Safari Web Content high CPU usage

One option in the Bookmark menu is to save all open tabs to a folder. You can then close all the tabs and open them one-by-one from the folder, or quit Safari, and choose to reopen all the tabs at once. I sometimes choose the first strategy, leaving one tab open with the bookmarks folder I need, and opening just one new tab with each successive link, closing it and deleting the link when I'm done. As article I linked to suggests, tab managment seems to be a problem for other browsers, too, to the point of having several extensions for Chrome, and a limited number for Safari, to address some of the problems.

I guess the point I was trying to make is that, if I have 20 or more tabs open at once, is there another way that I can accomplish the same thing without that much overhead? I'm obviously not going to access more than a small portion of those tabs, maybe even in one day. And if I had that many tabs, documents, or windows open in almost any other program besides a browser, I don't think I'd be surprised if my computer slowed to a halt.

For what it's worth, I have no idea what Apple believes, but at least these things are in my control. I suspect Apple programmers are both aware of the problem, and are trying to find a solution.

I understand the collecting urls now.

That's too much work for me. I just spread the load over different browsers, and I will dedicate one browser specifically to something that's likely to cause issues. Some sites that are heavily dependent on flash or have loads of 3rd party content, tend to give me issues, so I'll try to offload that to another browser, whether chrome or firefox or opera, and let that eat cpu cycles instead. No issue with killing it off interfering with what I want to keep open.

As far as ghostery or disconnect, they're not a magic bullet. They can slow things down. Takes some tweaking to get some sites to work. Anything from missing images, video, content sections, comment sections, ... But I'm largely happy with them. And, if I can't get something to work, rather than fiddle with, I just open up chrome or opera (no extensions in either) and load that page there.

FWIW, after reading through some of this thread, I moved the three items below from the Safari folder that is in the user account's Library folder to the desktop (after quitting Safari), then cold booted, then launched Safari.

Safari Web Content process and the fans on my 2012 MBPr have been stable whereas they previously had been excessively high.

LocalStorage (folder)

WebpageIcons.db

HistoryIndex.sk

JohnMM, you said you have an option in the Bookmark menu is to save all open tabs to a folder, but I don't seem to have that. I'm using Snow Leopard, so maybe it's a later development (to help deal with all this stuff). If I could do that, it would make life much easier.... The only way I can do that now, without having to manually go window to window, bookmarking every tab, would be to close, then open, hit reopen all windows, then copy & paste all the bookmarks from the history, as they'll all be lined up at the start. However, that won't add any new ones I open... but it would help. I sure hope some of this is better dealt with in the new OS....

I have Safari 6.0.5 and the Bookmarks menu, 3rd item from the top, has "Add bookmarks for these "x" tabs". Snow Leopard is not supported for the current version of Safari.

One of my other strategies to reduce open tabs is to send pages to Pocket or Instapaper. This works best for text-intensive pages, but can be used in a pinch. It's not particularly hard to save articles to either service, one-by-one, or to create bookmarks, one-by-one, especially if it's part of your routine. Using Reader (not reading list) in Safari, or using one of these services, makes online reading much more efficient.

I have Safari 5.1.7

In safari when I highlight a piece of text, scrolling becomes erratic and the Safari Web Content runs up the cpu to 100%. This only seems to happen on a webpage that is sourced by google web toolkit (GWT). This does not happen with firefox, chrome, IE.

There was a similar statement made by

GodwinCanuck

Re: Safari Web Content high CPU usage

13-Jul-2012 02:27 (in response to The-Bard)

where folks were saying google docs or the like (backed by GWT perhaps) were impacting cpu.

But no other information provided.

Does anyone know the relationship to GWT, or could provide steps to troubleshoot. I've been playing with developer and debug options in safari but nothing stands out as of yet.

Safari CPU usage 100% plus. Spent 2 or 3 hours trying the many suggestions kindly posted on the web. Failed in all cases. Downloaded Chrome, imported all Safari Bookmarks. Chrome CPU usage 14%! Works like a charm. Took me 5 minutes.

Same story for me - Safari 6.05. Tried to deactivate add ons, but still after some time - CPU usage rockets above 100% and stays there. MacBookAir Mid2011 running 10.8.5.

Changed to Firefox and there is no such problem -even with adblocker activated. The only problem is that I like Safari UI better than all the others, so I would like Apple to fix this rather than making us drop Safari. Are they not replying to cases like this at all?

Thanks for your reply, BFH !

You are correct - there is no possible RAM-upgrade for my MBA. 4 is max.

I haven't seen that Maverick-feature, but I must admit I'm a bit sceptic when it comes to installing newer OS and expecting any kind of reduction in HW-usage. Usually the OS-upgrades have proven to eat more RAM, disc and CPU. If Maverick really helps on the RAM-usage, it could also be good for my old iMac at home, even though a SSD-upgrade possibly would be the best thing for it.

OK - until Maverick then - I stay with The (Fire) Fox :-) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jofNR_WkoCE

This is just great: I just noticed that switching from the ethernet to the WiFi is the reason for the high Web Content CPU usage. The problem is that switching back to ethernet doesn't stop it.

Safari 6.0.5

OS X Lion 10.7.5

Ah - that actually sounds reasonable and explains why I don't experience this on my MBAir at work when I'm on the ethernet, but it starts when I get home connected only to Wifi. This also explains why my ethernet connected iMac doesen't show any of the same issues ...

Even more interesting! It can be the Bluetooth. At least it was in Snow Leopard:

http://blog.afandian.com/2012/03/crazy-high-cpu-usage-on-snow-leopard-and-a-surp rising-culprit/

Not sure if the BT and WiFi share the same chip, but people without BT devices may want to try disabling it.

PS: sorry for the double post. I just wanted to give it the relevance

Well, disabling bluetooth is not so great a remedy, when both one's mouse & keyboard are bluetooth. As for adding more RAM, I've got 12 Gigs of Ram, and still find Safari slowing, stalling, constantly refreshing itself, or crashing....

Without more detail, this seems like a fruitless direction. You can also reorder the bluetooth, wifi, and ethernet in the Network preferences by simply dragging their order, and that sometimes makes a difference, but if you're not willing to document your experiments, and you simply mention this as a "spiritual" cause of your problems or solutions, you might as well wave your hands on your monitor and suggest that works to solve a problem (and, at this point, I'm not even sure what problem you've solved, if any).

I turned off my wifi on my iMac since I already have an ethernet connection during this conversation. Wifi crashed my iMac (I looked at the crash logs), and I have no crashes since the change, and I currently have 49 tabs open without any problems. But I can't say that's what solved my problem, unless I believe in magic. Life is better, but I haven't isolated the problem.

No, it isn't the BT, I turned it off and the situation persisted. But there is definitively something wrong with the WiFi at least in my MacBook. I have had memory issues with Lion since 10.7.0. 10.7.2 appeared to slightly improve things but still something was wrong there. On top of this I'vw found myself various times in the situation where if the MacBook went to sleep while downloading GBs of data NOT with Safari, when waking it up the screen went black (with the backligh), the cursor went spinning, and I couldn't login anymore. The fans were at high speed, meaning that the CPU usage was high.

It happened recently as well after my findings. So what i did has been to switch off the WiFi and connect it to the ethernet. Magically after a couple of minutes I could finally login. I checked the memory situation and I had more than 9GB of swapping files. Killed Safari the backing storage went down to less than 2GB. This has been the first time I could eventually login when it happened.