Q: Safari Web Content high CPU usage

So, after checking through all the items in the menu bar, login items, & processes in the Activity Monitor, which by the way, a great many I "don't understand" and have no clue whatsoever as to what they are, you say it's working better, but have no idea which ones may have been the culprits in running up RAM usage, etc?  Believe it or not, not that many of us wish to spend a day going one by one, through all the alien sounding named processes, login & menu bar programs, trying to figure out A) what they are, B) if they aren't essential to using the computer, and C) if they may be corrupted, out-dated, or just not working....

With so many people, many being very experienced, advanced, long time users, having issues with Safari for YEARS, it still is very curious that Apple, or even some "power users" have no advice more specific than check through every process, plug in, program, etc, to find out on your own, what might be causing all these problems. Are there really no small number of these programs/processes that are more likely than others to be at fault, really?  Every person must in effect, pull the motor & transmission from the car, and go over every piece, individually?  I sure have no clue as what many of the items listed in the Activity Monitor do, if they are essential, can be uninstalled, updated, or checked. To have every user, no matter their level of expertise do such a task may end up totally screwing up people's computers, should they uninstall or delete the wrong things.. There has to be a better way, and why can't any of the costly utility programs offered diagnose all those things, or Apple's own disk utility?

I think you make a good point. Laptops and desktops are no less complex than they were 15 years ago. Whether Windows or OS X, you might have to spend significant time running down the problem, or significant $ having someone do it for you to make any app work, whether you got it as part of the OS, or downloaded it. Apple has been moving toward a sandbox where apps are separated from the OS, where "illegal" programming doesn't jump the barriers in the System and between programs. Many apps, including Chrome and FireFox, are free to ignore whatever parameters they wish. If installing Google Drive on your laptop is your desire, it is not available in the App Store because it does not meet its criteria for playing well with others. On OS X, you can still download many, or any, such apps/programs

Many people complain about "open vs. closed", but many intelligent people find iOS on iPhone or iPad functional and almost problem-free (and very secure). Mac OS X is still the Wild West in those terms. There are legacy programs, creative programs, and experiments that exist side-by-side with well-crafted apps/programs that play by the rules.

We are many years away from Safari warning you that your old installation is screwing with your current settings, or from utilities diagnosing what horrible cruft is still on your computer. There's a certain reality: sometimes a problem may be sufficiently complex that an online forum will not solve your problem, or that you might not have the time or inclination to troubleshoot it.

I did say that DivX was a problem; I did say that you should remove Internet Plugins from your Library folder that you don't use, and to delete those things in your User that startup Login that you can't identify, or have no desire to confront daily.

I am a power user (more: I maintained dozens of OS X Macs in several careers), and I still have problems. I have also mostly solved the problem with Safari. You complain about the Real Memory that Safari occupies, and I maintain that is not a good metric. CPU % is a beginning, but it is only an indication of possible problems, and not diagnostic. You can decide to determine what processes are normal, and which are zombies by simply looking a few of them up on Google. It doesn't take that long.

Also, despite your complaints, you haven't mentioned which menu bar or logins that you experience. This is a two-way street. You tell us your details, we'll suggest next steps. It doesn't work for you to say "I looked at that, no problem". WHICH plugins WHICH logins? Not that we don't trust you, but reporting is a [detailed] two-way street.

So, before you diss Apple again, please tell us that you have not found DivX files on your computer, list your login startups, and tell us what Internet Plugins you have.

JohnMM wrote:

 

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I did say that DivX was a problem; I did say that you should remove Internet Plugins from your Library folder that you don't use, and to delete those things in your User that startup Login that you can't identify, or have no desire to confront daily.

 

I am a power user (more: I maintained dozens of OS X Macs in several careers), and I still have problems. I have also mostly solved the problem with Safari. You complain about the Real Memory that Safari occupies, and I maintain that is not a good metric. CPU % is a beginning, but it is only an indication of possible problems, and not diagnostic. You can decide to determine what processes are normal, and which are zombies by simply looking a few of them up on Google. It doesn't take that long.

 

Also, despite your complaints, you haven't mentioned which menu bar or logins that you experience. This is a two-way street. You tell us your details, we'll suggest next steps. It doesn't work for you to say "I looked at that, no problem". WHICH plugins WHICH logins? Not that we don't trust you, but reporting is a [detailed] two-way street.

 

So, before you diss Apple again, please tell us that you have not found DivX files on your computer, list your login startups, and tell us what Internet Plugins you have.

I think everybody has the right to diss Apple when it comes to this issue and a few other ones.

I see the Safari problem on an ongoing basis with people who couldn't be any farther from power users, who's mac looks just like the last time I visited them, who have never heard of DIVX, who don't have any menu bar / system / whatever enhancements, ... and only have the common extras on their system to work with office files, read/edit pdf files, view flash online, etc.

Pick any Mac with any version of OS X and Safari will misbehave after a while. In the last few years, with the newest intel core systems, the problem is more hidden with  multiple GBs of RAM (>4GB) minimizing caching and now solid state drives which eliminate the hard drive paging bottleneck. That said, you can still get Safari to become unresponsive on a quad core i7 with more ram than all your previous computers combined, and surprise surprise, Safari or its web content sibling just blew past 3GB of RAM. 

I have no DivX anywhere, I cleared plug ins I don't use or need, and I also don't need any self-appointed user-forum nazis to demand I do this and do that, "not that you don't trust me".... well why should I trust you?  You might demand I do things that totally screw up my OS, how do I know? That fact that you are a PowerUser, have maintained "dozens of OS X Macs", and STILL HAVE PROBLEMS, pretty much makes our point, thank you....  If even an advanced, longtime poweruser has issues, what hope is there for the rest of us? I think Apple should be quite capable of creating a browser that works without grinding to a halt more often than even third party browsers, no?

Please note that I no longer suffer from the ill-defined, "memory-leak", and I can use Safari with multiple tabs consistently. No "nazi... demand" here. Do what you want, and change to Chrome, or FireFox, or Opera, if it suits you. I made a different point. Computers are complex, and trivial and indirect actions sometimes cause complex problems. If you don't like how Safari performs, you have options of other browsers, or you can troubleshoot the problem, or pay someone to do it for you (though the Apple geniuses will do quite a bit for free). Whining in a tech forum seems gratuitous. Believe me, Apple gets it. They monitor the forums, and have a deep knowledge of the choices they are making. It's not a simple calculus of something working all the time as much as it is something working within the context of everything working together. Mozilla and Google don't have a dog in that fight, and they can take shortcuts.

Not everyone has 20 tabs open (or even know what tabs are), and even novice users are encouraged by peers to "use FireFox" or "use Chrome" instead of Safari even before they know much about their computers, so it seems there's an odd group here that demands that Safari operate with 30 tabs open, and that it do so without examining the complex factors that might make that difficult. It's not that hard to make another browser your default, so you might talk about what you'd miss if you did. You didn't say why you won't switch, and you don't say why you have to have dozens of tabs open.

After working in technical support for a long time, I recognize that it's not simply about trust, but about specificity. If you say you have no DivX anywhere, how did you determine that? If you cleared unused plugins, where did you find them? You say that you did that as if we have a common understanding, but I don't know if you searched for plugins in Spotlight, looked in your user Library, or looked in your root Library, and I don't know what you have, or what you deleted, or even if you can access your hidden Librarys in Lion or Mountain Lion. If you want to complain, then rate the system software in the store, and then come here to present or follow troubleshooting heuristics. "Everybody has the right to diss Apple" is an angry pause in the attempt to solve a problem. Seems mostly out of place here.

I've just logged out of Google, quit safari and restarted safari, and can confirm that this appears to have resolved my CPU usage issue!

I also logged into a flash intensive site to see how safari performed compared to running the same site through chrome and found that safari performed better (from a CPU/Memory) perspective...

So to reiterate the steps i took to resolve the issue were...

1. Open Safari
2. Log Out of Google Accounts
3. Quit Safari
4. Restart Safari

So, in order to properly ask a question here, saying there's no DIvX on my computer, means I must also keep copious notes as to every step I've taken to make that determination, explain to you where I found internet plugins, & keep a consice history of every step taken in the few years of dealing with Safari issues? Sorry, I'm not that fastidiuous a geek, I just expect Apple products to function fairly smoothly on Apple machines. I don't understand the idea of other browsers "using shortcuts" as "they have no dog in the fight", and that's why they can operate better with more tabs open, if they can, why are the shortcuts a bad thing?

And yes I also note CPU usage, not only RAM use, etc, assuming all of us who post here have zero understanding of these things is no help either. Just because something is not said, doesn't imply it's not taken into account. Perhaps after posting copious actions previously taken, many times over the years, I just don't bother, and perhaps all the "whining" you see on these forums is the result of too many posts, and too many long troubleshooting sessions w/Apple techs over the phone, and we're just a bit frustrated....

I think at this point we just need to ignore the people who think they have the solution to this problem. It CERTAINLY is not as simple as logging out of Google. The problem has been there long before Google even allowed a login!

I HAVE NEVER INSTALLED DIVX. Please give it a rest w/this.

I have seen this issue for YEARS. On multiple OS'es, multuple machines, multuple processors, and multuple versions of Safari. THE ONLY CONSISTENT FACTOR IS SAFARI.

Its been said before, but it needs to be reiterated: If other browsers can play nice, Safari should be able to as well. Apple's own default browser should perform AT LEAST as good as 3rd party ones, if not better.

And its a bit silly to simply claim ALL the users who have been experiencing this problem for so long are just secretly suffering from some unknown, obscure plug-in or extension. OH DANG! We're all running DIVX and just too stupid to realize it. Think not.

I have been working professionally with Macintosh computers since 1995. I am, by defintion, a power user. And it doesnt take a power user to realize that Safari performs differently than other browsers.

But all this is really just talk in the wind, as this thread is marked as FIXED. I think we need to create a new thread, and escalate this problem. Because right now the only people talking about this are users.

I have been struggling with Safari web content  for quite a number of years: high CPU usage and memory hogging.

By conincidence I found out that some web-sites cause high CPU load, the best culprit for me is spiegel.de

Can anybody hazard a guess why this might be?

The difference is drmatic when I close spiegel.de: when it is open the CPU load stays around 100%, when I close it it is down to 20%.

Do a google search on spiegel.de and this is most relevant response I found?  Do you remember visiting a German site recently? 

Spiegel Online is the online sibling of Germany's print weekly Der Spiegel. It was launched in 1994 and is one of the most visited German language news websites. Wikipedia

https://www.google.com/webhp?source=search_app#gs_rn=20&gs_ri=psy-ab&tok=5vzHEu- _2zNFbpkQpk3adQ&cp=10&gs_id=4&xhr=t&q=spiegel.de&es_nrs=true&pf=p&output=search& sclient=psy-ab&oq=spiegel.de&gs_l=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&bvm=bv.49784469, d.aWM&fp=dbd40e074ea0c8e1&biw=1606&bih=842

Spiegel.de does have Flash content running constantly, which can be quite the cpu hit.

The Safari extension Ghostery blocks that on the site, you might also test with click to flash, which prevents Flash from loading unless you choose it.

Thanks- I installed Ghostery- let us see what happens....

I have already Click2Flash, in the past I have switched it on and off to see a difference, nothing conclusive

I have a Powerbook 1.67 GHz and a MacBook 4,1 2.4GHz. Powerbook is on Leopard and MB is on Lion, on which I use Safari on both machines. I tried the other browsers like chrome and firefox, but after couple of days of test drives, i still keep coming back to Safari. Previously, my Safari would almost crawl to a halt even with just less than 10 tabs open. I have seen and read this thread and tried some of the suggestion. I uninstalled every plugin that I don't need and basically uninstalled flash. Removed all and turn off extensions. I have installed Glimmerblocker for blocking ads. And after doing this, Safari has been responsive and fluid once again.

What I have learned from it is that, it is not Safari that is causing all of this, but probably poor coding on the side of the third-party plug-ins and extensions? I used to have Click-to-Flash and Adblock plus, Facebook Zoom and another one I cannot recall anymore. And also poor coding on the side of the web pages? Who knows, but as it stands right now, I would never install flash and everything that comes with it on all my computers.

I mostly use Safari's built in reader, so I don't need flash.

My MBP had all sorts of cpu loadings with all the browsers, mail and more.  I finally removed Sophos Anti-Virus that I had installed more than a year ago.  It never showed up on the process list so I never thought about it. Now, instead of 190F temps I have 95F and I don't need to purge every half hour or restart regularly.   Things are moving much quicker now.  I'm guessing Sophos was interacting with all those programs.  Solved for me for now.

I have found Facebook to be a huge energy drain on Safari, nearly tripling the Web Content usage. I've also found other browsers having similar issues with Facebook. I think some of the blame is that FB has so many bells & whistles, popups & stuff refreshing constantly, that they are making their software overly cumbersome, and may drive users away, as it's no fun having everything slow down, and having to wait as it refreshes itself every time you want to do something there...