Why does Safari write to disk?

[MichaelDroste]

I have an old MacBook Air M1 running 75 web pages. After a day it say memory full!
It seems to disk swapping then filling.

Why is it disk swapping?

8 gigs for 75 web pages should be enough!

I checked istat menu about 6 gig used 1 gig disk swapping…

How can I stop disk swapping?

 

[MichaelDroste]

 

[russell_314]

I have an old MacBook Air M1 running 75 web pages. After a day it say memory full!
It seems to disk swapping then filling.

Why is it disk swapping?

8 gigs for 75 web pages should be enough!

I checked istat menu about 6 gig used 1 gig disk swapping…

How can I stop disk swapping?

Wait, you have 75 webpages open at once? Like 75 tabs?

I’m going on your serious here well, yes, that’s going to take more than 8 GB of RAM especially with whatever else is running to include the operating system.

I’m not sure how to turn off the swapping on the Mac, but I wouldn’t recommend it and that could have some bad consequences. Perhaps someone else could chime in on how to do it.

 

[Fishrrman]

Close all but 8-10 tabs.

See how things go then.

(really, WHY would someone need 75 tabs to be open?)

 

[splifingate]

WHY would someone need 75 tabs to be open?

Because one can?

 

[MacCheetah3]

I have an old MacBook Air M1 running 75 web pages. After a day it say memory full!
It seems to disk swapping then filling.

[...]

How can I stop disk swapping?

Wait, you have 75 webpages open at once? Like 75 tabs?

I’m going on your serious here well, yes, that’s going to take more than 8 GB of RAM especially with whatever else is running to include the operating system.

Close all but 8-10 tabs.

See how things go then.

(really, WHY would someone need 75 tabs to be open?)

Y-e-a-h… I’ll leave these:

Stop Having Too Many Tabs Open — Tinley Park Mom Blog

Part of why there are even memes about this habit of leaving too many tabs open is because it's so easy to do. Here are some tips on how to stop this form of digital hoarding.

tinleyparkmom.com

https://www.reddit.com/r/productivity/comments/155q8jx/having_a_zillion_browser_tabs_open_is_a

Bookmark websites that you want to revisit in Safari on Mac

In Safari on your Mac, bookmark websites to quickly revisit them. Also rearrange bookmarks and organize them into folders.

support.apple.com

Keep a Reading List in Safari on Mac

In Safari on your Mac, keep a Reading List of webpages to read later, even when you’re not connected to the internet.

support.apple.com

Print or create a PDF of a webpage in Safari on Mac

In Safari on your Mac, print or create a PDF of a webpage.

support.apple.com

Poor practice/bad habits aside...

View attachment 2473491

3GB of swap files isn’t catastrophic. Here’s additional reading material to help (somewhat) understand the terminology:

View memory usage in Activity Monitor on Mac

In Activity Monitor, view the amount of system memory being used on your Mac, including physical, compressed, wired, and app memory.

support.apple.com

Feel free to bookmark or add it to your reading list.

 

[MichaelDroste]

Just seems strange that 75 pages can’t run without memory swap on the air…

 

[smirking]

Why is it disk swapping?

8 gigs for 75 web pages should be enough!

It depends on what pages you have open, but yeah 8GB should be plenty for 75 tabs. I've pushed an 8GB machine far harder and had no problems.

It's likely not so much the number of tabs you have open, but there might be a specific page or two that's causing runaway memory usage. Don't disable swapping, especially if you only have 8GB of RAM. Swap is not your problem. Your problem is you either have a runaway program or a few pages hidden in those 75 tabs that are massive resource hogs.

Web pages are ideal for swap usage. You're not viewing all 75 pages at the same time. Swapping it to disk is exactly what you want it to do so you have resources to keep using your computer normally.

You may also want to try rebooting. We all run a lot of programs and not all of them play nicely. Any one of them can become problematic and chew up resources in the background.

 

[MacCheetah3]

Just seems strange that 75 pages can’t run without memory swap on the air…

Also on that note:

Hide distractions when reading articles in Safari on Mac

Use Safari Reader on your Mac to hide menus and other diversions when reading an article. See a table of contents and summary for longer articles.

support.apple.com

Quick example:

 

[TechnoMonk]

Is it active swap? Swap in Mac OS and most flavors of Linux means OS is proactively moving some of the memory pages to disk in case it needs more memory. Mac OS and Linux handle swap very differently than traditional Wintel swap. You will run in to more problems if you stop swapping. Folks need to get out of the idea that swap is bad, unless you are seeing crashes. Let oS do its job and worry if the system gets unstable or takes a performance hit.

 

[MichaelDroste]

It depends on what pages you have open, but yeah 8GB should be plenty for 75 tabs. I've pushed an 8GB machine far harder and had no problems.

It's likely not so much the number of tabs you have open, but there might be a specific page or two that's causing runaway memory usage. Don't disable swapping, especially if you only have 8GB of RAM. Swap is not your problem. Your problem is you either have a runaway program or a few pages hidden in those 75 tabs that are massive resource hogs.

Web pages are ideal for swap usage. You're not viewing all 75 pages at the same time. Swapping it to disk is exactly what you want it to do so you have resources to keep using your computer normally.

You may also want to try rebooting. We all run a lot of programs and not all of them play nicely. Any one of them can become problematic and chew up resources in the background.

I’ve tried restarted the computer - did not change the swapping or usage - these are my sites … what would be causing runaway memory? Auto playing a header video?

 

[TechnoMonk]

I have an old MacBook Air M1 running 75 web pages. After a day it say memory full!
It seems to disk swapping then filling.

Why is it disk swapping?

8 gigs for 75 web pages should be enough!

I checked istat menu about 6 gig used 1 gig disk swapping…

How can I stop disk swapping?

Why do you want to stop swapping? What would it achieve?

 

[Dolphins1972]

I will never understand why people do this? There is absolutely no reason why anyone should have that many tabs open.

Depending on the website you're visiting Safari allocates a cache of webpages for each tab you have open and even after you close them, Safari keeps a cache of every website you visited unless you manually delete your browser history. Safari can't be set to auto-delete history so when the system runs out of RAM, Safari starts swapping to disk.

 

[chown33]

The apparent default behavior for iStat Menus is to combine child processes for an app into the parent app's memory summary. If you turn that off, then you may be able to see which of the 75 tabs is using the most memory.

Memory

Makers of iStat Menus, Skala and other great apps.

bjango.com

I suspect you'll then have 75 child processes to work through, but it should reveal hidden details of what's actually going on.

Another alternative may be to use Activity Monitor and sort by RAM usage.

 

[MichaelDroste]

Why do you want to stop swapping? What would it achieve?

The computer fills and says out of memory after 12+ hours….

 

[h.gilbert]

What do you expect, not every webpage uses the same amount of memory. A youtube tab might be a few hundred MB no?

Over 10 tabs is when you ought to start bookmarking and closing instead of leaving them open IMO

 

[TechnoMonk]

The computer fills and says out of memory after 12+ hours….

Swap is not your problem, if it is running out of memory with swap after 12 hrs. You will most likely run out of memory much sooner with swap disabled. What are those 75 safari tabs? Each tab and webpage can consume vastly different memory. Disable Istats, open activity monitor and see what’s going on.
Either you figure out which tab is consuming most memory or buy a machine with more RAM.

 

[TechnoMonk]

I will never understand why people do this? There is absolutely no reason why anyone should have that many tabs open.

Depending on the website you're visiting Safari allocates a cache of webpages for each tab you have open and even after you close them, Safari keeps a cache of every website you visited unless you manually delete your browser history. Safari can't be set to auto-delete history so when the system runs out of RAM, Safari starts swapping to disk.

Mac OS doesn’t need to run out RAM to start swapping, for that matter most of the Linux systems. Most modern OS proactively swap even if you have 128 GB RAM. Doesn’t mean it is active swap.

 

[smirking]

I’ve tried restarted the computer - did not change the swapping or usage - these are my sites … what would be causing runaway memory? Auto playing a header video?

You've got some runaway stuff on your website. In the course of 10 minutes of having a few copies of your homepage open in Firefox, I started getting high CPU utilization alerts and the fans on my new M4 Pro started spinning. Once I closed out, everything returned to normal.

I don't know exactly what it is on your site that's doing this, but there are some scripts there that are not behaving. LOL, did you just cryptojack us and use us to mine for Bitcoin?

Also, having lots of Google Drive pages open to MP3 players eats up more than a typical page in resources. You've got lots of heavies and baddies hidden throughout your inventory of content.

 

[MichaelDroste]

I will never understand why people do this? There is absolutely no reason why anyone should have that many tabs open.

Depending on the website you're visiting Safari allocates a cache of webpages for each tab you have open and even after you close them, Safari keeps a cache of every website you visited unless you manually delete your browser history. Safari can't be set to auto-delete history so when the system runs out of RAM, Safari starts swapping to disk.

Mac OS doesn’t need to run out RAM to start swapping, for that matter most of the Linux systems. Most modern OS proactively swap even if you have 128 GB RAM. Doesn’t mean it is active swap.

Haven’t check the Mac mini if it is doing swapping with 64gb ram…

 

[TechnoMonk]

You've got some runaway stuff on your website. In the course of 10 minutes of having a few copies of your homepage open in Firefox, I started getting high CPU utilization alerts and the fans on my new M4 Pro started spinning. Once I closed out, everything returned to normal.

I don't know exactly what it is on your site that's doing this, but there are some scripts there that are not behaving. LOL, did you just cryptojack us and use us to mine for Bitcoin?

Also, having lots of Google Drive pages open to MP3 players eats up more than a typical page in resources. You've got lots of heavies and baddies hidden throughout your inventory of content.

Wow. What website?

 

[MichaelDroste]

You've got some runaway stuff on your website. In the course of 10 minutes of having a few copies of your homepage open in Firefox, I started getting high CPU utilization alerts and the fans on my new M4 Pro started spinning. Once I closed out, everything returned to normal.

I don't know exactly what it is on your site that's doing this, but there are some scripts there that are not behaving. LOL, did you just cryptojack us and use us to mine for Bitcoin?

Also, having lots of Google Drive pages open to MP3 players eats up more than a typical page in resources. You've got lots of heavies and baddies hidden throughout your inventory of content.

On the front page of my sites I have a video header playing on loop… I’ve got 7-9 sites all with video mp4 playing… instead of header image…

 

[MichaelDroste]

MichaelDroste.com
WindyTown.com
MusicRowSongs.com
PlayTheBlues.com
TrumpetStudio.com
These are some sites I made with Rapidweaver for the Mac

 

[MichaelDroste]

The video mp4s on my sites are 16mb to 40mb

 

[MacCheetah3]

Is it active swap? Swap in Mac OS and most flavors of Linux means OS is proactively moving some of the memory pages to disk in case it needs more memory. Mac OS and Linux handle swap very differently than traditional Wintel swap. You will run in to more problems if you stop swapping. Folks need to get out of the idea that swap is bad, unless you are seeing crashes. Let oS do its job and worry if the system gets unstable or takes a performance hit.

The computer fills and says out of memory after 12+ hours….

Swap is not your problem, if it is running out of memory with swap after 12 hrs. You will most likely run out of memory much sooner with swap disabled. What are those 75 safari tabs? Each tab and webpage can consume vastly different memory. Disable Istats, open activity monitor and see what’s going on.
Either you figure out which tab is consuming most memory or buy a machine with more RAM.

That’s (also) where memory pressure comes in...

Check if your Mac needs more RAM in Activity Monitor

Use Activity Monitor on your Mac to see if memory is being used efficiently and if you need more memory (RAM).

support.apple.com