safari uses way too much memory

[Love-hate 🍏 relationship]

macbook air m1, ventura 13.4

safari uses a lot more battery recently, and chrome is much more efficient

but it has recently come to a point where it's more than double of chromium

here with only 3 tabs open: macrumors.com, macg.co , reddit , it consumes 4GB of ram ! where chrome consumes only 1.5

is it normal? how much does yours use ? what could be the issue? and is there a way to reset safari ?

 

[phrehdd]

macbook air m1, ventura 13.4

safari uses a lot more battery recently, and chrome is much more efficient

but it has recently come to a point where it's more than double of chromium

here with only 3 tabs open: macrumors.com, macg.co , reddit , it consumes 4GB of ram ! where chrome consumes only 1.5

is it normal? how much does yours use ? what could be the issue? and is there a way to reset safari ?

Safari and Chrome and others all use substantial amounts of RAM. Some more than others but none really do a great job in limiting the amount of RAM used. I believe Opera at one time (maybe still does) have some controls you can put in place.

Just a general statement -
MacOS could help out in controlling app behavior where RAM is concerned but perhaps at a cost to performance.
Applications such as Safari should be able to put some controls in place or allow the user to make limitations but that too would cause perhaps performance degredation.
Websites who are the real villain here are not about to change for anyone unless they get a dramatic drop in visitors.

 

[HDFan]

with only 3 tabs open: macrumors.com, macg.co , reddit , it consumes 4GB of ram ! where chrome consumes only 1.5

Opening the browsers with the exact same web pages what do you see?

 

[Love-hate 🍏 relationship]

Opening the browsers with the exact same web pages what do you see?

Sorry I don't understand your question, what do you mean by "see"?

 

[Love-hate 🍏 relationship]

Safari and Chrome and others all use substantial amounts of RAM. Some more than others but none really do a great job in limiting the amount of RAM used. I believe Opera at one time (maybe still does) have some controls you can put in place.

Just a general statement -
MacOS could help out in controlling app behavior where RAM is concerned but perhaps at a cost to performance.
Applications such as Safari should be able to put some controls in place or allow the user to make limitations but that too would cause perhaps performance degredation.
Websites who are the real villain here are not about to change for anyone unless they get a dramatic drop in visitors.

Doesn't explain why safari uses 2-3* as much memory as chrome though...I mean 4Gb for 3 sites ?

 

[einsteinbqat]

Safari uses 1,9 Go ± 0,5 over here for those 3 tabs.

 

[Love-hate 🍏 relationship]

Safari uses 1,9 Go ± 0,5 over here fo those 3 tabs.

Thanks

I just reset safari , which btw was a pain in the arse , and even more so on IOS .

With chrome you simply press a button and it resets it all, on safari you gotta do a lot of ****. Anyway

It now consumes way less , around 1.2gb (you might wanna do the reset as well, could help ! )

No idea what caused it, "it always work" my ass , when it doesn't work you can't debug it , and fixing the issues is complicated thanks to apple not providing you simple access to reset , cache deletion, etc .

I've never had any issue like this over 5y of chrome usage ! Blows my mind

And still, surprisingly enough, chromium and chrome have gotten soooo good at memory management (since months/last year) better than safari for sure. I hate to see everyone around claiming how less resources safari consumes whilst it's just not true , but apple is a religion after all sadly

 

[phrehdd]

Doesn't explain why safari uses 2-3* as much memory as chrome though...I mean 4Gb for 3 sites ?

I certainly won't challenge your experience with Safari but it would be of worth noting that there was a time when Chrome was a bigger offender than Safari. No matter as the problem is still the same across the board when browsers harvest websites that are happy to eat up a ridiculous amount of RAM.

 

[Love-hate 🍏 relationship]

I certainly won't challenge your experience with Safari but it would be of worth noting that there was a time when Chrome was a bigger offender than Safari. No matter as the problem is still the same across the board when browsers harvest websites that are happy to eat up a ridiculous amount of RAM.

Yeah it used to be

Mind you, resetting safari did help tremendously ! As shown in the screenshot above, safari does still use more RAM than safari

Chromium has gotten super good since a few months, extremely optimised !

 

[Shhhh]

I care about battery life, not RAM usage. And Safari is very kind to my battery life.

 

[Love-hate 🍏 relationship]

I care about battery life, not RAM usage. And Safari is very kind to my battery life.

true . not helpful, but true

 

[Shhhh]

true . not helpful, but true

Sorry it wasn't helpful, but it is definitely a factor I consider when using different apps (at least apps I use when I'm not plugged in). It could be better optimized for memory usage, but at least it's not Chrome. Maybe the next macOS version of Safari will be better.

 

[Love-hate 🍏 relationship]

Sorry it wasn't helpful, but it is definitely a factor I consider when using different apps (at least apps I use when I'm not plugged in). It could be better optimized for memory usage, but at least it's not Chrome. Maybe the next macOS version of Safari will be better.

I hear ya

We will see . Apple rly needs to start shipping safari updates separately though, instead of requiring a whole OS update

 

[Shhhh]

I hear ya

We will see . Apple rly needs to start shipping safari updates separately though, instead of requiring a whole OS update

They actually have done Safari updates that were separate from the OS updates. The problem is ... they rarely update Safari.

 

[HDFan]

what do you mean by "see"?

Do they work? Describe what is on the screen and note differences.