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OS X Lion Bug: Safari guzzling massive amounts of RAM

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On my MBP, activity monitor(when it finally opens up!) shows safari web content is using up 800mb's+, and only shows 46mb's free out of 4gb's. I've been using firefox for the time being until I get time to try and fix everything.
 
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Some very good points about Safari, that I didn't know. To me, Safari always seemed to be a bit sluggish when compared to Google Chrome and Firefox. The speed of Safari on Lion does seem better, but in some of the usual webpages I visit, Safari still seems slower. Thank God no one hasn't really set out to expoit the Safari browser, but with the rise in popularity of the Mac, that may be coming down the road. That recent Malware (I believe it was Mac Defender) issue had everyone including Apple worried, with a update for then Snow Leopard, put out almost immediately. It is just a matter of time before the Windows based virus guru's start focusing more of their attention on Mac's OS X:(

May God Bless,

Ed
 

dtravis7


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I find Safari 5.1 much faster overall than FF and even Chrome with some sites. Sorry but that is what I see here.
 

chscag

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Same here. Safari is the speed king as far as I'm concerned. The only other browser that comes close is Opera.
 

vansmith

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Same here. Safari is the speed king as far as I'm concerned. The only other browser that comes close is Opera.
Another Opera appreciator! We're slowly growing in number. Haha.

So, my "experiment" is done (the quotation marks are there on purpose). Some background: I have a 2.1 C2D MB with 4GB of RAM. I also want to suggest that the results here may not be unique to Safari nor am I out to make Safari look good or bad.

Results
I took memory usage info every hour for a seven hour period so there are eight readings in total (I counted the initial values). Here's what I found:
saf_mem.png
The drastic change from 2:10 to 3:10 was caused by running the SunSpider javascript benchmark. What's surprising is that Safari had to eat up close to 1.2GB just to make it through the benchmark (for some reason).

Next up, Flash video:
saf_mem_flash.png
There seems to be a slight bump and then it seems to level off (perhaps it's worth noting that it was two 20 min. video and not one 40 min. video). Note the Flash version - I am using the 11 beta so I don't know how this would have affected the results compared to 10.3.

Take all of this with a grain of salt as this was very unscientific. I thought it might be interesting nonetheless. Here is the spreadsheet with some more data regarding each measurement.
 
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^^^^ Thanks for sharing that Van. Very interesting results

Just read a LINK courtesy of Randy.B.Singer and i like what was said about Safari and makes a lot a sense about the 2 different processes

Charlie Miller of Accuvant, well-known in the Mac hacking community for his exploitations of various Mac vulnerabilities, is particularly pleased to see significant changes in Safari (he has been known to use weaknesses in Safari as part of his techniques). The latest version (v5.1) separates the internal processes into two camps: the user interface, and the Webkit engine that handles the parsing of web content. The change was made to limit the damage that could be done, and effectively sandboxes each of the two "sides" to prevent any error in one affecting the other.
 

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Thanks Van for all the testing. Can you try that with FF5 and Chrome? I might do that with FF5 later this evening and will report back.
 

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I'm fairly busy tonight and tomorrow during the day but I might be able to get to one of the two sometime this weekend. I'd be interested to see how Chrome's custom sandboxing feature handles leaks and strenuous testing compared to Safari.
 
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Well I'd rather use Safari than Chrome so Google can spy on me and eat my babies.
 

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Well I'd rather use Safari than Chrome so Google can spy on me and eat my babies.

roflol

And I'm one of those Opera fans also.

1Password, I'm looking at you now that Opera has extensions. Forget Chrome. Or at least hurry up and get it done and get started on an Opera extension so I can move back to Opera in both OS X and Windows.
 

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Well I'd rather use Safari than Chrome so Google can spy on me and eat my babies.
The baby eating thing has been confirmed but the jury is still out on the spying bit.

Glad to see the Opera contingent speaking up. All four of us need to be heard. ;)
 
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Glad to see the Opera contingent speaking up. All four of us need to be heard. ;)

Well if we recruit the Russian hacking community here, your numbers will grow.
 

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They don't speak up - they wouldn't be good hackers if they did. They're more anonymous than Anonymous. ;)
 

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Sorry I never got the time to test FF5. I will tonight and see what memory usage numbers I get. Van if you can try Chrome and all it's processes.
 

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