Safari Web Content high CPU usage

I'm having the same problem with the web content, although i figured what's causing it. I have a 23 inch display and the letters were always too small, so in advanced-style sheet, i wrote css file to have a permanant font size 150%. In every site that has the icon "tweet, digg, share" the web content goes crazy, in snow leopard you could force the page to stop loading but not in Lion.

After lion I almost stop using safari

Hawaiian_Starman wrote:

With Safari 5.1, Apple has changed the API (application programming interface) quite a bit. These changes have porven to be a big challenge for 3rd party developers, including the developers of Glims and 1Password, who have built their products using a now outdated API. To their credit, MacHangOut (Glims) and Agile (1Password) have done quite an amazing task of working through the compatibility and functionality issues triggered by the various API changes. Yet, more work on their part remains.

Anyone experiencing Safari 5.1 performance issues would be wise to disable all extensions in Safari Preferences>Extensions and restart Safari. If Safari is now stable, re-enable one extension at a time, then restart Safari. If stability is OK, reenable the next extension, restart Safari etc.

If performance is compromised, the last extension enabled is problematic. Disable that extension and restart Safari. Continue the enabling process.

For problematic extensions, check the developer's site for any information relative to Safari 5.1 compatibility, and also contact the developer about your findings.

If you are any bit familiar with the 1Password app/extension you'll understand that it is **considerably** more important than a (maybe working, maybe not) Safari upgrade.

Having said that the 1Password extension doesn't seem to be the problem, as it is the only extension I run and I have this CPU usage issue with it uninstalled. Incompatible websites maybe?

Yes, I use 1Password and find it invaluable. And if you follow their forums, you'll see there has been a lot of on-going changes affecting the evolving new extension. Given the Beta nature of these efforts, any new version can affect CPU performance.

My suggestion was to disable all extensions, then add them back one at a time to isolate any which may be compromising system/Safari 5.1 efficiency.

Having said that the 1Password extension doesn't seem to be the problem, as it is the only extension I run and I have this CPU usage issue with it uninstalled. Incompatible websites maybe?

If you continue to experience high CPU cycles, or excessive RAM allocation, then perhaps other 3rd party plugins may be the cause. In that case, have a look inside your Internet Plugin folder in either your main (/Library) or User Library (~/Library). The most popular would be Adobe Flash, Flip4Mac and Microsoft's Silverlight. There are others too. For any that are installed, make sure you are using the latest versions.

Also, specific to RAM, the greater the number of tabs or windows open, the higher the RAM allocation.

Safari Web content is hitting 90% and higher on my system. I have 4GB and have Lion installed. With the new features of Lion, if I quit Safari and restart it, all windows come back and CPU utilization returned to 90% and higher. Is this a bug? I don't see this with Firefox and I would prefer to use Safari...

On my MacBook Pro 2.4 (Early 2800), Safari 5.1 + Safari Web Content takes a minimum of 40% and 1.8 GB, with all extensions turned off, and all plugins (including Flash) updated to the latest version. The previous verson of Safari, with the same windows open, just took a minimum of 15% and 800 MB. And Safari 5.1 eats more and more memory as the hours pass.

I really hope in a quick revision of the app. As it is now, it is next to unasable, since it eats most resources.

Paolo

Have early 2011 MacBook Pro with 8Gb of ram installed. since installing Lion and Safari 5.1 my CPU usage is way up. Checking with Activity monitor shows Safari and finder are the biggest culprits, hogging a great deal of memory. I believe there is a lot of memory leakage in Safari.

If I have Safari open for any length of time my CPU fan starts winding up and the MacBook gets very hot. I also get the spinning beachball (never before) and just typing a comments in this forum can become very sluggish telling me that the CPU if running at almost 100%.

I have discovered that this issue is set off by the fantasy baseball website at Yahoo. I'm not saying this is the only site that causes it, but it sets the Safari Web Content process to go nuts every time I visit it. I'm required to "force reload of all tabs" several times per visit and my machine slows to a crawl. Again.. incompatible websites?

I had similar problems and, by looking at the console log, noticed that WebProcess was churning away trying to read various files in ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/AIR/ELS. I trashed all these, logged out and then logged in again, and all appears to be well.

Hi All

I too had similar problems as the OP, (with only 1 tab open, no other apps active and Spotlight indexing having been already completed). But have no Safari extensions and just the following plug-ins; Flip4Mac, Flash, GoogleTalk, iPhotoPhotocast, Quicktime and Silverlight. The high CPU usage from the Safari Web Content process appears to have gone after installing the Java Preferences Applet which is not automatically part of Lion.

Regards

I experienced the same issues: very slow machine and raging fans because of huge CPU usage (80-100% on an i7!) by Safari Web Content and quite a lot of memory usage too (around 250-300 MB of 8GB). In my case disabling the Web of Trust extension (v 1.3) solved the problem. So check the influence of extensions.

I noticed that when I click the orange minimize button several times really many copies of the same sites are opened. I didn't open those by myself. It looks that they are automatically restored sessions. But as the screens are overlapping, you don't notice. In this way quite a lot of memory will be consumed unnoticed. If all the pages are updated automatically this will in the end consume a lot op CPU too. After closing all the copies the Safari Web Content process behaves normally again. Strange behaviour I guess.

Hello, for me worked unchecking the feature in Safari-Preferences-Security- "Fraudulent Sites". I've read about this possibility in some 2008 forum related to similiar issue, but seems to do the thing. Both Safari processes consume reasonable memory (hundreds of MBs, depending) and CPU usage is 1-10%, moreless.

It was definitely an overload of 3rd party extensions that was racking up my memory usage with Safari Web Content. I have a 2011 iMac with 12GB. If it eats that up (and I've seen it at close to a gig) some extension developer has been lazy. I turned off every extension I wasn't using regularly (Preferences: Extensions) and the problem is solved. I still have about ten extensions installed, but they aren't building up much ram...

I was just having the same issue with Firefox. It ate up about 2gb of ram and a large amount of virtual mem. Safari seems to be running alright so far. I was having trouble with Chrome right after I upgraded to Lion. It was locking up my system. I have since uninstalled Chrome but love it so I'd like to get it back if anyone has had the same issue and found a work around. Btw I have an early 08 mbp 15in 2.4ghz w/ 4gb ram.

I had this issue badly effecting my Mac Mini (Snow Leopard) today using up to 100% of the CPU and over 80% all the time. Clearing the history worked for me, the usage dropped immediately to 0.4%. Well done Pejan