Q: Safari Web Content high CPU usage

I'll add my voice to the crowd. Safari Web Content periodically spiking to 110% CPU usage w/ Real Mem use at 5Gb (Core i5 w/ 12Gb RAM). From what I understand, this is the result of a long-standing memory bug introduced in Snow Leopard that is (supposedly) finally squashed in Mavericks.

Yeah, I'm now looking at my S Web Content topping 4GB & up to 135% CPU Usage, with Safari about 100% & up to a GB of RAM....  This is sick, as I have about half as many windows open as usual, and do have Click To PlugIn installed so I've not got lots of active flash stuff going on.  I sure hope Maverick deals with this persistant & maddening energy drain...

Update: after removing Sophos, I also removed Dropbox and even a bigger benefit.  The mem expansion is still there, much less of a problem and the MBP is definitely much more responsive now.   I still have to purge occasionally but nothing like before.  Safari now seems to be reasonable again and so if Firefox.

Do you mean you removed Dropbox from your apps folder, where did you remove it from?  And what's Sophos?

I removed Dropbox from the Mac by following the Dropbox terminal instructions.  The dropbox folder remains but the app and the CPU cycles disappear.  For some reason Dropbox was consuming CPU and there was stuff in the dropbox but nothing new.  I had read elsewhere it was a problem for some.

The Sophos reference is an anti-virus app for the Mac, it appeared to be scanning everything from dropbox to browser content and more.  Safari and Firefox were almost unusable.   When I removed the app, the load and temps came way back down.  I have a 2008 MBP.

Thanks for the info, but my Dropbox uses no CPU (.1 to .2%), and I don't have Sophos, so I must keep scratching my head....

On Andy's recommendation I installed Ghostery a couple of weeks ago. I ticked all the block boxes and it really did the trick! No more over 100% CPU and full fan spin for me.

I have not even tried to research where the problem was- just happy to have the solution.

You might want to try removing it as a check.  Neither of those Apps showed any CPU when I checked Activity Monitor.  The virus scanner and dropbox were not even near the top of any list but made a huge difference when removed.   Whatever has been added has to be suspect even if it doesn't appear in the CPU rankings especially things like virus scanner that protect themselves from being removed by staying out of sight.  I could be wrong.

Supporting my earlier point that CPU usage is browser-agnostic, a NextWeb article talks about Chrome problems, and solutions.

One solution that no one has mentioned is to simply collect links systematically, rather than having dozens of windows or tabs open. If you had Word open with 20 or 30 documents, you might feel a bit sheepish when your computer grinds to a halt. Why is your browser different? Also, if Safari causes you problems, why haven't you already switched to Chrome, FireFox, or Opera?

Maybe someone will create an article on LifeHacker that talks about managing multiple open tabs . Although I'm guilty as the next person (or I wouldn't be visiting this topic) there's a threshold beyond which open tabs are just a bit self-indulgent. That we expect Apple or Google or Mozilla to solve problems that we create, (since we can solve the problem by closing a few tabs or windows) seems a little backwards. Most of our toasters still don't get it right, and our toasts burns, or it doesn't quite brown the bread. Why do you think a complex amalgam of hardware and software networking to undisciplined sites worlds away is going to work perfectly?

That said, I've been free of problems for almost a month following the basic schema laid out here by me and others.

I tried Ghostery, but blocking everything screwed up some of the sites I use, like LinkedIn, etc... I wish there was some simple way to know which things to Whitelist, and which things are unneeded & an invasion that might slow things down.

JohnMM, what do you mean by collecting links systematically?  Do you mean copying them to a document file, or?  I often have 50-60 tabs open, however, even with far fewer, I've had the typical Safari slow downs, freezes, crashes, etc. If it were only when I had a lot of tabs open, I'd not be complaining so much. And if Apple believes the browser is fine, and the problems are mainly via too many tabs, why don't they just create a happening tab manager, that gives us a way to access many tabs, without it burdening the functioning of Safari? That would seem to me, a no-brainer. If they weaned everyone off of having so many open, with a way to get to the ones we want, it would be a win-win..... unless the issues many of us have are not solely caused by lots of open tabs...

I have no idea about "collecting links systematically" either.

What I tend to do, to curb Safari, is only have as many tabs open as fit in its window and split the load across 3-4 different browsers. If need be open open another window in one of them for a few more tabs.

Another issue I haven't gotten to the bottom of, yet, is that sometimes things just refuse to load in Safari, possibly because they're hanging on some bit from some 3rd party service. No data comes in (network monitor) then hit refresh, and boom it is all there.

I'm not an expert on this stuff but I had similar symptoms on both Chrome and Safari where the cpu was 20% on each and the browsers just refused to load.   It wasn't my browsers though, it was the anti-virus program and perhaps the other app I removed (Dropbox).   The browser CPU is now 0.2 again on my old 2008 MBP and I didn't change anything else.  Oh, I did fix a cable modem speed (outbound) problem but that was after I saw the CPU improvement from dropping the app.  Just a thought.

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.