Kirk McElhearn:
It’s time to tip a hat to Apple for a major change they’ve made in their latest desktop operating system, macOS High Sierra. Last year, I wrote about how Safari was a memory hog. At times, it would be using 5,6, even 8 or 9 GB of memory. I would have to quit it every few days to get it to stop being sluggish.
Since the release of High Sierra, I have noticed that Safari’s memory usage has dropped a great deal. Right now, with my iMac running for more than four days, Safari is only using about 3 GB of RAM. And this with more than a dozen tabs open.
- I’ve noticed the same thing on my setup.
- Notice Kirk is using iStat Menus, a nice little utility, wraps a lot of information in a tiny interface, all under a single menu bar icon. Check it out.
That is excellent news.
I had stopped tracking, because I had complained and nothing had changed, but that’s just great, great news.
A little late, but great nonetheless.
As opposed to Firefox, which became even more of a dog w v56. If I am running FF, it needs to be quit and relaunched a few times a day. Safari is quite well behaved by comparison. As a Web Designer, I like/em> Chrome, but it’s creepy semi-spyware connection to the Google mothership is a little off-putting.
More than a dozen tabs? For 3GB RAM!?
I have 104 tabs open right now, which is pretty typical, and Safari shows it’s using 741 MB via Activity Monitor.
iPhoto is hogging 1.27 GB. Kernel task, 5.29 GB. What the hell is kernel task doing?