struggling to cope.

Sometimes we just keep saving stuff, and sooner or later the Mac will struggle to cope.

You can easily check by clicking on the small black Apple icon at the left of the top menu bar, then choosing "About this Mac" > then choose "Storage" from the top menu bar of the small screen that opens.

Mac needs at least 50Gb spare to keep running effeciently,

Apple has support pages online to help optimise storage.

Some of the ways include:

Emptying the trash if there is a large amount stored in there.

Putting loose files cluttering the desktop into a "Desktop" folder.

Buy a portable hard-drive and move hefty files like movies, music etc. on to that.

You would need to "restart " your Mac to see any changes to "Storage" when you re-check.

If you want more:

Apple Support pages: (Are you running Big Sur ?)

See how much storage space is used on your Mac and how much space is available.

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/system-information/sysp4ee93ca4/11.0/mac/11.0

Find and delete files on your Mac

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/system-information/syspf5a64aa6/11.0/mac/11.0

Optimise storage space on your Mac

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/system-information/sysp4ee93ca4/11.0/mac/11.0

Cheers :)

Thank you for adding more information on what is happening, giving a better picture of your situation.

Perhaps it may encourage someone with more expertise to suggest a work-around.

Wondering whether many of your apps are using "significant energy" at the same time.

It might be worthwhile taking a look with Activity Monitor.

Apple support have a user guide / articles that would help with that.

Activity Monitor User Guide

(You can choose your Operating System at the top)

https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/activity-monitor/welcome/mac

View memory usage in Activity monitor

https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/activity-monitor/actmntr1004/mac

View energy consumption in Activity Monitor:

https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/activity-monitor/actmntr43697/mac

Thinking there must be a way to alleviate the situation.

Cheers :)

Thank you :)

So it seems Safari only re-loads your Disney channel when it needs to update something "using significant memory" on another tab ? Could be switching the memory used back and forth ?

Solution may be to temporarily close the other tab(s) when you want to focus on Disney channel ?

OR

Wondering if it might be worth running "diagnostics" to see if anything untoward shows up there ?

Use Apple Diagnostics to test your Mac

https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT203747

Apple Diagnostics reference codes (for interpreting test results)

https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT203747

Cheers :)

Hi Kimberly563,

Thank you for posting on Apple Communities.

If the above reply and the links have not helped you solve the issue,

you might like to try the solutions offered in this other discussion thread:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252668795

Cheers :)

Thank you for your reply, joopfromoverijssel,

Since it is still annoying you, am wondering what you set Safari to open with in "preferences" ?

If Safari is set to "open with all windows from last session" ... that's what you'll get.

If you want, you can change it to "Open with a new window" or one of the other choices.

For example:

Wondering too, if you checked whether you have 50Gb of storage space free.

This would be needed in order to enable Safari, and other apps, to perform smoothly.

Regards :)

Both on SSD (1,6TB free) and in memory (16GB) there is enough space on my Mac mini but still Safari sometimes reloads a page.

This is =very annoying= reading my (digital) paper or some large site-pages. It makes me loose track of where I was, reading.

Safari is set to "open with all windows from last session", which is exactly what I want.

Most of the times Safari is only restarted after a MacOS update.

There is ample storage space free, on the internal system disk 90 GB and on the disk with most of my data 1,6 TB.

And there never is a shortage of memory (I keep a close watch).

To me it looks as if Safari has some limit for one tabs memory usage and my not-so-big newspaper every now and then exceeds this limit, but never when I am actually reading. ;-)

Admittedly, there are quite some Safari windows, each with a number of tabs, on the 15 virtual screens I am working with. But MacOS handles all of that quite well, nowadays you need not reorder windows on the screen (except Pages windows).

Thank you for checking the storage, etc. :)

So we have ruled out a few possibilities, yet still do not know the cause of why Safari would interrupt your reading to re-load websites that use significant memory!

The only other thing that comes to mind right now, is that the news website owner may be updating the website files to display the latest news, and may have instructions, within it's pages, to the browser so it will refresh and display the updates.

There is an Reading List option in ... Safari > Preferences > Advanced ... to "save articles for offline reading automatically" that you could check if you want. Then (I think) you can be reading a cached version, while the updated version reloads.

Perhaps this can work for you ?

Cheers :)

On occasion there is an updated version of the paper as I have seen on my iPad and iPhone. The app then asks if you want a reload. This is (so far) always (very) early in the morning.

The page reload on the Mac can occur anytime of day and can reoccur.

What instructions are in the pages, I have not (yet) explored but indeed that could be causing extra memory usage. Leaves the point that I don't want an automatic reload, I prefer a warning with a stop ("Stopped loading .....").

Thanks very much for your replies. ;-)

The Activity Monitor is always running and I check it regularly: nothing out of the ordinary.

Space enough on disk and in memory.

The Activity Monitor is on top for CPU usage, most of the time anyway.

Yes, Safari is on top for energy consumption, but not extremely so.

Hi _they,

Did you try closing any other sites (eg newspapers) that include code that reloads the page(s) after every (news) update, while watching the videos, ... when you want uninterrupted video-viewing ?

It seems that if there are open tabs of web-sites that include code intended to refresh the site content often, the sites would still refresh whatever the browser.

Oops!

Use Apple Diagnostics to test your Mac

https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT202731

Hey, none of these helped my same situation either with watching video on a brand new 16GB RAM MacBook Air so is there anything else that can be done short of switching to Firefox?

That’s helpful to know - I will stick with Firefox then from now on. Thanks!