Slow system response due to Safari Web Content CPU usage

Question

Slow system response due to Safari Web Content CPU usage

I have about 200 Tabs open and a DSL line. Safari Web Content frequently uses near or more than 100% of my CPU time, and the computer runs dead slow.

How can I modify Web Content so that it does not refresh tabs in the background?

Maybe I can at least get a "toggle" to control when it tries to access that huge junk server at "deploy.akamaitechnologies.com" ???

Right now its taking over 30 seconds to respond to clicks, and then the same sort of delay before drawing the new screen.

Safari-OTHER, Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on Jun 18, 2012 1:13 PM

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Answer 1

Jun 18, 2012 1:26 PM in response to firstname lastname

Hi..

Right now its taking over 30 seconds to respond to clicks, and then the same sort of delay before drawing the new screen.

I have about 200 Tabs open and a DSL line. Safari Web Content frequently uses near or more than 100% of my CPU time, and the computer runs dead slow.

200 tabs open using DSL ..

Of course it's going to slow your Mac down. Too many open tabs simultaenously on a DSL connection.

You could try empting the Safari cache more often but I doubt that's going to help much with that much content running on 200 tabs. And it won't make any difference regarding servers.

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Answer 2

Jun 18, 2012 1:54 PM in response to Carolyn Samit

>

200 tabs open using DSL ..

Of course it's going to slow your Mac down.

>

Only because Safari behaves badly. I dont desire it to keep "refreshing" things in the background. Make it stop! The user should have control over this. Ideally, the user should be able to control the background refreshing of every tab by toggling it on or off.

Refreshing even a single tab wastes CPU time when the user has another application on top.

There should be some hack to Web Content.

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Answer 3

Jun 18, 2012 1:56 PM in response to firstname lastname

I am not surprised you are having problems. Screen dumps of all tabs are stored in RAM. No matter how much RAM you have it is likely that your computer is continually moving chunks of memory to and from disk.

I don't use tabs and Safari on my 733 MHz G4+ is reasonably fast. Whilst tabs are very useful for slow lines I find they help little on my 5 Mb/s ADSL line.

Either switch tabs off or reduce them to less than 10.

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Answer 4

Jun 18, 2012 2:01 PM in response to Neville Hillyer

>Screen dumps of all tabs are stored in RAM.

Another bad behavior.

Along with re-opening all pages from the last session: Safari tries to open them all simultaneously, instead of figuring out the capacity of the pipe and putting the tabs into a queue. This results in "time out" errors, and processes getting hung up & spinning forever.

Would FireFox behave better given my need to have a lot of tabs open?

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Answer 5

Jun 18, 2012 2:14 PM in response to firstname lastname

Not on a Mac.

I have recently moved from Firefox. It is made cross platform by being script intensive. It is like running via emulation.

Safari is much closer to the OS and hence faster, especially on Macs.

Your earlier remark about tabs refreshing is probably related to web content of open pages - all tabs are hidden open pages.

I am not saying things could not be done in a better way but I think all browsers work this way at this time.

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Answer 6

Jun 18, 2012 2:20 PM in response to Neville Hillyer

Most of the time, the response is not too slow.

But sometimes, one of those 200 background processes gets stuck, and I have no way of determining WHICH it is, other than looking at each tab one by one.

Sometimes I can fix it by going into Activity Monitor and quitting Safari Web Content, but that is a PIA. And sometimes it doesn't work; the entire system response is affected.

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Answer 7

stuchel

Level 1

14 points

Nov 6, 2013 6:40 AM in response to firstname lastname

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3190569?answerId=23685234022#23685234022&tstart=0#23685234

Hope this helps you!!

Stuart

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Answer 8

Nov 6, 2013 11:35 AM in response to firstname lastname

stuchel -- searched for those four letters in my Bookmarks but not found.

Still having the problem.

From what I read about Mavericks it might solve the tabs problem but it takes away your ability to use ClickToFlash. Instead you are forced to dis/allow flash on a tab by tab or site by site basis, and the choices allowed are clunky.

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Answer 9

stuchel

Level 1

14 points

Nov 6, 2013 11:39 AM in response to firstname lastname

It doesn't have to specifically be that download link, what I'm saying is it was an entry in my reading list causing the issue! If possible, delete ALL entries from reading list, maybe even bookmarks! If you hover over Safari Web Content in activity monitor, it will tell you what site is causing the issue!

Stuart

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Answer 10

Nov 6, 2013 11:59 AM in response to firstname lastname

Just updated by ClickToFlash & ClickToPlugin extensions.

How do I know if Extensions are globally OFF or ON ???

The slider has a grey half and a white half. I would presume that the GREY half indicates the state. But when I make the GREY half move to the right next to ON, the popup box no longer shows me the list of installed extensions. Which makes me think they are hidden because they are off. **** developers created a switch with ambiguous labeling !!!!!

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Answer 11

Nov 6, 2013 12:02 PM in response to firstname lastname

F*ck. Looks like in order to turn it ON, I need to click upon the OFF side of the switch. STUPID STUPID STUPID DEVELOPERS

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Answer 12

Nov 6, 2013 4:27 PM in response to stuchel

" If you hover over Safari Web Content in activity monitor, it will tell you what site is causing the issue!"

You mean Mavericks does this? Unsure about wanting to change from OSX 10.6.8, except for the Safari issue. How much more memory does Mavericks use up?

I have a 2.66 Ghz Intel Core i7 macbook pro. Don't recall the model year...

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