Safari Web Content taking 3/4 my RAM?

Yes I've tried emptying the cache manualy and running Onyx, yet the problem persists. I have no extensions.

I do not know whether this is a solution, but it seems that you can simply force quit the Safari Web Content application in the Activity Monitor. I do not know what this does, but it automatically restarted on my machine since I had several Safari windows open. Before the Force Quit, Safari Web Content was sucking about 1.3GB, after it was at 290MB. Still not great, but a heck of a lot better.

When I Force Quit the Safari Web Content application, the Safari window I had open refreshed, but the several I had minimized all were fine.

While clearly not a fix, this might be a bandaid until Apple fixes this memory suck.

Yes that is what I've had to do, but that isn't really a solution. Force quiting safari flash and then Safari Web Content effectively restarts safari while maintaining the windows. It litterally quits the content of the web pages, and forces you to reload all open windows. I do this multiple times a day. It is very annoying.

Just woke up to find my 8 month-old, Core i5, 4GB, iMac give me 3 minutes of spinning beachball before it would even display the login screen. Safari Web Content is taking up multiple GB of RAM and making the iMac generally very sluggish. My G4 Powerbook didn't have this problem, and that was 8 years old!

Really hope this problem is fixed in Mountain Lion 😟

Can't confirm!

I can confirm the same behaviour on my Wife's iMac w/4GB of RAM. Safari Web Process would often take >3GB causing the machine to swap heavily and become un-responsive.

We both regularily have 10+ tabs open at any time (I am much worse, often having 15+ in each Safari Window and 2 - 3 Safari Windows open at all times). Yet it happens to her quite often (not 100% of the time), but never to me. Hmmm.... We are both running Lion with the same version of Safari.

This morning I spent a bit of time investigating by doing the following:

- I forced the Safari Web Content Process to quit and watched it in Activity Monitor as it restarted

- 1 by 1 I clicked on her tabs to reload the page content and watched the memory consumption of the Safari Web Content Process. It seemed to go up ~50MB per tab, some pages took a few seconds to stabilize, others seemed to go up or down by between 5MB - 10MB every few seconds as the page sat idle (likely some AJAX processing or other dynamic content is causing this). While some of them fluctuated, it wasn't constant growth, just a small up and down in the allocation of memory.

- When I got the her Yahoo Mail page, the memory increased as usual, but then grew by ~10MB every few seconds and never stopped. Clicking on a folder within her mail caused it to jump between 50MB - 100MB and then contiune to climb by ~10MB every few seconds. Leaving that page open in a tab (active or not doesn't matter) will quickly consume all available memory on the machine and cause it to start swapping and become un-responsive.

So, I would recommend following the steps above to identify if you too have a particular web page(s) that is causing the problem (or making it worse, depending on your perspective on this issue).

Based on what I've seen personally, I wouldn't categorize this as a "Memory Leak" in Safari. Closing the tab with Yahoo Mail not only stops the continual growth, but the memory allocation of the Safari Web Content Process drops. If Safari was leaking, the memory would not be released until the process was ended.

Just my 2 cents, I hope this helps some of you to narrow down what is causing this. For my wife the solution is simple, close Yahoo when she's done checking her mail. No more beachball, no more thrashing hard drive, no more slow machine.

Good Luck!

I have also seen the same behavior happen only with certain websites. I don't use yahoo mail, but I have left a facebook tab open and found it hugely unresponsive a few hours later. So I'm suspecting it may be something to do with self-updating websites. Facebook will regularly update the window with new posts, messages, whatever as if it was an application, but it seems this regular ajaxy checking seems to take multiple MB constantly for some reason.

Another possibility is that it's the ads being swapped out for new ones. The old ads could be stuck in memory and the memory would be growing that way…

I have this problem with or without windows open. No websites seem to be particularly better or worse, and closing windows doesn't seem to remedy the situation. If safari is left running in the background with no windows open I still get this problem.

I've been noticing this issue as well and i have 16GB RAM. I bought an app called FreeMemoryPro - it works pretty well. But while monitoring my usage I quit safair and got close to 10GB of RAM back! I'm working in Chrome thi smorning and it doesn't even compare in memory usage - 250MB?

The sad thing is that Apple requires one to use Safari to access store appointments, one on one, etc. If they require it, they should create something that works!

I also see this after some days of usage, my MBA is getting impossible to use until I kill Safari...

The (effective) trick of quitting Safari Web Process (e.g, using Activity Monitor) appears to no longer work in Mountain Lion (OS 10.8 / Safari 6.0): doing so causes the Safari app to quit as well.

I have this same problem on ML, especially when loading flash content. What worked for me is to install the extension Click To Flash...

Same problem. But I feel good because this was the only reason I was trying Safari apart from Firefox. So, no reason to abandon Firefox now 👿

This issue has been bugging me through multiple releases of the OS and Safari. It's astonishing to close all of Safari's windows and see that Safari Web Content is still using 4GB of RAM! (and the machine is running like molasses).

It's just not credible that there is nothing Apple can do to fix this!

I am on a MacBook with 10.7.5, 8GB of RAM and with 7 (seven) Safari 6.02 windows open (nothing special going on - one small .pdf, nyt.com, a few simple sites) Safari Web Content is taking 5 and I have 23mb of free RAM. Safari is taking up 65% of physical RAM for seven pages, and that does not include the 'Safari' process. Beyond frustrating that this persists. How can Apple not cure this issue, or at least explain it if not solvable?