Safari Web Content using 2GB of RAM?

Safari on my iMac with v10.8.4 and Safari 6.0.5 often uses up to 3GB of RAM and that's with five or six other applications open simulateneously.

Never had a problem.

And BTW, whoever suggested uninstaling the ESET a/v software was trying to do you a favor.

Either ClamXavor Sophosare Mountain Lion compatible and safer to use on your Mac.

And make sure Gatekeeper is enabled to prevent malware > OS X: About Gatekeeper

Ethanace wrote:

I have as of today ordered some more compatible RAM to upgrade to 8GB to see if this helps the problem

I'm confident you will see a dramatic difference. Safari, like most all browsers these days, are huge RAM hogs.

Safari should not be consuming this much memory on it's own anyway.

I don't know what makes you believe that.

Hi,

Just jumping in here as I'm having a similar problem, but I have 16GB of RAM. My symptoms are not just seeing how much RAM is being used by Safari web content (3+ GB) in Activity Monitor, but that it has only *recently* started, and it is slowing Safari down to a crawl... I get the spinning beachball a lot now, often for a minute or more at a time. when I hit the down arrow to move down a webpage. I'm not doing anything special on these webpages, these are just webpages with text, some graphics (and sometimes Flash video, which is a whole other can of worms), but the point is: I've ALWAYS been doing that. Nothing has changed. I had it with 10.8.4 and now 10.8.5. I have enough RAM to run on so I really wouldn't care how much RAM web content was taking if it wasn't making my machine suddenly - and sporadically - run so slow.

Any thoughts? I'm starting to see other threads on this topic, and some are saying "wait for 10.9." Well, yeah, but I'm an audio guy so I'm not going bleeding edge with 10.9 for a while, until they get everything sort first with software and drivers.

Best,

Joel

2008 MacPro (3,1), OS 10.8.5, 16 GB RAM, 1 TB internal boot etc. (yes, I have plenty of room on my boot drive, over 500 GB).

Message was edited by: joelfriedman

joelfriedman wrote:

Hi,

I get the spinning beachball a lot now, often for a minute or more at a time.

Start with Flash Player Help / Uninstall Flash Player | Mac OS and then reinstall it from http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/. If you still see it check Macintosh OS X Beachballs!.

Hi,

Thank you for the reply. Just did the Flash portion. The web content is down to 1.83 GB for now. I did get one brief beachball. I'll look at the Beachball thread later if need be. Most appreciated!

Bets,

Joel

MadMacs0 wrote:

Safari should not be consuming this much memory on it's own anyway.

I don't know what makes you believe that.

Really? Really, really? You think it's acceptable that Safari should consume more memory than all of the OS X operating system itself? And you think this is normal?

Can we get a real solution to this? Upgrading RAM isn't always feasible, and it seems like the solutions that have been posted have been in ignorance. Upgrading RAM will definitely help, but that doesn't address the issue of why Safari was using this much memory in the first place.

In reality, this is a bug. Safari uses 2GB of RAM when running for a long time. When Safari is closed and reopened with the same tabs, that amount of memory drops to around 125MB.

In the world of software coding, this is known as a "memory leak". It needs to be reported to Apple. They need to fix this.

In the meantime, you'll probably have to switch to a different browser.

grimsrudjk wrote:

MadMacs0 wrote:

Safari should not be consuming this much memory on it's own anyway.

I don't know what makes you believe that.

Really? Really, really? You think it's acceptable that Safari should consume more memory than all of the OS X operating system itself? And you think this is normal?

I didn't say it was acceptable or normal, just that it does. At this moment it is using 3.58GB with my setup.

It needs to be reported to Apple. They need to fix this.

And it should be, so have at it: https://www.apple.com/feedback/safari.html. Discussing it here almost certainly isn't going to get anything fixed.

Message was edited by: MadMacs0

Added: Closing and re-opening gets it down to 1.8GB.