Safari is eating all my memory, why?

[Magus90]

Hello there,

I am trying to figure out what is going on with my macbook pro 2014.

I have 8gb of ram, and just having safari open with 5 tabs, i have 65mb of ram free according to memory cleaner.

I just reinstalled the OS a few months ago and i can't think of any reason why i have no memory left.

If i use memory cleaner to optimize, it will get me back up to about 2.5gb left.

But after a little while it goes right back down to under 100mb.

Anyone have any idea why this is happening? Chrome isn't as bad, but still not great.

Thanks

 

[DeltaMac]

If you open your Activity Monitor, do you show good (green) memory pressure (the graph under the memory tab), with only a small amount of pageouts?

Are you actually having any issues, such as poor performance, and lags in response?
If your MBPro is working to your satisfaction, then memory use is a non-issue.
After all, memory installed, but not used, is memory wasted...
Speaking of wasted memory, you could remove that pos memory 'cleaner' app. That might help you more than anything.

 

[Magus90]

If you open your Activity Monitor, do you show good (green) memory pressure (the graph under the memory tab), with only a small amount of pageouts?

Are you actually having any issues, such as poor performance, and lags in response?
If your MBPro is working to your satisfaction, then memory use is a non-issue.
After all, memory installed, but not used, is memory wasted...
Speaking of wasted memory, you could remove that pos memory 'cleaner' app. That might help you more than anything.

Yeah the pressure is green.

5 Gb in use
2 Gb cached files
74mb swap

And yeah safari was getting a bit laggy. Writing text on certain websites was getting choppy.

Okay i will ditch the app, i thought it might be helpful since it optimizes. But since the memory just goes back down anyway i guess it doesn't matter.

 

[chabig]

Just let the system run the way it's designed. Apple's engineers know what they are doing better than any third party.

 

[macjunk(ie)]

Although, Safari has been a bit of kludge recently. A simple Google Doc containing less than 800 words throws a high memory usage warning in the browser. This might be possible cause I have 30 other tabs open but I thought Safari was good at managing inactive tabs.

 

[HDFan]

I have 8gb of ram, and just having safari open with 5 tabs, i have 65mb of ram free according to memory cleaner.

If you open your Activity Monitor,

In activity monitor, memory tab sorted high to low, how much memory is Safari using? Any other apps with high memory use?

I had some issues where Safari was using like 35 GB of memory. Went away when I installed AddBlock Plus.

 

[AppleHaterLover]

OS X does a very good job of using whatever amount of RAM you have. I wouldn’t worry about it.

 

[kohlson]

Anyone have any idea why this is happening?

Apple has spent considerable resources over the past several OS revs to optimize the use of what you paid for. In this particular case, you want all of the RAM you bought to be utilized, right?
MacOS X allocates memory for each required process, and anything left over is used for cache. In later hardware, memory is compressed when a process is not using it (faster than swap).
In my experience, Memory Cleaner was useful until about 10.9 or so. After that, garbage collection in macOS x has worked pretty well.

 

[leman]

MacOS and Safari in particular aggressively use the available RAM to speed up processing. All that your memory cleaner does is force all those acceleration structures to be deleted, which causes the machine to do extra work to rebuild them. Cleaners like that do nothing useful, and are detrimental to performance. Don’t fall inti the trap of obsessing about occupied RAM. As others have pointed out, the relevant metric is the RAM pressure. As long as it’s green, you are perfectly fine.

 

[LV426]

MacOS and Safari in particular aggressively use the available RAM to speed up processing. All that your memory cleaner does is force all those acceleration structures to be deleted, which causes the machine to do extra work to rebuild them. Cleaners like that do nothing useful, and are detrimental to performance. Don’t fall inti the trap of obsessing about occupied RAM. As others have pointed out, the relevant metric is the RAM pressure. As long as it’s green, you are perfectly fine.

This. Delete any 'cleaner' you may have been tempted to install. Unused RAM is wasted RAM, and macOS puts it to good use rather than waste it. The OS knows how to manage memory far better than third party utilities.