In his O'Reilly weblog post Safari Sucks Memory
, Roger Weeks writes:
The killer problem that I just noticed today is that Safari positively EATS memory. I was working in Cacti, and noticed that my system had really slowed to a crawl. The browser window took forever to update, and I had a lot of disk activity. I fired up top and WHOA! I only have 2M of free RAM and the system is swapping like mad.
Safari was taking up 216M of RSIZE memory in top. That's half of my system total! Again, this is a single web site. I have a single window open, at this time displaying a list of 25 graphs which I was editing one at a time.
216M of RAM! What on earth are you doing to me, Apple?
Tell me about it. I had a similar experience and called Apple support before I noticed the memory sucking power of Safari. My Powerbook was burning up and absolutely crawling. This behavior was exactly how my last Powerbook before it died on me one New Years Eve.
I know I just need to switch to FireFox, but old habits die hard. I'm also a slut for esthetics which Safari still does better then FireFox.
Hopefully Safari 2 will do better when I finally get around to installing my Tiger upgrade that's been collecting dust.
<p>In his O'Reilly weblog post <q>Safari Sucks Memory</q>, Roger Weeks <a href="http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/7152">writes</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The killer problem that I just noticed today is that Safari positively EATS memory. I was working in Cacti, and noticed that my system had really slowed to a crawl. The browser window took forever to update, and I had a lot of disk activity. I fired up top and WHOA! I only have 2M of free RAM and the system is swapping like mad.</p>
<p>Safari was taking up 216M of RSIZE memory in top. That's half of my system total! Again, this is a single web site. I have a single window open, at this time displaying a list of 25 graphs which I was editing one at a time.</p>
<p>216M of RAM! What on earth are you doing to me, Apple?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Tell me about it. I had a similar experience and called Apple support before I noticed the memory sucking power of Safari. My Powerbook was burning up and absolutely crawling. This behavior was exactly how my last Powerbook before it <a href="http://www.timaoutloud.org/archives/000334.html">died on me one New Years Eve</a>. </p>
<p>I know I just need to switch to FireFox, but old habits die hard. I'm also a slut for esthetics which Safari still does better then FireFox.</p>
<p>Hopefully Safari 2 will do better when I finally get around to installing my Tiger upgrade that's been collecting dust.</p>
