Safari consumes too much RAM

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Safari consumes too much RAM

Hi everybody,

After upgrading my Mid-2011 iMac from Lion to Mountain Lion I am experiencing a weird memory issue with Safari. I have 8 Gb of RAM installed and my Mac runs like a charm except when Safari is open... when I access certain websites such as Facebook, Safari web content process grows fast and takes 4 or even 5 Gb of RAM, which of course makes my iMac slow and severely reduce the performance of the other apps, but as soon I close Safari I got my free memory back. This happens only with certain sites, accessing Netflix -for example- Safari web content process only takes about 200 Mb of RAM, which is remarkable considering that it involves HD video playback.

Any clues of what's going on with Safari? Perhaps it's not Safari's flaw itself but something awkward is happening with facebook... I don't know. Any thoughts will be appreciated.

iMac (27-inch Mid 2011), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.3)

Posted on May 3, 2013 9:08 AM

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CarlAVII

Community Specialist

May 6, 2013 7:25 AM in response to fonturbel

Howdy, fonturbel!

A couple of things that may help sort your hungry hungry Safari:

Safari: Unsupported third-party add-ons may cause Safari to unexpectedly quit or have performance issues

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3230

Unsupported third-party add-ons may add features to Safari or change its appearance. If you use unsupported third-party add-ons you may encounter issues such as these:

Safari quits unexpectedly

Safari runs slowly

Safari is unable to download files

Other unexpected behavior

Note: This article does not apply to Internet Plug-Ins such as QuickTime, Java and Adobe Flash. It also does not apply to Safari Extensions.

The article goes on to describe where to look for these add-ons, and how to remove them and determine which (if any) may be causing issues.

Furthermore, the same process can be applied to Safari Extensions:

Safari 6 (OS X Mountain Lion): Extensions preferences

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH11933

Off/On switch | To turn all extensions on or off, click the switch. For certain extensions, the change does not take effect until you navigate to a new page.

Once all extensions are disabled, try enabling one at a time and testing to see if the issue occurs, until you locate the offending add-on or extension.

Cheers,

Allen

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