Kirk McElhearn, writing for Macworld:
Right now, my iMac’s uptime (the time since my last restart) is nearly four days. And Safari is using 6.81GB of RAM, by far the largest memory hog on my Mac. The app itself is using about 1GB, but each tab, each window also uses RAM. You can see this in Activity Monitor (located in /Applications/Utilities), by selecting the Memory tab.
And:
As you can see [in the image in Kirk’s original post], the most egregious RAM user is Google Docs, which requires more than 500MB RAM for a single, blank document. Open a few more Google docs, and you’ll see that number quickly balloon. (It’s not clear whether this is Google’s fault or Apple’s fault.)
A lot of this memory usage depends on how long the pages or tabs have been open. If I launch Safari on my 12-inch MacBook, and open the exact same tabs, it only uses 2.8GB RAM. Of course, if I leave them open for a long time, that RAM usage will increase.
I fired up Activity Monitor on my Mac and tapped the Memory tab. My Safari only used 321MB (Less than 1/3 of Kirk’s 1GB).
I then created a new Google Doc blank document which used 193MB (again, much less than Kirk’s result), and added more Google Doc documents, each of which weighed in at slightly less than the original.
I don’t doubt Kirk’s results, but I suspect that there’s more here than simply Safari being a memory hog. It’d be interesting to see a more controlled experiment, loading known pages in a controlled environment after a fresh restart.
Officially, there is no perfect browser for Mac OS. Safari started strong but has really gone down the tubes.
ad blockers?
I agree. Even with ad blockers installed, & 5 open tabs (+10 pins) is using 2+ GB of RAM. The bigger issue I have seen (nonscientific) is that once you close tabs, there is some residual RAM left that doesn’t get released. If I would ever get some time, I would love trying to run Safari by itself, open 5 tabs, close them all, open up the same 5 tabs again and see how much the memory space changes.
Perhaps his reading list is to fault? If it’s sizable.
I’ve always found Safari is using huge amounts of memory. Right now as I look at the memory (not compressed memory) my Facebook tab is using 4.37GB and the loopinsight tab (which I just opened) is using 593MB. Something is not right.
Doesn’t matter how many tabs you have open, leave Safari running, open Activity Monitor > Memory and watch what happens over time.
“I see this, therefore it’s universal” is a 101 level mistake. Right now Safari is eating 114m with 3 tabs open. Not 1gig. Cheap “journalism”.
Also, program don’t simply hang onto RAM and not give it up if the system needs it. This isn’t System 7.
PS: Uh.. how is it Safari’s issue if the Docs code eats RAM? Unless it doesn’t take that much as a tab in Chrome and Firefox…
Open a few more Google docs, and you’ll see that number quickly balloon. (It’s not clear whether this is Google’s fault or Apple’s fault.) Uh… open that in Chrome. Then Firefox. Jesus, this is what tech journalism has come to?
I don’t use reading list. I did, however, find a bunch of items in it, most likely things that accidentally got added when I hit a similar keyboard shortcut. I deleted them, and a Google doc takes up more than 540 MB.
The article is about Safari. Not all web browsers. It’s very clear in the article; which you may have read.
Jesus, what have comments come to?
I think Apple should make you head of their Q.A. department. We could use a keener eye on this and other app faux pas.
I keep a pinned tab for home.nest.com to have quick access to half a dozen thermostats in the office. Amazingly, the site can barely keep itself updated (I always have to force refresh it), and even then, it manages to use 1GB of RAM.
I don’t use Google Docs. My Facebook RAM usage is about 120MB… a little more than half of yours. Not sure what the difference would be, unless it’s ad blocking. Only 25MB “real,” though.
But if your biggest tab is a Google Doc taking 540MB, you should probably be looking in Google’s direction. How much of that is real? (My guess is a lot more than 25MB, but I’m curious.)
Edit: Actually, forget real memory. Seems to bounce all over the place. I was hoping to find a view that avoided Safari’s shared memory, but that ain’t it.
It’s a flat line. What am I supposed to see?
Leave it open for long enough and you will see the amount of RAM Safari (and its daughter processes) consumes gradually ramp up over time for no rhyme or reason.
Nah, still flat. I wonder if it’s fixed in this build. If so, it’s gonna be a crowd pleaser for sure.
(Or it could absolutely be a specific bug I’m just not hitting.)
over time means more than just a few minutes bro. Let it run overnight. And I’m not talking about Safari and its daughter processes in the process list
But how can you decide this is a problem with Safari, rather than the website itself, if you don’t compare it to other browsers?
My experience with Safari has consistently been that it is the least resource-demanding browser on the Mac. Usually by a decent margin. Thats my experience at least. So its kind of hard to complain about Safaris memory usage, if it is beating all other browsers.
How so? Still seems great to me. If you were arguing the Windows version has gone down the tubes, then yea no question. The Sierra version of Safari performs great for me.