Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Safari 15 is very slow
- Thread starter radogado
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Its possible that you have not checked activity monitor recently. And its possible that Safari has become slow because of the memory leak bug. And you may not know you have it until it gets so bad that your mac runs out of virtual memory space and tells you that you hav e no more application memory.
You, like me and almost everyone who uses Monterey,. has the dreaded memory leak bug. Apple will fix it eventually.
Before then there is a simple temporary solution. Presumably you have several desktops on your mac. I have 11 at the moment. Go to one you don’t use often and open up Activity Monitor(its in your applications and on every mac). Leave it open all the time. Click on the column that tells you the use of memory by system processes and apps. Highlight(click on) any that look completely out of control, and then click on the little icon with the x in the middle of a circle. Choose force quit. If its an app it will quit and you will have to restart it. If its a process(weird names mostly) then it will quit but come back almost instantly in the small size it's supposed to be. For me about 15 minutes ago I noticed that the most common culprit, Control Center(which normally uses about 26 mb of memory) was slowly sucking more and was up to 144mb. Earlier this week I found it at 14 GB.
You can keep these little buggers from stealing memory by just keeping an eye on them. Be advised: if WindowServer is up at 1gb then its probably doing it too, and if you force quit that one, your screen will go black for about 5 seconds while the OS puts it back, and then you will have to type in your machine password again.
I have actually begun shutting the mac down now at the end of the day rather than going to sleep because of the fact that many many processes and apps are leaking just a little bit. And they start to add up. Safari has turned out to be a major leaker now, and you can see it in Activity Monitor where every tab is sucking up 400 mb or more.
I notice that the cache for Safari is completely out of control most of the time.
Hope this helps.
You, like me and almost everyone who uses Monterey,. has the dreaded memory leak bug. Apple will fix it eventually.
Before then there is a simple temporary solution. Presumably you have several desktops on your mac. I have 11 at the moment. Go to one you don’t use often and open up Activity Monitor(its in your applications and on every mac). Leave it open all the time. Click on the column that tells you the use of memory by system processes and apps. Highlight(click on) any that look completely out of control, and then click on the little icon with the x in the middle of a circle. Choose force quit. If its an app it will quit and you will have to restart it. If its a process(weird names mostly) then it will quit but come back almost instantly in the small size it's supposed to be. For me about 15 minutes ago I noticed that the most common culprit, Control Center(which normally uses about 26 mb of memory) was slowly sucking more and was up to 144mb. Earlier this week I found it at 14 GB.
You can keep these little buggers from stealing memory by just keeping an eye on them. Be advised: if WindowServer is up at 1gb then its probably doing it too, and if you force quit that one, your screen will go black for about 5 seconds while the OS puts it back, and then you will have to type in your machine password again.
I have actually begun shutting the mac down now at the end of the day rather than going to sleep because of the fact that many many processes and apps are leaking just a little bit. And they start to add up. Safari has turned out to be a major leaker now, and you can see it in Activity Monitor where every tab is sucking up 400 mb or more.
I notice that the cache for Safari is completely out of control most of the time.
Hope this helps.
Thanks, just killed WindowServer (1.7 GB) and Safari 15 seems to be a little faster (feels like locked 30 fps), but nowhere as fast as Chrome, Firefox and Safari 14. This issue also appears on macOS 11. A user shouldn't check Activity Monitor anyway...
For me the incredibly slow performance of Safari 15.1 was definitely the fault of having Private Relay turned on.
Go to System Preferences / Network and uncheck "Use iCloud Private Relay. I did this and Safari went from enragingly slow to bloody fast. Private Relay is a great idea, but just two slow for default use at this time.
Go to System Preferences / Network and uncheck "Use iCloud Private Relay. I did this and Safari went from enragingly slow to bloody fast. Private Relay is a great idea, but just two slow for default use at this time.
Or: Go to System Preferences, Apple ID, Private Relay Options, Turn Off.
Also, enable Safari Developer Mode, and Empty Caches regularly: Safari Preferences, Advanced, Show Develop menu in menu bar.
WindowServer seems better (fixed?) in 12.1 beta 2.
Edit. Maybe WindowServer isn't fixed. I just ran into excessive CPU use. Memory use OK, and seems better than previously.
Also, enable Safari Developer Mode, and Empty Caches regularly: Safari Preferences, Advanced, Show Develop menu in menu bar.
Edit. Maybe WindowServer isn't fixed. I just ran into excessive CPU use. Memory use OK, and seems better than previously.
Last edited:
Forgot about this. I had a few issues coming over from Catalina 2013imac to 24" and the start was led by Apple support using migration assistant. Several OS re installs with migration assistant (some with Apple on the phone) and still a mess. Short while ago I re installed and did not use migration assistant and I now seem to have a stable system and Safari is working.
I am using safari with private relay on a 2014 patched MacBook Air and don't seem to have that problem with it being slow, I am quite impressed with how well it works, especially being an unsupported machine.
Big improvement on Safari 15.4 (tested on M1). It seems the above issues are finally fixed. I'd really like to know what happened with development and why performance dropped in 15.0–15.3.
