Q: Safari Web Content high CPU usage

I was having the exact same problem.  After upgrading to Lion I noticed that Safari was chewing up huge amounts of RAM and processor.  I left Safari running all night one night and when I got up in the morning my processor and RAM were maxed out and I could hardly do anything due to the fact that all of my system resources were being allocated to Safari.  I went in and dissabled all of my extensions and now it's running perfectly fine.  I guess this is just the result of a new product with third party extensions that aren't quite all there yet. 

when i first addressed the issue, i uninstalled the light dimmer extension (the one for watching videos). the only other extension i have running is ad blocker. safari has been running fine since my first fix but today i noticed the issue returned. this time i did a restart of the computer and all is well. anybody noticing an issue with other browsers. i stopped using firefox when i upgraded to lion and safari 5.1

now this is weird. I just checked my activity monitor. ive got 16 MB of free memory out of 4 GB. ive got itunes, spotify, safari activily running. 5 tabs open in safari (one is netflix). im noticed an direct lacg in performance. websites still appear to load in a timely manner. streaming video isnt choppy. before i get heckled, im looking for overall sluggish behavior from my computer, i understand my network connection greatly impacts my browser performance.

I was having these same issues of sluggishness after installing Lion.  Since disabling Ad Blocker, things are running much smoother.  Thanks for the tip.

Jeff

This just seems very funny considering that on my MacBook Pro, Firefox ate up to 1 GB of RAM and between 50 to 80% of CPU after running for a day or two with 100+ tabs.

Now, after going to about:config and making sure that the background tabs are not loading, it takes up to 500 MB RAM and 2-3 % with 100+ tabs and after running an entire day.

What I'm saying is that you should consider yourself lucky for not using Firefox Safari it's a small kid in comparison

Another user here found the problem on my MacPro with SnowLeopard and only one Safari Extension installed, disabled it and now can run four or five pages each with ten tabs open and web content only using 600 MB as compared to previously using 5 to 6 GB with the 1Password extension enabled. Have posted on the Agile forums and they are working on a fix, lots of trouble for all the third party vendors trying to get stabilized with the new Safari version 5.1. At first I thought it was Apple problem but turns out Safari runs better than previous version once extension is disabled.

Read post over on Agile forums for details:

http://forum.agile.ws/index.php?/topic/6015-high-ram-and-cpu-usage-related-to-1p assword-extension/

Hope this is helpful to a few of you, it had been dragging my system to a crawl, now all is well again.

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.

Hi guys - just posted this on a similar thread.

I've been reading this thread with interest. I have a similar issue with RAM guzzling but in Mail. It is using 2.21GB of my 4GB RAM and everythime I quit it (which I try not to do) it takes 15 mins to start up fully.

Today by mistake I used an incorrect SMTP server to send a message. As it kept trying to send the message it increased the RAM usage to 3.99GB!

I know the thread is mainly about Safari - I have not dared to open it, but using Firefox instead. Just wondered if you had any ideas for a Mail fix?

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

Uninstalling extensions seems to have worked for me too.  Safari's memory footprint is much smaller now.  Thanks for the tip!

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...

To get Safari Web Content under control, I had to close all window and restart Safari.