Safari Web Content high CPU usage

I stopped fighting this problem with Safari over a year ago, switched to Chrome and never looked back. I continue to monitor this thread thinking some day Apple will fix the problem but so far it appears to be as bad as it ever was.

Actually, overall I have been pleased with Safari... I haven't noticed it being too sluggish until the recent update with the combined address and search bar - which I think was the update that relit this thread up?

Interestingly, from my office - which may help...

MacPro 1,1 with Safari 6: 90% (approx) CPU

iMac 12,1 with Safari 6: 10% (approx) CPU

Seems that it's more leaky with an older Mac?

I'll try to be brief, because, as I said before, I'm just not having these problems. My browsing habits probably differ from most. I try to minimize malicious 'Web Content' as much as possible. That means:

* Not keeping cookies & 'local storage' around when I'm on a broadband connection anyway. Stale data causes problems.

* Running Glimmerblocker and killing a LOT of malicious (to me) javascript and 'refresh' processes (websites that try to 'game' pageviews by constant page refreshing. Also killing any link that points to /ad/ as they are doing the same thing.

* No Flash. That cuts out the rest of the ads. If you need Flash, do the John Gruber thing and just install Chrome.

* Not so many tabs open, because (as again with misbehaving web sites, their scripts & bots) each of these tabs would be still running.

Now to where things are going. I think Apple foisting things into a 'Web Content' process was supposed to be a subtle hint to the users as to where the problems lie. "Web Content" as a name was no accident. So here are my educated guesses. I could be wrong.

Apple has been systematically cutting variables that inject into the OS & apps like Safari (and Mail, which uses Safari components to render). First they cut 3rd party Haxie type things, then input managers. They discourage things like SIMBL. And then on the iOS side there was that 'Letter from Steve' over Flash. Are you having these problems on your iOS things? No.

Apple probably should test with more tabs in Safari. But the implicit UX is that you won't open 'as many' tabs, that you will use Reading List. Note that RSS was also killed in Safari (and Mail which uses Safari webkit views). Yes there are still web plugins, but HTML5 is supposed to take over a lot of that functionality.

As far as Google Chrome goes, on my Mini I've been able to bog it down just like Safari. Just open 10 tabs of Youtube without a plugin blocker. Google, for its part will be 'locking down' rogue javascript extensions: From the next version (maybe now?) you can only load Chrome Extensions from their 'Store'. And they prominently feature plugin & Javascript blockers in their store.

The only final thing that I can add is that more visual display, as well as 'number crunching' is being handed off to the GPU. Newer machines benefit from this, older machines & MacBook Pros on battery (using the integrated video) will just bog down. 2 gigs for 10 or so tabs, *depending on the content* may not be out of line.

Apple *may* produce a fix for "newer" machines. But for the 'very old' it may be better to stay on 10.6 or 10.7. The one saving grace is that Apple *does* listen, so if enough folks hit 'Feedback' they will address the issue. In their own way. This link might be helpful: http://pondini.org/OSX/BugReport.html

Those are just the breaks.

-Leo "any more than 5 tabs, to Instapaper they go" M.

I agree with everything you said. And have been doing all (except Glimmer Block and Instapaper) for months.

In this case the computer even has an upgraded graphics card. Chrome is good and fast, but not the preferred browser in my case... But the current performance of Safari is a bummer.

It maybe isn't a memory leak if 2gb is about right for that amount of tabs, but there have been times when I have over 20 open (before this recent update) and performance wasn't anything like the treacle it currently is.

Obviously, there is a processing leak somewhere.

But you are also right that this put an extra nail in the coffin of this MP. Hoping for a refreshed imac 27 (or something) to replace it in coming months. 🙂

Hey everyone,

I've been suffering with a massive Safari CPU issue with Safari 6 and Lion.

Today this was solved when I restarted Safari and it told me that it had disabled the Flash plugin as a critical update was available.

I updated via Adobe's auto-updater and after the upgrade Safari was back to normal and has yet to misbehave.

I want to be clear here: Flash CONTENT itself was not sucking up the CPU, but merely the Flash PLUGIN BEING INSTALLED was what sucked up the CPU time.

I recommend anyone with Lion and Safari 6 CPU issues try to uninstall Flash or upgrade to this latest version and see if that doesn't fix things.

Nope

Sadly that didn't work for me. I have downloaded Chrome server instead. It also uses a similar software to Flash and guess what, the fan runs high with that - but not as high as the Flash plugin.

I wouldn't suggest that people remove flash completely though - other sites use Flash as you probably know, so if you remove the plug-in, onilne site content can't be viewed without it.

I do a large amount of website development so it is very common that I have several browser windows or tabs open at once. I found that the windows that contained a large number of jquery slide shows tend to slow my system down when left open in the background. As long as I am moving from page to page I am fine but if I leave a window open then I pay for it. Try looking at windows or tabs that contain an excess amount of slide shows etc and close these. You should see a big performance boost.

but what about the happy habit of Chromium browsers to freeze pages forcing you to kill them?
Another deep disappointment, allow me to tell it, and the main reason why I, frustrated by ll the Chrome and Rockmelt craps, gave again a try to the grey, sad, 'German looking' Safari.
The competintion between browsers is still wide open and any suggestion welcome
By the way, I have 8 GB RAM and should not care about this waste of it, but I tried to close any window and didn't see a RAM usage REDUCTION, so it seems to not be a 'dynamic process' that we could manage with a bit of economy criteria and, even worst, it don't allows us to easily find out which site, whitch extension and in which amout is ACCUMULATING this NOT USED RAM (how can it be used if mo one window is open???).
Anyway I agree with you and would like to add that Apple software developers are stubbonly deaf or paralized in their inhability to follow the clients needs, and this by the ugly, sad antiergonomic user interface of Finder, iTunes and mails sidebars icons till the heavy and hard to learn iWorks apps, SO FAR by the fantastic (for his times, in the Classic environment) AppleWorks/ClasisWorks, a product which I would use til now as it was, if only compatible, so light, complet and integrated!
Then they abandone the good ideas like iWeb instead to develope them...
Should I think that Steve was the only computer enthusiast of Apple and that the new Wall Street oriented managment will focus only on gadgets?In the second life of Apple, when this Steve came back (so sorry that the other one never did it!) iMac and iBook were years ahead any other competitor, just as our System.
With the OS X the system made another huge jump (still back to Clasic, think just at Menuette or Kaleidoscope and many 'system utilities').
With the defaith of IBM the hardware became banal and laptops are high level but with only one excelence, the retina display (and perhaps the top speed flash drives).
I really wonder how it's possible that so many workers can produce so few innovation recently, are so confudes, loosing the focus on the user interface and self explanatory applications while in the past so huge REVOLUTIONS were possible starting by near zero!
I wonder also why the time could not teach to make things simplier and more effcient, using less hardware resources increasing speed, files rendering just the same, opened and saved in new applications enflates sizes, aplications are larger than whole hard disks of 10 years ago just to do so few and often worse...

As many here, I've suffered from years of issues with Safari where it will mushroom in size and become unusable after hours or days of use (depends on the activity level). Not so much on the CPU side, but on the memory side, where it leaks a lot and then becomes increasingly dependent on the page file, slowing things down drastically. On older systems with less RAM etc it would reach a critical point at 1GB. These days it seems to be more at 2GB for me, though browser response slows down around a gig.

Interestingly enough, today, I got Safari to become totally unresponsive within one hour, on a single site. Thought that was strange. I restarted Safari, did not leave the page and watched it eat up 3GB of memory of my 4GB, at which point I had to throw in the towel. Yes, a new session, visit one long blog page that expands with more entries when you read the last entry ... and you can watch memory use go up with dozens and hundreds of MB. Even though the true page load is not that heavy and I was keeping an eye on the network meter.

If you are curious. Visit blog dot smarthome dot com. Skim the page and scroll down to the bottom. It'll auto-expand with the next series of entries. Skim some more to get to read entries from a few months ago. If you have menu meters or use activity monitor, watch the memory leak

Note that I'm not here in any shape or form endorsing this vendor, I just purchased some hardware from them, and experienced this rampant memory use.

I'd like to respond with some recent findings regarding my Safari RAM issues. To review, I was restoring from a time machine backup, and having massive RAM usage every time I opened Safari. I did a clean install and individually reinstalled my apps, and the issue has been resolved. I took care to not install anything that had to do with Safari, plugins, flash, iCloud sync, or anything else. I have been slowly re-adding the things I wanted that Safari used, one by one, and monitoring the results. So far, nothing has made my RAM issue reappear, even flash, until I activated iCloud Safari syncing in the settings menu. As soon as I allowed Safari to sync with my iCloud account, the climbing RAM issue returned, and the app was ruined. I disabled syncing, but it didn't matter. I did a full restore to the previous morning's Time Machine backup, and the issue disappeared. I'd really like to make my bookmarks sync, and to use the new iCloud tabs sync, but it looks like that's not going to happen. Everything else about Safari works perfectly for me, as long at I keep that Safari iCloud box unchecked...

Might be wrong here ... never can tell, it MIGHT be right ...

I HAD the Garmin Communicator Plug-in installed ... deleted it, restarted Safari, and sure looks like my memory is holding ...

I used to be a Garmin fanatic ... guess I still am as I have several of their devices, but - I think the software sometimes isn't quite the way I would design it ... (I'm being nice) ...

Could it be ???

BTW, I did most of the above suggestions as well, this one seems to be working better for me... I suspect most of us have a few plugins ... most are user/developer written ... not Apple ... I wonder if people are seeing this problem with NO Plugins ??

This is exactly the problem I am having as well. After having Safari open on my MacBook Pro for about 10 minutes, the internal fans start screaming because Safari is using nearly 100% of my CPU power and my MacBook Pro can't keep up.

Additionally, our online scheduling software (at http://www.restorationcs.com/Schedule.html) will not function properly when accessed by Safari 6. After our clients find an opening to schedule, they get an error stating that the chosen time slot is no longer available. This happens no matter which time they choose. We've had to install a warning for users. I've had devlopers tell us it's a cache problem with Safari and some tell us it's a Javascript problem with Safari. But we have no issues with other browsers!

This is really disappointing!

So StormPipe, is Safari still working fine, now that you deleted the Garmin plug-in? I have it too, but wanted to see if this might really be a fix....

It truly is frustrating & infuriating, that somany of us have had this many issues with Safari, for years, and still Apple doesn't seem to respond, much less fix this hot mess....

I've never owned a Garmin, never had plug-ins in Safari.

For years I've seen Safari "self-implode". Constantly running out of memory with somewhat prolonged and intense use, through various iterations of OS X and Safari. I've had it on the G4 1GB RAM, G5 2.5 GB RAM and Core2Duo 4GB RAM.

At some point Safari got a sister process call webprocess (or such) and now that's the one that gobbles up memory like a kid at the candy story.

I recently got a 10.8 mac mini with 8GB RAM. I haven't really used it yet, but I'm waiting to see when that combo will reach the unresponsive point.

Of course no such memory issues would occur with Firefox or Chrome. Not that they never crashed, but I've never been able to relate their issues to memory / cache putting ever increasing demand on physical memory and hard drive cache.

I have had pretty good luck clearing the Safari Cache.db

Quit Safari.

mv ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/Cache.db\

~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/Cache.db.old

It will spike initially, but it should settle down.