When will Safari Content memory leak be fixed

firehat · Aug 19, 2011

The first update for Lion has come and gone and it looks like the memory leak through the Safari Content process has not been fixed. I've seen threads mentioning this here and several threads at MacRumors and Mac Support, so why is Apple not addressing this?

This is the most frustrated I've ever been with Apple.

dtravis7 · Aug 19, 2011

Do know that the older versions of Safari before 5.1 had a quite bad memory leak. Firefox has for years and years. Finally the new version is better but still goes up quite high over the course of the day of use.

People all gripped because Safari did not have Sandboxing, Well now it's going to take some time to get that process under control also.

It's true 5.1 does (ON SOME SYSTEMS more than others) does take quite a bit or memory after many hours of usage, but it still seems responsive here. I am not in a hurry and I am sure that will be taken care of over time.

mrplow · Aug 19, 2011

It's never really been an issue for me. It'd be worse on machines without much ram I guess. Worst case cmd+q and restart Safari.

Maybe I'm just used to it. My Firefox install on Windows at work regularly sits at 300mb+ with just a three or four tabs open!

chscag · Aug 19, 2011

No problem here either. I can run Safari all day long and still only use between 200 - 300 MB of memory. FF uses more memory - as others have stated.

vansmith · Aug 19, 2011

The memory usage issue with Safari seems to be limited and I'm willing to bet that it has to do with how one uses the browser. In my own testing (here), Safari had to be allocated 1.2GB of memory just to make it through a JS benchmark and never gave it up. If you don't visit anything that doesn't require Safari to be allocated more memory, you probably won't notice anything.

chscag · Aug 19, 2011

That's likely the reason I never observe Safari using much more than 200 to 300 MB of memory. I rarely if ever watch videos or anything that uses Flash. I'm usually either on here or reading news from various sites such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, etc.

vansmith · Aug 19, 2011

That's likely the reason. It would seem then that Safari has an issue releasing memory which isn't a problem if you do light browsing like you do. I might test this theory - do some light browsing for an hour and then watching something on Netflix for an hour to see if memory gets eaten up during the movie/show.

firehat · Aug 19, 2011

I don't think this is a Flash issue (and neither do most of the people in the various threads exploring it). I've had Safari open for less than an hour with no more than three tabs at once, and no Flash, and the Safari web content process is over 500mb right now with Safari itself over 300.

fiume · Aug 25, 2011

found

I almost stopped memory leaking when disabled full screen apps. Then I lost most of gestures possibility. Problem could be gestures, and not Safari. Without gestures there is almost no signs of memory leaking. Try it.

bobtomay · Aug 25, 2011

Wow, just wow.

Mine is right now sitting at:

I have 180MB free memory out of 4GB. The only apps open are Mail and Safari.

edit:
Quitting Safari and free memory jumped the 180MB to 2.04GB.
So I was still using 2GB of memory with not a single application open except Mail.

Well, I have to take that back. The following are running full time:
Time Machine
MobileMe
DropBox - 35MB
Evernote - 33MB
Window Magnet - 9MB
1Password - 15MB
TotalFinder - 4MB

BrianLachoreVPI · Aug 25, 2011

Yes - 5.1 can get really leaky sometimes. I posted some screenshots somewhere where I was over 2.5GB just for Safari.

Even more than the memory leakage - I want 1P and Evernote back to working correctly (meaning as it used to) with Safari. The move to 5.1 broke a lot of things.

dsa · Aug 27, 2011

This problem has quick fix

just set "Run in 32 bit mode" chekbox and you will happy

bobtomay · Aug 27, 2011

dsa said:
just set "Run in 32 bit mode" chekbox and you will happy

Sorry, but that's not a solution.

Even in the screen shot you used, you were still using over 1 GB of RAM for Safari.

dsa · Aug 27, 2011

bobtomay said:
Sorry, but that's not a solution.

Even in the screen shot you used, you were still using over 1 GB of RAM for Safari.

And what's wrong with it? It is the browser what was working over a day on 4Gb box - even if 1GB seems to be big memory consumption (in fact it is not - any other browser shoed the same in such condition) but it is not a leak - the memory stays in the same state an do not cause the system to stall, spinball to appear and the scrolling is as smooth as it used to be.

BrianLachoreVPI · Oct 13, 2011

Looks like Apple is addressing this with the latest Safari update:

This update contains various bug fixes and improvements to performance, stability, compatibility, accessibility and security, including fixes that:

Improve JavaScript performance up to 13% over Safari 5.1*
Address issues that could cause hangs and excessive memory usage
Improve stability when using Find, dragging tabs, and managing extensions
Improve stability for netflix.com and other websites that use the Silverlight plug-in
Address an issue that could prevent East Asian character input into webpages with Flash content
Address an issue that could cause History items to appear incorrectly
Improve printing from Safari
Address an issue that could prevent the Google Safe Browsing Service from updating

For detailed information on the security content of this update, please visit this site: Apple security updates

*Testing conducted by Apple in August 2011 on a 2.7GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5-based iMac 21.5-inch system using Mac OS X v10.6.8 Snow Leopard and configured with 4GB of RAM and an AMD Radeon HD 6770M with 512MB of VRAM. JavaScript benchmark based on SunSpider 0.9.1. Performance will vary based on system configuration, network connection, and other factors.

dtravis7 · Oct 17, 2011

Brian, Not sure it's completely fixed, but 100% better here. After 10.7.1 it was normally every day going up to close to 2GB (Both Processes together), so I backed off and was using Chrome Canary. Since the 10.7.2 update the other day I have never seen it doing what I normally do go about 500MB or so. For sure they fixed something. I still feel Chrome Canary takes less but I won't complain about 500 or so MB. Will keep an eye on it and report back.

vansmith · Oct 17, 2011

Wel,, I just ran Sunspider in Safari 5.1.1 in Lion (10.7.2) and when the test was done, Safari was using 1.52GB (I started the test right after opening it). I did the test in Chrome for the sake of comparison. Chrome was using 369.7MB when it started and was using 538.8MB when it was done. Not...even...close.

In my eyes, the memory problem still persists. The browser continues to consume RAM until it reaches a point well beyond what is actually required. From where I sit, I'm still waiting for a fix.

BrianLachoreVPI · Oct 17, 2011

I have it on good authority that the fix hasn't been released to Canada yet.

vansmith · Oct 17, 2011

I suppose it would be better to give us the actual fix than subject us to these minor updates that don't actually work. I'm okay with that.

dtravis7 · Oct 17, 2011

Here Van it's releasing memory after a few minutes. Did a lot of heavy flash and within a few minutes the memory usage went down and it went into the inactive RAM. That is what I have seen here so far anyway.

When will Safari Content memory leak be fixed

firehat

dtravis7

mrplow

chscag

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vansmith

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chscag

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vansmith

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firehat

fiume

bobtomay

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BrianLachoreVPI

dsa

bobtomay

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dsa

BrianLachoreVPI

dtravis7

vansmith

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vansmith

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