Safari is consuming more ram than Chrome

[Jimmy_Banks]

Most tabs consume 800mb - 1.3gb on my M1 Mac.

This is unacceptable. Almost feels like a memory leak, more likely it just isn't clearing caches, an Apple development failure either way; you have to regularly close a tab as it continues to creep up in memory usage.

Twitter is the worst offender, sometimes hitting 5gb just due to scrolling.

 

[leman]

Most tabs consume 800mb - 1.3gb on my M1 Mac.

This is unacceptable. Almost feels like a memory leak, more likely it just isn't clearing caches, an Apple development failure either way; you have to regularly close a tab as it continues to creep up in memory usage.

Twitter is the worst offender, sometimes hitting 5gb just due to scrolling.

How is your memory pressure and system responsiveness? If you experience no performance issues, why would it matter?

 

[coffeemilktea]

I wonder if the lack of a good adblocker on Safari affects this. I've got uBlock Origin, DecentralEyes, Privacy Badger, etc., etc., on Chrome, but Safari doesn't have any of those (or any proper extension support, really), so it's harder to get rid of the ads/trackers/etc that are using up system resources. 😅

 

[Jimmy_Banks]

How is your memory pressure and system responsiveness? If you experience no performance issues, why would it matter?

Literally always in the yellow and extremely slow. People don't notice these ram issues without having first noticed a performance problem.

It's a major PITA having to constantly monitor Activity Monitor

 

[svenmany]

Literally always in the yellow and extremely slow. People don't notice these ram issues without having first noticed a performance problem.

It's a major PITA having to constantly monitor Activity Monitor

Do you have some mainstream website, which doesn't require logging in, that exhibits that major memory load? I would like to try to reproduce it.

 

[Jimmy_Banks]

Do you have some mainstream website, which doesn't require logging in, that exhibits that major memory load? I would like to try to reproduce it.

forums.macrumors.com: 850mb right now from leaving this tab open today.

 

[phrehdd]

I've dealt with Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Brave, and a few others. They all have their moments of taking up massive amounts of RAM. If I recall correctly, there was a time when Opera had some preferences to control the amount of RAM it could use but I haven't visited that software for a long while.

Working on a M1 Mini with 16gig of RAM - if I had a few tabs open on Safari or Chrome, it would impair some art apps I would have open. There is no real means to make the RAM accessible to other apps without a manual "flush" of the memory. For me this left a couple of options - don't have browsers open with multiple tabs when working or, get a system that has enough RAM to avoid swaps etc. I opted for the latter and feel a bit cheated I had to even think about all this.

From my experience, best to worst - Firefox, Brave, Safari, Chrome. I am sure others will have a very different order.

Since websites are out ridiculous with what they do when engaging browsers, that leaves it up to Apple to sooner or later give a damn and make Safari a better app out the door to engage this issue of RAM consumption. Will they? Maybe in a few years and expect us to think. how great they are for doing something that should have been done out the door with the OS and M1 Macs.

 

[Tagbert]

Most tabs consume 800mb - 1.3gb on my M1 Mac.

This is unacceptable. Almost feels like a memory leak, more likely it just isn't clearing caches, an Apple development failure either way; you have to regularly close a tab as it continues to creep up in memory usage.

Twitter is the worst offender, sometimes hitting 5gb just due to scrolling.

I regularly see those kinds of memory allocations for tabs such as forums.macrumors.com and gmail on Chrome and Firefox as well as Safari when the tabs have been open for an extended period of time. It seems to be related to how those apps use JavaScript.

From what I have seen, this does not result in slowdown of other apps. The tabs seem to to be swapped to SSD when memory is needed by other apps. Overall memory pressure usually remains in the green. I frequently use the Affinity design apps with browsers, music, photos, notes, and probably other apps all running together without running into memory problems. I wonder what the cause might be for such variable experiences.

 

[phrehdd]

I regularly see those kinds of memory allocations for tabs such as forums.macrumors.com and gmail on Chrome and Firefox as well as Safari when the tabs have been open for an extended period of time. It seems to be related to how those apps use JavaScript.

From what I have seen, this does not result in slowdown of other apps. The tabs seem to to be swapped to SSD when memory is needed by other apps. Overall memory pressure usually remains in the green. I frequently use the Affinity design apps with browsers, music, photos, notes, and probably other apps all running together without running into memory problems. I wonder what the cause might be for such variable experiences.

"Variable" is a good word given that my Mini M1 512/16 did have challenges with Affinity Photo when Web pages were open, email, messages and a couple of other apps. Flushing the RAM helped. I guess it is not the same for all but the Web browser eating memory is one of the main challenges. What a shame that all this memory is eaten up for no good reason.

 

[leman]

Literally always in the yellow and extremely slow. People don't notice these ram issues without having first noticed a performance problem.

It's a major PITA having to constantly monitor Activity Monitor

And using a different browser fixes the performance issues? I'm just trying to understand the situation.

 

[svenmany]

I've spent a bit of time playing around on this site and Amazon, using Safari and Chrome. I can confirm that the memory usage I see in Safari far exceeded that of Chrome. I then opened a bunch of tabs to different sites and my computer's memory consumption just kept going up - by a lot. After adding 15 or so tabs, I managed to add 6 GB to the "Memory Used" reading in Activity Monitor. Chrome also caused consumption to creep up when adding tabs, but not nearly as much.

I don't understand the difference. In Safari, each site has its own process. In Chrome, each site started multiple renderer processes. A quick review seemed to suggest the memory load for each site was the same order of magnitude. The answer is probably in some understanding of the different kinds of memory Activity Monitor shows: "Memory", "Real Mem", "Private Mem", and "Shared Mem".

I've just never paid attention to this. My last computer had 32 GB of RAM and my current one has 96 GB, so none of this impacts me.

Unless I'm misunderstanding the meaning of the numbers in Activity Monitor, I don't understand how people with small amounts of RAM are not heavily impacted when using Safari with multiple tabs open. Their computers are probably swapping a lot.

One thing that helps me is tab groups. The tab groups remember the open tabs but don't consume memory until those tabs are visited. So, restarting Safari clears the memory consumption but doesn't lose my tabs.

 

[rafark]

How is your memory pressure and system responsiveness? If you experience no performance issues, why would it matter?

@ 1gb per tab and up to 5gb, he’s definitely experiencing performance issues