Q: Safari Web Content high CPU usage

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?

Clear history, restart Safari, and you get your memory back. I'll do this till Apple fixes it with an update.

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

If you have Rapport, from Trusteer, installed- that could be your problem. It was on mine.  Seems many people are having the same problem with this software.

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.

This problem is not an extension thing.  If you remove all your extensions it still happens routinely.

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

this got nothing to do with extensions, I got none ans it still happens. only thing that helps is to quit process of safari web content via activity monitor in utilities. but it helps only till it gets overloaded again. hope apple will fix this somehow soon, cause its really not comfortable now