Safari Web Content taking 3/4 my RAM?

Firefox? Don't make me laughing: http://www.google.ru/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=firefox+memory+consumption&ie =UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&redir_esc=&ei=SUh1TtyDC8bT4QTL1-CHDQ

FF differs from Safari with one feature - besides memory consumption it will start to eat your CPU: http://www.google.ru/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=firefox+memory+consumption&ie =UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&redir_esc=&ei=SUh1TtyDC8bT4QTL1-CHDQ#sclient=psy-ab&hl=ru&safe=o ff&client=safari&rls=en&source=hp&q=firefox+cpu+consumption&pbx=1&oq=firefox+cpu +consumption&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=113768l114483l0l114892l3l3l0l0l0l2l55 3l1077l5-2l2l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=62b320f605c74d11&biw=1142&bih=652

G-Chrome won't save you either - it just pretends to be small, but it runs lot of process what consume not less memory than the others. And aside it is buggy as ****.

We are doing websites and have to work with all browsers, i admitted "there's no good browser anymore" and stopped to complain about i could not fix. Some can try to lie to themselves "The Safari 5.0 consumed less than 1GB".

The real problem is users loyalty to the Brands. They "love" Steve, Bill, Linus instead of demand. I hate the fools welcome Lion instead of beating Jobs with their legs "When the **** at last you will remove you fancy random focus restoring by Spaces? - i again pressed Command-Q in the wrong application"

It must be admitted Jobs blew the Apple Bulb but he also mined Apple with broken development process.

dsa.me wrote:

We are doing websites and have to work with all browsers, i admitted "there's no good browser anymore" and stopped to complain about i could not fix.

That is my conclusion as well. I might be naive but to me 150+ MB just to open a particular page (Gamespot) is a lot of memory. And OS X Lion (which I love but...) doesn't help either. It takes twice the memory of Snow Leopard on nearly anything. Even System preferences can consume as much as 200MB of RAM. The 2GB RAM minimum requirement is a joke. 4GB is the minimum and still one can face some page out activity with it.

I'm having similar issues with Safari 5.1.3 on OS X Lion 10.7.3

Even if I have a Mac Pro with 12GB RAM and two Quadcore-Processors, Safari is getting slower after some hours of surfing the web.

Checking the Activity Monitor shows the "Safari Web Content" process running on 33,3% and using between 1 and 2GB of RAM... Observing it shows me that it normally runs with an average of 350MB most of the time, but somehow takes load after a lot of browsing.

Mostly I'm browsing image boards like Deviantart and also Flash Websites like Newgrounds (but I don't think it's Flash related as this is using a separate process and if the flash-plugin fails, Safari mostly crashes).

I have normally not more then 4 or 5 Tabs open, mostly I'm using 2....

Unfortunately I didn't had the luck to see the process becoming bigger, so I guess it must be growing suddenly and very quickly.

I will run some tests afterwards and I will keep you posted if I have any news.

ninja --

How often do you empty your Safari cache? Do you leave it open all the time, or shut it down at night?

Now after some tests I guess the memory leaks are because of the Safari Web Workers and also a minor RAM-eater is AdBlocker...

I used http://peacekeeper.futuremark.com/run.action to run some compatibility tests. I noted that when it starts running the Web Workers tests for the the second more intense testing my "Safari Web Content" process is jumping from 150MB up to 500MB and not going back after the tests finish, not even after browsing some time... no it even gets worse.

The second time I ran the testing the "Safari Web Content" process crashed and restarted without any message resulting in reloading the website and starting the tests all over again. After this I noticed that there are now two "Safari Web Content" processes in my Activity Monitor, I needed to force quite both...

Now to AdBlocker... When I go to the website http://www.redmondpie.com/ with AdBlocker disabled, the "Safari Web Content" process is only using 250MB of RAM, having Ad Blocker enabled results in almost 500MB of used RAM.

Conclusion, but no fix: I noticed that some tasks result in increasing the "Safari Web Content" process, but it also decreases after you finish the task. Other tasks increase the memory usage of the process permanently until you restart the browser or quit the process.

Over time with my Mac I have used three web broswers. Firstly I stated off with Firefox but after a while I found it was running too slowly with quite a few tabs open and closing tbas didn't help. Restarting it did of course.

So I switched to Sarfari because I found I didn't have to close it the same. I was running adblocker. Then after a time Sarfari suffered a smilar problem. So I researched it and people said their were memory leaks. Whether it's a technically correct leak or not, memory isn't being realsed when Web pages are closed so you end up restarting the programme to free up memory.

So I switched to Chrome and so far I haven't had to restart it due to memory issues. Yes there are more processes running but combined they do not take up the same amount of memory as Safari did over time. To be fair I don't have an adblocker running so that might make a difference.

Now I don't based these results on how much memory just one process is using, although I do check that. I base it on how much free memory I have remaining when I'm running VM Fusion with Windows 7 [up to 2GB alloted]; Mail and a web browser at the same time in Lion.

Running all three and other smaller programmes with Chrome has less memory issues than either Firefox or Safarii. That's not to say I don't run out of memory form time to time but I can get it back when closing tabs in Chrome or if there is a prooblem, it's caused by another app altogether.

Perhaps Apple are taking the view that in time people will have more memory so why should we bother to fix such issues. If you don't have enough memory not our fault could also be another view point. Buy a new Mac if it's that much a problem could be another view point held.

I see the exact thing. I've even seen Safari Web Content over 2GB by itself.

Admittedly my computer use profile is part of it, but I think it's reasonable to consider my laptop a toaster, always on, rebooted only when needed to install updates, thankfully much less frequently than the Windows 7 laptop my company provides. My laptop is a mid-2011 MBP with 8GB RAM, which should be plenty for consumer uses (mail, web, photo, and music).

I leave Safari running, walk away from a page that I may come back to in a few days, etc. I sometimes have 3-4 windows with 6-7 tabs each, all with work in progress or news sites I just refresh periodically to catch the headlines.

This seems to be in conflict with the way Safari was written from a memory consumption standpoint. Start cold (which I do now and then to free up RAM), and Safari + SWContent are 100MB or so. Time moves forward and the number only goes up. Its like each time you refresh a page it grabs more RAM and never releases the old.

I've seen the same behavior with IE 8 and 9 on Windoze, so it seems the same programmers are writing apps for all platforms, so maybe they're working on the side for memory manufacturers... 🙂

I wouldn't care if they would only cap it at some user-configurable value (100MB, 500MB, 1GB, something). Safari has a setting for Max Database Usage that is small numbers, and I have no idea what DB that is talking about.

Even if it's grabbing fresh RAM for every byte on every page, there is NO WAY I'm downloading multi-GB of web content. What exactly IS in Safari Web Content, anyway?

Bottom line, it may not be a leak, but it's crappy memory management practices.

rustys6004 wrote:

Even if it's grabbing fresh RAM for every byte on every page, there is NO WAY I'm downloading multi-GB of web content. What exactly IS in Safari Web Content, anyway?

Bottom line, it may not be a leak, but it's crappy memory management practices.

SWC in simple words is the sandboxed web browser. The one managing all pages contents, downloads etc. The other one showing, Safari indeed, should be user interface (windows, tabs, editors etc.).

I totally agree that Safari has a crappy memory management. I wish Apple could make a "light" (no memory cache?) option to keep Safari memory usage the same of when it just started. With a slow connection there isn't any perfomance improvement anyway. Actually it gets worse.

I have been subscribed to this discussion for a while now, hoping for a resolution. No such luck.

A few days ago, I updated Safari to 5.1.4. As soon as I did, 1Password stopped working. At the vendor's website, they said the "fix" was to run Safari in 64-bit mode. I had switched to 32-bit quite a while ago, for this issue or something related to it. So I changed back to 64 ...

1Password started working, the vitual memory usage has stayed rather high, but the CPU usage has gone down from 20-30% to 5-10%. And Safari has not gone spinning-beachball on me even once.

Is there even an option to enable 64-bit mode in Lion? I thought all stock applications were 64 bit by default now...

All I know is I am getting incredibly frustrated with something that is causing incredible slow-downs and just general hangs in Lion and I can't narrow it down to any specific application. I am using a brand new 15" MBP with the 2.4 i7 and 4GB RAM and I am honestly having more crashes and unstable OS responses than I was on my old 2.2GHz C2D MBP from 2007.

There is no excuse for this. This is a brand new computer. I can be running three apps - Safari, iTunes and Transmission and have 0.1GB of free memory. I have two tabs open in Safari, Facebook and this page, and Safari Web Content is using almost 2GB of RAM. Nothing else even comes close.

The biggest problem I have with this is that no matter what browser I use it's the same general problem -- it works perfectly for a day or two then all **** breaks loose. I used to use Chrome and it just stopped working properly at all. Now I'm using Safari and was enjoying it but now it works terribly. I can disable all extensions and have the same problems. Restart and have the same problem. I guess I'll try Firefox or Opera next but I don't know how those well-known memory hogs will help.

Sigh.

At times, having a browser open will take up 2-3 GB of my 4GB of RAM...

I have the problem much less with other browsers on my 27" mid 2011 imac (Lion) - any other browser is better - Firefox,Chrome, Camino. They all use resources much more effeciently than Safari. There are a lot of therories in here as to why. Apple seems to just blame third party software - but what if it is all removed and still...? In any case other browsers with the same software don't have the issue. Safri will often use 60% of my processor and all available ram 2+ gigs before all the paging out just to keep a few tabs open - flash or no flash. It is intermitant behavior but can be counted on at some point in any long or short session. Closing all the tabs and quiting Safri is the only real solution. I liked Safari once but have now switched to Chrome as my default browser. This is an issue that has gone on long enough. Apple needs to alocate some resources to their Mac applications again (OS included) or why bother with these machines? If they are willing to ignore this for so long on the Macs than how long before they start ignoring all the other new toys as well? Come on Apple be the company I pay that little extra for! Otherwise, I will certainly be willing to pay less down the road for someone elses buggy systems. That said I have to say I generally find the machine and the software quite good. Lion uses a lot of ram right off the top though. Four gigs will make it mostly keep working smoothly enough (depending on what you do) but realistically six to eight should be regarded as the minumum. If you run Safari though, make that twenty four gigs of ram and expect it to eventually use up even that. Apple fix Safari please!

I have essentially the same issue. I am running lion on a macbook pro with 4gigs of RAM. If I close all auxillary processes I have about 3 gigs of RAM available. If I leave safari open on any webpage for any length of time the remainder of my RAM will be taken up by Safari Web Content. This started last week for me, and I can think of no discernable cause.

Also periodicly while I'm using safari with activity monitor in the background the virtual memory will jump to 16EB for a fraction of a second, and then back. If your not familiar an ExaByte is 1 billion GB. I wish my computer had that much RAM, but sadly it doesn't. Something is obviously wrong.

James --

Have you read the other posts here? And tried any solutions offered?

1. Empty your Cache.

2. What third-party internet or "security" apps or extensions are you running?