Safari Web Content taking 3/4 my RAM?

Question

Level 1

63 points

Safari Web Content taking 3/4 my RAM?

I have a single Safari tab open, and a subprocess called Safari Web Content is taking 1.5GB of ram.

I don't think there is any flash or anything on the page: http://explosm.net/comics/1949/

Why does Safari need so much memory? My Macbook only has 2GB in total, so everything is crawling. Is this a bug, or by design? I really like Safari and I don't want to have to switch to Chromium, but if Safari doesn't work well on 2GB machines, I guess I have no choice 😟

Version 5.1 (7534.48.3) on Lion

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on Aug 11, 2011 6:58 AM

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Answer 1

CT

Level 7

23,981 points

Aug 11, 2011 7:00 AM in response to ninja9578

(1) Safari is indeed a RAM PIG.

(2) 2 GB RAM, being the minimum allowed, is really not enough for good performance.

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Answer 2

ninja9578 Author

Level 1

63 points

Aug 22, 2011 12:31 PM in response to CT

Actually, after searching the web, it appears to be a well known memory leak. Why is it taking so long for Apple to fix it? I can usually track down a memory leak within a few hours, and really obscure ones within a few days, especially with Instruments or Valgrind. I'm using Chrome now as the default browser, but I would love to go back to Safari when this is fixed.

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Answer 3

thomas_r.

Level 7

31,983 points

Aug 22, 2011 12:57 PM in response to ninja9578

Don't be too sure. Lots of people like to blame memory leaks for things when there isn't really a memory leak. I'm not seeing reports of a memory leak in Safari 5.1 anywhere reputable... just in user forums.

As CT says, 2 GB is the minimum required to run Lion, and it really should be 4 GB. Web browsing is a memory-heavy activity, and Lion requires more RAM than Snow Leopard did, squeezing your memory tighter. Upgrade to 4 GB of RAM minimum if you can. 8 GB would be even better, if your machine can support it.

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Answer 4

ninja9578 Author

Level 1

63 points

Aug 26, 2011 8:32 AM in response to thomas_r.

Being a software engineer, I know a memory leak's behavior when I see it.

Try this: Open up a dozen tabs in safari, all different sites. Look at your memory. Close all but one tab, look at your memory again. See how it barely dropped at all? That is indicitive behavior of a memory leak.

Another experiment is to browse the web for a few minutes, and graph the memory consumed. It will always just keep going up, which means that something that was put in ram on each page, is staying in RAM, even when navigated away. This is classic memory leak behavior.

Since no leaks are detected by Instruments, it is most likely something being stored in a cache and never being removed, which isn't a true "memory leak" meaning orphaned blocks, but a leak bug none-the-less.

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Answer 5

dsa.me

Level 1

0 points

Aug 27, 2011 3:07 AM in response to ninja9578

This is not a memory leak. Running the browser in 32-bit mode solves the problems: http://mytech.dsa.me/en/2011/08/27/safari-5-1-memory-leak-solve/

You will be magically brought in the old good days when the grass was greener.

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Answer 6

Aug 29, 2011 9:43 AM in response to dsa.me

I already run it in 32-bit mode and have done so for about three months - the problem appeared sometime during that period and persists. If these are the good old days, the grass is brown.

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Answer 7

Sep 7, 2011 2:45 PM in response to ninja9578

I have been having the same symptoms for months ... and I do not run Lion (yet). I have 4GB on my macbook pro and when I have safari open for a few hours my available memory goes down to nearly nothing.

I dont get what the "web content " is but it grows and grows to nearly 1.5GB or more at times. A friend of mine runs same version (5.1) and does NOT have this problem (he is using 64bit).. in fact, he does NOT have a "web content" process ... nonte to be found.

My only fix now is to shut down safari and start it up again every few hours . very annoying.

any thoughts?

L

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Answer 8

Sep 8, 2011 10:16 AM in response to lreinstein

Just stop Safari Web Content in Activity Monitor. You can leave Safari open and your pages will refresh on their own.

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Answer 9

Sep 8, 2011 4:39 PM in response to Roy Levien

Making Safari open in 32 Bit mode seems to not be an option with Lion, and killing Safari Web Content is a very temporary solution; minutes later it is back and growning. I have 8 GB on my MacBook Pro and have seen over 2 GB for Safari + Safari Web Content. Seems like a bug or poor design to me.

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Answer 10

Sep 10, 2011 2:22 PM in response to dsa.me

dsa.me wrote:

This is not a memory leak. Running the browser in 32-bit mode solves the problems: http://mytech.dsa.me/en/2011/08/27/safari-5-1-memory-leak-solve/

You will be magically brought in the old good days when the grass was greener.

I don't understand why many people keep posting that link. If one looks at the Activity Monitor picture the memory usage is not that good. 1GB total for running Safari out of 3.75GB RAM isn't really a a great deal. Sure, it depends on how many tabs the guy had opened during the day.

Anyway, running Safari in 32 bit mode doesn't change much. Safari is simply not releasing the memory for the old pages. As it has been said it is not a proper memory leak because Safari seems to be aware it's retaining that memory, but it is still annoying nonetheless.

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Answer 11

dsa.me

Level 1

0 points

Sep 11, 2011 7:39 PM in response to Michelasso

Would you like to call the name of the other browser what runs for more than 24 hours and stays below 1GB? I definitely will use it.

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Answer 12

Sep 12, 2011 2:13 AM in response to dsa.me

dsa.me wrote:

Would you like to call the name of the other browser what runs for more than 24 hours and stays below 1GB? I definitely will use it.

Safari 5.05 in Snow Leopard. A dozen tabs varying, 6-800 MB. Not after 24 hours only, after 2 weeks. I just closed the MacBook lid when not using it.

A couple of hours after installing Lion the first thing I've got has been a page out thrashing. So much that I wrote a message to a friend of mine asking if he was getting the same. He said everything was fine. Disabling AdBlock improved the mem usage (not a problem in SL), but it still gets pretty high.

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Answer 13

Sep 12, 2011 3:10 AM in response to ninja9578

Safari IS a memory pig. Only been surfing news pages

and this site for about an hour, memory usage already

greater than 500 meg, and climbing!

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Answer 14

ninja9578 Author

Level 1

63 points

Sep 12, 2011 6:59 AM in response to dsa.me

@dsa.me

Safari before Lion, Chromium, even Interent Explorer running on the PC next to me isn't taking nearly that much memory and it's been open for a week. Safari 5 on Mac is being outperformed by IE9 on Win7, sad.

If Safari Web Content is really just the cache, then Apple engineers should be smart enough to use a multilayered cache, which performs much faster, and doesn't take up nearly the same amount of RAM as a flat cache.

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Answer 15

jh7468

Level 1

0 points

Sep 17, 2011 5:47 AM in response to dsa.me

1G? Give me a break! These people are having Safari gobble up upwards of 2G! Even if you have 4G on your system, that's half of your memory taken by your browser, which is pathetic. Bottom line is that Safari has been a memory hog for years, and everyone (Apple included) has known about it. What's really sad s that the problem has actually gotten WORSE as updates are released, culminating in some extravagant memory hogging with this latest release. The only "fix" is to close Safari after a few hours and reopen into the last open tabs. Or use Firefox...

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