Safari hogging all my RAM!!!

[YoYoMa]

I keep my Mac running pretty much all the time and what I notice is, after visiting a few websites, my RAM keeps disappearing. Even if I close all of the Safari windows, my RAM will still be gone. Then, when I quit safari, I'll get a HUGE amount of RAM back, sometimes over 256MB. Is this normal?

PS-- When I say a few websites, I mean less than ten. The way I browse usually, I'll keep maybe four tabs open, and rotate sites between them, but usually don't have to visit more than 10 sites for me to notice this massive irritation. I literally have to keep quitting and reopening Safari.

Am I the only one? Does anyone know why it's happening and how to prevent it?

 

[clevin]

1. large amount of flash, pictures on a webpage normally consume more ram
2. you are not talking about virtue memory, are you?

 

[mmmcheese]

I keep my Mac running pretty much all the time and what I notice is, after visiting a few websites, my RAM keeps disappearing. Even if I close all of the Safari windows, my RAM will still be gone. Then, when I quit safari, I'll get a HUGE amount of RAM back, sometimes over 256MB. Is this normal?

PS-- When I say a few websites, I mean less than ten. The way I browse usually, I'll keep maybe four tabs open, and rotate sites between them, but usually don't have to visit more than 10 sites for me to notice this massive irritation. I literally have to keep quitting and reopening Safari.

Am I the only one? Does anyone know why it's happening and how to prevent it?

That's because of caching....it's a feature, not a bug.

 

[YoYoMa]

Not a lot of flash things at all. Most of the sites I frequent are forums and such. I'll keep an eye on it in regards to this though. Could you give me a more detailed description of what caching is and it's purpose? Also, am I the only one that is bothered by the fact that I have to completely quit out of Safari multiple times a day to keep my RAM at a decant level? Quite an inconvenience for a "feature" that I've previously gotten along fine without.

 

[Schnebar]

Maybe you are running safari under rosetta?

Go to get info to check.

 

[benthewraith]

I keep my Mac running pretty much all the time and what I notice is, after visiting a few websites, my RAM keeps disappearing. Even if I close all of the Safari windows, my RAM will still be gone. Then, when I quit safari, I'll get a HUGE amount of RAM back, sometimes over 256MB. Is this normal?

PS-- When I say a few websites, I mean less than ten. The way I browse usually, I'll keep maybe four tabs open, and rotate sites between them, but usually don't have to visit more than 10 sites for me to notice this massive irritation. I literally have to keep quitting and reopening Safari.

Am I the only one? Does anyone know why it's happening and how to prevent it?

Safari's a RAM hog, and forums, well, yeah, you're going to lose some RAM because of all the vBulletin stuff.

 

[NATO]

Over time (days/weeks), I've noticed Safari's 'Real Memory' usage can increase to 700MB+

It's usually just a case of quitting and restarting to reclaim all that lost RAM.

Really needs to be something that is fixed in a future version of Safari.

 

[Counterfit]

Caching makes frequently visited pages load faster by keeping a local copy of unchanged portions (images and such). You can empty it by pressing option-command-E (or choosing "Empty Cache" from the Safari menu ). However, this has, on occasion, actually caused Safari to use more of my RAM (usually when several other RAM-hungry apps are also running.)

 

[FFTT]

Safari is most definitely a memory hog.

It's even funner on 2.4kb dial-up

Even with a G5 2.0 my system will lock up every once in a while, but
mostly when linking to a .pdf document online.

I get beach balled almost every time.

 

[csubear]

I've recently noticed this as well. I've had it consume up to 600mb of real memory. This is a recent development, and I would assume that apple changed their caching algorithm, or they introduced a rather large memory leak. Either way the memory usage never goes down. Its getting to the point that I am going to stop using safari, and start using firefox.

 

[furious]

no need to worry it is normal