Safari Web Content eating up 2GB of my RAM?

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Safari Web Content eating up 2GB of my RAM?

I posted about my iMac crashing some months ago, after having some concerns that Safari was causing my system to hang up and/or crash; but I was told that my ESET AntiVirus was at fault and that I should uninstall it despite it being no problem for over a year that I've had it.

However, I now finally have evidence at hand that Safari IS indeed the problem and would like to know if anyone has been having this issue. I currently have no tabs open other than the page that I am now using to compose this text, however Safari Web Content is somehow still using up 1.21GB of RAM on it's own despite only having one page up. I only have 4GB of RAM installed since purchase, however since this issue is fairly reoccurring I have as of today ordered some more compatible RAM to upgrade to 8GB to see if this helps the problem. However this is not a solution as Safari should not be consuming this much memory on it's own anyway.

With 3 or more tabs open, my RAM had dropped to literally 21MB free, and over 2GB was used by Safari. Why is it doing this, is this normal? How can it be fixed?

OS X 10.8.4

Safari 6.0.5

iMac 21.5 inch late 2009

3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

4.0GB DDR3 1066MHz RAM

iMac, OS X Mountain Lion

Posted on Sep 4, 2013 10:31 AM

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Answer 1

Sep 4, 2013 2:16 PM in response to Ethanace

Yes, Safari Web Content can use a lot of RAM. However, I don't think that would be the cause of crashing; lots of memory use rarely causes crashes. Poorly written software that runs in kernel space (AV software fits this), can cause this.

Safari Web Content is "caching" a lot of stuff. More than I'd like it to. If you have 47 tabs open, and close them down to 1, SWC will still often be taking up a lot of RAM. If you quit and restart Safari it will give the memory back, though in general if the system is under memory pressure I think SWC will also release some more RAM. In general I never notice this to be an issue.

I think with OS X Mavericks things may improve as well, based on details on the Safari tab, as well as with "Compressed Memory" which would help as your system approaches using all its RAM:

http://www.apple.com/osx/preview/advanced-technologies.html

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