Yosemite keeps eating my RAM

[Hummingbird1934]

I have a MacMini which ran fine when purchased. When, however, I installed Yosemite 10.10.03/04, I began to notice Safari was slowing to an unbearable crawl. It is so bad I can sometimes sit, waiting over a minute for a sentence I have typed to appear letter....by....letter....by.....letter in a text input field. When it's reached this phenomenal speed I always have to restart the Mac. I decided to invest in some more RAM. This did not work, the same thing happens; within half and hour or so of browsing (obviously it is far worse if I have several tabs waiting to be read) the Mac starts to become unresponsive.

A check on RAM use shows that Safari is swapping memory to/from the HDD after being open for 40-45 minutes. RAM pressure is still green but all my physical RAM has gone. Checking Memory usage shows most of the RAM has been absorbed by caching tabbed pages and those I have read and closed. Safari, itself, often consumes 3.5GB. I joined Apple Mac OS beta users in the hope a fix was one iteration away... It's not happened.

I have never had a Mac OS this bad at memory usage. It was an advantage of Windows. Now I find myself turning more to Windows 8.1 with Safari and Firefox for internet use than my Mac. Sad state of affairs.

Suggestions as to what could be wrong?

 

[ScoobyMcDoo]

This is not normal behavior. I have a 2010 MBP which I run OS X 10.10.3, Windows 7 and Linux all at the same time with very little, if any, lag.

Are you running short of disk space? Maybe you could run the Apple hardware test or Apple Diagnostics (depending on the age of your mac) to see if there is a hardware issue?

 

[lowendlinux]

I'd make it spit it back up and give it back to you

 

[Taz Mangus]

I have a MacMini which ran fine when purchased. When, however, I installed Yosemite 10.10.03/04, I began to notice Safari was slowing to an unbearable crawl. It is so bad I can sometimes sit, waiting over a minute for a sentence I have typed to appear letter....by....letter....by.....letter in a text input field. When it's reached this phenomenal speed I always have to restart the Mac. I decided to invest in some more RAM. This did not work, the same thing happens; within half and hour or so of browsing (obviously it is far worse if I have several tabs waiting to be read) the Mac starts to become unresponsive.

A check on RAM use shows that Safari is swapping memory to/from the HDD after being open for 40-45 minutes. RAM pressure is still green but all my physical RAM has gone. Checking Memory usage shows most of the RAM has been absorbed by caching tabbed pages and those I have read and closed. Safari, itself, often consumes 3.5GB. I joined Apple Mac OS beta users in the hope a fix was one iteration away... It's not happened.

I have never had a Mac OS this bad at memory usage. It was an advantage of Windows. Now I find myself turning more to Windows 8.1 with Safari and Firefox for internet use than my Mac. Sad state of affairs.

Suggestions as to what could be wrong?

Here is what I suggest trying, create a new user and reboot. Login to the new user and see if the issue still happens in the new user account.

 

[mfram]

Maybe there is some Safari plug-in that's messing with you. What Safari plug-ins do you have installed?

 

[MikhailT]

I have a MacMini which ran fine when purchased. When, however, I installed Yosemite 10.10.03/04, I began to notice Safari was slowing to an unbearable crawl. It is so bad I can sometimes sit, waiting over a minute for a sentence I have typed to appear letter....by....letter....by.....letter in a text input field. When it's reached this phenomenal speed I always have to restart the Mac. I decided to invest in some more RAM. This did not work, the same thing happens; within half and hour or so of browsing (obviously it is far worse if I have several tabs waiting to be read) the Mac starts to become unresponsive.

A check on RAM use shows that Safari is swapping memory to/from the HDD after being open for 40-45 minutes. RAM pressure is still green but all my physical RAM has gone. Checking Memory usage shows most of the RAM has been absorbed by caching tabbed pages and those I have read and closed. Safari, itself, often consumes 3.5GB. I joined Apple Mac OS beta users in the hope a fix was one iteration away... It's not happened.

I have never had a Mac OS this bad at memory usage. It was an advantage of Windows. Now I find myself turning more to Windows 8.1 with Safari and Firefox for internet use than my Mac. Sad state of affairs.

Suggestions as to what could be wrong?

You do realize OS X does not automatically have anything to do with the memory leaks in Safari? Installing Yosemite means installing Safari 8 as well, so Yosemite may just a coincidence here. Any old incompatible plugins can cause nasty memory leaks.

Are you seeing any memory leaks when you use Firefox on OS X? If not, then it's just Safari itself that's leaking. Do you use extensions? If yes, disable all of them.

Did you upgrade to Yosemite from a pervious OS install? If yes, that might be the problem, you probably have some outdated plugins in Safari that's leaking badly.

What did the Console.app say when you open Safari?