Is Safari a system resource hog?

Yeah, I've noticed Safari use a lot of real memory and like 4 gigs of virtual memory. Can't it restrict itself to like... 2 gigs? That should totally be enough. Firefox will be running for the same amount of time and take a lot less.

I love Safari and I'm wondering, how does Bonjour affect the performance of Safari?

Hey, Hyatt's response is enough to get me to try Webkit nightly again. http://nightly.webkit.org/

Much to my delight, ForgetMeNot works with the current build. No guarantee that'll last though... Anyway. Let's see if this works better.

Of course it's a resource hog. A web browser should not go from 50MB on start-up and then rise to anything from 250MB to 1GB of real memory during average use. As much as I loved Safari I had to stop using it because after barely an hour of use it was grinding my system down (I have 2GB of RAM).

I now use Camino which typically hovers around 75MB and my Mac is now far more responsive :)

So THAT's what the problem is. I was always blaming Textmate for the resource hoggery, but now I know the truth.

I think a bit more time in Camino should help me a bit.

My Safari uses a crapload of RAM, but then again I often have 30-40 tabs open.

The problem isn't Safari or any other browser. It's the web pages (including TUAW). My companies intranet home page is very complex and contains lots of information, but uses very few resources. Maybe the difference with the commercial sites is because of adware.

I have a somewhat heavy Safari constellation here: on my 30'' Monitor I have to large windows open side by side, each with 8 tabs open. This monster eats up much memory and hangs sometimes. Its very comfortable, but if I use say Parallels, I have to close Safari first, to get fast performance...

mk

a web navigator will use memory

of course

it will put all it can in cache. it's nORMAL. It should give back the memory if an other application actively used need more physical memory.

Virtual Memory is hem.. just "virtual". it's not so simple to say "my program use 1.5GB of virtual so it takes 1.5GB of memory" , of course not

it could be huge hundreds MB of memory shared by an other, it could be memory put in the swap disk (so your precious _physical_ memory is still free) and so on.

the main point is a program can use GB of memory , it's not bad, IF your actively used application has alwasy free physical memory to avoid to use the swap disk.

OS X makes complexes adjustments to avoid that. Safari (or Firefox) try to indicate to Os X when cached information can be put away from the physical memory into swap.

and Yes, Firefox is designed to grow its cache. its cache reaaaally help to improve speed. Of course it use memory , but not necessarily physical memory all the time.

We don't care about the "virtual memory" size. the virtual size encompass physical+swap+whatever shared+whatever system libraries or operating structures the applications need to exist. Many of that is not in the physical memory all the time. Many is in fact shared with others applications or even the core operating system.

Definitely a resource hog. I have one forum I use a lot, and when using Safari I have to Quit and launch 1-3 times per day, because it's like a leaky bucket. Just look at this, this is from a couple of hours surfing and with NO windows open.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/caldaean/405465067/