Using Safari can slow your system down as much as 76% vs Firefox
Posted by Dr. Macenstein
In the online technology forums, there is perhaps no greater battle than the one that inevitably ensues when tech geeks get together to decide which is better, Macs or PCs. A close second to that battle, however, is which is the better web browser.
On the Mac side, it essentially comes down to Firefox vs. Safari (yes, I know there are others, but let’s be realistic). The main arguments most people use in defending or criticizing a browser are 1) its ability to accurately render a page, and 2) the speed at which it does so. For the most part, I do not notice a big difference in the page rendering accuracy between Firefox and Safari. Most sites I go to, including banking sites, work just fine in both. I’m sure there are exceptions, but for 95% of my surfing, it hasn’t been an issue. As for speed, well both browsers perform very snappy on both my home and work machines thanks to high speed broadband connections, and while one may render certain pages faster than the other, it has never been noticeable enough to bother me. But what I have noticed (and what made me write this article) is there are 2 ways to look at speed when talking about web browsers.
Redefining “speed”
While how fast a browser can render a web page is certainly an important weapon in the browser war arguments, the difference is usually a matter of seconds at the most. To my mind, a more important measure of speed is how a browser affects the overall speed of your SYSTEM.
I noticed this quite by accident the other day while rendering out an After Effects animation I had done. I had made a spelling change in one of the graphics, and re-rendered a composition I had rendered the day before. When it was finished, I noticed in the Render Queue that it had taken 15 minutes longer to render than it had the day before. This seemed odd to me, as like I said, all I had done was changed the spelling of one word in the animation.
So I began to think why this would be. I had not restarted the computer since the day before, nothing had changed hardware wise. The only thing different was that I had been surfing the web a bit while the render was going on that day, where the day before I had not. “Surely surfing the web on a mulit-processor machine shouldn’t add 15 minutes to a render”, I thought. Well, yes it does actually, if you’re using Safari.
The tests
I decided to test out my theory. I began by restarting my system (a dual 2GHz G5 PowerMac with 2GB of RAM), then rendering out my After Effects movie again, with no other applications open. I got an almost identical render time as the first render. I then opened Safari, and opened 5 random sites in tabs (digg.com, cnn.com, myspace.com, macenstein.com (of course) and virb.com). I figured these represented a good mix of the type of sites I visit, as well as sites with differnet types of layouts and memory requirements. I clicked around a bit in each site to build up a little cache action, then re-opened After Effects and rendered the scene again. The render time was almost exactly the same 15 minutes longer that I experienced the first time.
The next step was to figure out if this slowdown was only due to Safari, or just web browsing in general. So I made a stripped down test project for After Effects (so I didn’t have to spend 30 minutes waiting for each test to complete) and did the same “fresh reboot, open After Effects, render, quit, open Safari, open After Effects, and render” test as before to get my baseline times. Using After Effects sans ANY browser scored a render time of 154 seconds. After Effects with Safari running got a time of 271 seconds.
Next, I repeated the test with Firefox instead of Safari, and was very surprised to see that Firefox added only 6 seconds to After Effect’s render time. (See Below)
Above: Results on a PowerMac rendering an After Effects project, then again with Firefox and Sarafi open. The PowerMac ran almost 76% slower with Safari open.
I decided to grab the ol’ stopwatch and then try some Photoshop tests. I recently had to make a series of banners for a project I was working on, so I used one of them (a 1.72GB 50 x 32.5-inch Photoshop file at 300 dpi) for my test. First, I tested how long it took Photoshop to launch and open the file via double-clicking. Next, I timed how long it took to do a “Save As” PSD. I then quit Photoshop and repeated the tests with both Safari and Firefox. Results are below.
Above: Results on a PowerMac opening and saving a 1.72 GB file, then again with Firefox and Sarafi open. The system took 40% longer to open the document and 49% longer to save it with multiple sites open in Safari.
As you can see, Photoshop gave a similarly dismal performance while Safari was running, particularly during the “Open Document” test, where it added a full 97 seconds to the process.
I did one final test in QuickTime, exporting a 2 minute full screen video clip to iPod. I was pleasantly surprised (and yet somewhat baffled) to find that Safari had no adverse effect at all on the export time. I got the exact same 3 minute 44 second time for all 3 tests. I was sort of surprised as I figured compressing a movie would use similar function calls resources as rendering an animation from After Effects. So apparently this issue is somewhat application specific (perhaps even exclusive to Adobe apps? Insert conspiracy theory here).
For the record, all tests were done twice, and the average times were used. My Safari installation should be fairly clean, as I have not installed any odd plug-ins or such. Pretty much the factory default settings.
A “Universal” problem
As one final test (and because everyone loves graphs!) I repeated all tests again on a Quad-core 2.66 GHz MacPro, with 2 GB of RAM. Of course both Adobe apps had to run under Rosetta, as neither is a Universal app yet. While in some cases the difference is not AS great as on the PowerPC model, you can see that there is still a sizable performance hit when using Safari (and remember, the Mac Pro has 2 extra processors available to handle the “demands” of Safari).
Above: Results on a Mac Pro rendering an After Effects project, then again with Firefox and Sarafi open. The Mac Pro ran 21% slower with Safari open.
Above: Results on a Mac Pro opening and saving a 1.72 GB file, then again with Firefox and Sarafi open. Performance hits of 37% and 29% for the “Open” and “Save As” tests.
It was nice to see that despite both After Effects and Photoshop being PowerPC apps relying on Rosetta, After Effects actually rendered slightly faster on the Mac Pro than the PowerMac, and wasn’t that out done in the Photoshop “Open” test.
Conclusion
The interesting thing about these results (to me at least) is that both Firefox and Safari were simply open during their tests. I was not actively “surfing”, ie. clicking on things, moving windows, etc. It seems to me that a background application, especially one that should not really be doing anything all that processor-intensive even when in the foreground, should not hog system resources the way Safari apparently does. If Firefox can play nice, why not Safari?
I suppose as a final disclaimer I should say that while I did everything I could think to keep the tests fair (using the same web sites, running multiple tests and so forth) it is possible that both my work and home machines (with different processors, graphics cards, software installations, etc.) are both somehow uniquely wacky, and I have the only 2 machines on the planet that will bear out these results. It could also be my choice of sites, although the fact remains Firefox had no problem handling them.
To that end, I would encourage anyone with these apps, a stop watch, and too much free time to conduct their own tests. I would also love feedback on performance hits on other apps when using Safari, such as some 3D applications. The fact that both affected apps were Adobe apps, and QuickTime (an Apple app) was NOT affected is a little strange to me. For those of you looking to conduct your OWN tests, I would like to point out that simply opening Safari and conducting tests will not yield too much of a difference; you need to have at least a few open tabs (I used 5), and I would suggest visiting some “intense” sites. I chose MySpace as one of my test sites because I consider it to be the worst coded page out there, with tons of flash ads and other gunk that can stop up a browser.
So what does this mean? Well, for most people, not a lot. If you are just using your computer for Word, e-mail, and web browsing, I doubt there is much of a noticeable performance hit. It really seems that only “Power Users” (if I may be so bold as to lump myself in that group) will be affected, and possibly not even all “power” apps will be affected (as shown in the QuickTime test).
For ME, however, these results means that while Safari is still my browser of choice, if I am going to kill time while large, time-critical projects are rendering, I will be using Firefox. Or better yet, another computer.
UPDATE: OK, at the request of faithful Macenstein reader Richard Neal, I have run some quick tests on OmniWeb and Camino. I did not do as thorough a test, just one round each on the PowerMac, but based on my previous tests the differences in times should be negligible.
Above: Time in Seconds. Shorter bars are better. (Sorry the colors on this graph don’t match the above graphs, I have no idea how to change graph bar colors in Keynote!)
I’m not sure what these results really prove, except that Safari is consistently the worst performer out of the group, and Firefox seems the best (except for Camino’s After Effects score).
OmniWeb (which should be similar to Safari according to Richard) performed well on the After Effects test, and in the middle on the Photoshop ones, and even beat Camino on the “Save As” and After Effects rendering tests. So if there is a problem with the underlying architecture of Safari’s webkit, I don’t quite see it.
[UPDATE 2:] OK, For any who care, here is an activity monitor screenshot of 5 web browsers (Safari, Firefox, Opera, OmniWeb, and Camino) sorted by amount of RAM used.
Click to enlarge
All 5 browsers have the exact same web pages open. You can see Safari is using over 2.5 times the amount of memory as Opera and OmniWeb, and about 3 times as much memory as Camino and Firefox. You can also see that while it is using the most RAM, Safari is actually tied for the lowest CPU load. Conversely, Firefox, using the least amount of RAM ,is using the most CPU power (yet Safari has claimed the 2nd highest amount of threads). Safari is also using twice the Virtual RAM (1.22GB ) of any other browser). This seems to bear out the memory-leak/RAM issues theories.
The only other “real” application open at the moment (aside from Activity Monitor) is Audio Hijack, which is only using 27 MB of RAM, 5% of the CPU power, and only 7 threads, which is funny to me since it is actively recording 2-hour long AAC audio files at the moment, and all 5 web browsers are simply “background” applications (in fact, Safari is the “back-most background app at the moment).
These results seem to prove that the Photoshop and After Effects tests were severely hampered by having Safari open due to the amount of RAM Safari hordes and does not release. While I still think over 120MB is too much RAM for ANY web browser to want, I can’t think of any good reason Safari would need 3 times as much. So while buying more RAM would likely lessen the problem for me in my tests, the fact that out of the 5 browsers only Safari is making buying more RAM a necessity is somewhat disappointing.
[UPDATE 3:] A happy ending
OK, well, many of you will be happy to know we have run the tests again at the request of David Hyatt, the architect behind Safari, using the latest WebKit build (WebKit-SVN-r19919) and there is a world of improvement (see below).
Above: Results of the After Effects render on the dual G5 PowerMac, now including results for using the latest Webkit build. As you can see, it is more or less tied with Firefox.
Above: Results of the Photoshop “Open” and “Save As” tests on the dual G5 PowerMac, now including results for using the latest Webkit build. As with the After Effects test, the latest Webkit builds almost tie Firefox in the “Open” test, and beat it in the “Save As” test.
David would be better able to tell you what has changed the most between the shipping version of Safari and this latest WebKit build that could conceivably account for these results, but suffice it to say we are pleased as punch to know the next version of Safari (which will be released when, David? :)) seemingly puts things back on track. Of course, we have no idea how stable this release is (although so far it seems fine to us) so use at your own risk. However, for the moment, WebKit is now Macenstein’s default browser of choice. Good work, Mr Hyatt!
-The Doc
Quote: “For ME, however, these results means that while Safari is still my browser of choice, if I am going to kill time while large, time-critical projects are rendering, I will be using Firefox. Or better yet, another computer.”
Why would Safari be your browser of choice? What does it do Firefox can’t?
-J
virb rules.
Is there any way you could repeat the test with other browsers? It’d be interesting to see if OmniWeb, which uses Safari’s WebKit engine, performs the same, or if Camino, using Firefox’s Gecco, gives different results. I don’t have any of the Adobe applications you used installed, so I can’t test myself, but if OmniWeb fares the same, I might have to start using Firefox a bit more.
I have noticed this as well. I think it has to do with not just Safari but WebKit on the whole. I use NetNewsWire as my feed reader and Safari as my main browser, and if I use either of them for awhile, they start to eat up RAM. The only common link I can think of is WebKit. If I quit either of them and wait until the RAM is “released” and reopen, the system as well as the app in question becomes “snappy” again. It might be some sort of memory leak in WebKit. I haven’t done any formal testing beyond observing my memory usage through MenuMeters.
@Jenkinator
I think there was another article at http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000789.html on how non-native UI sucks, which might be why Macenstein prefers safari. It’s not what it can do or not, it’s the experience of using it (which is a big thing in the mac world). From the short stint I had as a mac user (got one at a job I was working at, sadly wasn’t able to keep it) I had safari as my default browser as well simply for the feel of it working with the rest of the OS.
Interesting results. I wonder if it still holds with the WebKit nightlies. The awkwardness of Firefox will still prevent me from moving away from Safari however. I could not live without Inquisitor and PicLens, and the overall browsing experience of Safari.
Um. Wow. That’s impressive. Is this your job, or do you have A LOT of extra time on your hands? I’m assuming your job.
But I’m expecting the latter.
Lots of free time.
🙂
-The Doc
So if you quit Safari & run the test (without a reboot) do you get your speed back again?
For anyone interested, just did a quick test using Activity Monitor, with Safari and Firefox, each visiting the same pages (start on Apple home page, going to Digg.com, linked to youtube video of Bill Gates talking about Vista – hilarious btw) and then set them both as background applications for a few seconds. Sitting idle, Firefox was using 1-7% more CPU and 10MB more RAM than Safari (which sat at 0-5% CPU and 60MB RAM). Interesting.
I think this has something to do with Safari’s RAM handling than anything else. I’ve noticed that doing similar amounts of surfing in both Safari and Firefox yield somewhat different results in terms of amount of RAM used (Firefox using significantly less than Safari–I’m one of those guys who constantly has Activity Monitor running). Also, it seems to me that the Adobe tests were largely based on memory calculations rather than CPU usage/speed, while I’ve noticed that QuickTime conversions rely very heavily on the CPU without significantly increasing RAM usage. Would it be possible to run another test with something like VisualHub, Garageband, or even a game’s framerate average?
I’ve noticed in my everyday useage that flash is the big cpu hog.. watching a video on you tube will cause the my cpu useage ti climb up steadly in safari and my fans will kick on with my macbook.. could flash explain why even tho you were “idle” on the pages it caused your render times to increase… maybe safari’s implementation of flash intergration is not so great..
Geez you guys, I was half-kidding when I said I had too much free time.
🙂
I will see what I can do.
-The Doc
This seems to be down to what is on the site and how web browsers deal with it. When I open all the sites the author mentions in Safari it seems to idle at around 10% CPU usage in background on my creaky 800Mhz iBook G4.
However, If I scroll down these pages and reveal a flash ad or object, this background idle usage doubles and moves up near 100% when Safari is in the foreground.
Another offender is You tube. If any site embeds youtube videos, safari takes up 50% in background and 100% in foreground, that is without the video playing!!
I suspect Firefox and the others are simply able to better control the running of plugins and java applets in the background. Also, I have noticed that many Apps on OS X will target 10% CPU usage at idle no matter what machine they run on. MS Word being the major example. Take a look at Word idling and compare that to safari.
Safari seems to be better at displaying myspace content than Firefox. If the profile is larger than the window, Safari automatically provides side-scroll bars at the bottom of the window, whereas Firefox doesn’t. Firefox also can’t seem to display certain HTML characters such as hearts. But these are minor points anyway. Both are still adequate for myspace.
I have always noticed that safari hogs up a lot of memory, and doesn’t let go until the app is quit. Vry annoying. I think that has to do with other apps being slow.
Safari crashed my hard-drive in my Macbook Pro. I’m glad I found this article, currently I’m waiting for my hard-drive replacement and I tried a number of different test when my previous hard-drive was acting up. I finally gave up on Safari and switched to Firefox. I found that the “beach-ball” of death wasn’t appearing nearly as much.
Thanks for your results, it confirms my thoughts on Safari.
Without knowing what the exact URLs are no one can repeat your tests. The digg.com main page and article pages cause quite different demands depending on the numbers of comments in an article. Advertising rotations mean even with exact URLs sometimes one page load in browser X will take much more CPU than browser Y – one needs to check the adverts are the same etc.
What happens with only one page open?
Specifically, what are the CPU and memory hits of the pages open when you run your tests? If there is a bug in one page which hits Safari causing CPU use / memory use then simply knowing what activity monitor tells you will solve this…
Ian,
I wasn’t advocating that you try to repeat my EXACT tests, as of course you don’t have my After Effects and Photoshop files.
Rather I was suggesting you conduct tests of your own, with other apps (and even other sites) and see if Safari produces more of a penalty hit than other browsers. I saw on the Macrumors forums that some people had done just that, and it seems to back up these results.
For the record, I clicked around each of the sites, but left the tabs set on the homepage of each site (ie. cnn.com was the last part of the cnn site I was at, MySpace.com, etc., even though I clicked about 5 links per site, I always went back to the base url).
But I think you are right that Flash/Java ads are a big part of it.
-The Doc
Ok, here’s some Cinebench scores on the Dual G5 PowerMac, and then with Firefox and Safari running. (Boy, these are some depressing numbers compared to the Mac Pro!)
Again, Safari seems to slow things down more, but not in every case.
Seems Open GL takes a hit with both browsers.
-The Doc
****************************************************
Cinebench
****************************************************
Rendering (Single CPU): 309 CB-CPU
Rendering (Multiple CPU): 541 CB-CPU
Multiprocessor Speedup: 1.75
Shading (CINEMA 4D) : 305 CB-GFX
Shading (OpenGL Software Lighting) : 870 CB-GFX
Shading (OpenGL Hardware Lighting) : 1671 CB-GFX
OpenGL Speedup: 5.47
****************************************************
Cinebench with Firefox
****************************************************
Rendering (Single CPU): 287 CB-CPU
Rendering (Multiple CPU): 466 CB-CPU
Multiprocessor Speedup: 1.63
Shading (CINEMA 4D) : 287 CB-GFX
Shading (OpenGL Software Lighting) : 808 CB-GFX
Shading (OpenGL Hardware Lighting) : 1510 CB-GFX
OpenGL Speedup: 5.25
****************************************************
Cinebench with Safari
****************************************************
Rendering (Single CPU): 293 CB-CPU
Rendering (Multiple CPU): 407 CB-CPU
Multiprocessor Speedup: 1.39
Shading (CINEMA 4D) : 291 CB-GFX
Shading (OpenGL Software Lighting) : 815 CB-GFX
Shading (OpenGL Hardware Lighting) : 1499 CB-GFX
OpenGL Speedup: 5.14
****************************************************
Jenkinator…
Because Firefox looks and acts like a bloated Windows app. That’s why.
I’ve noticed Safari slows things down a bit the longer you use it. Usually flushing the cache does it for me, but I’m not running anything graphics intensive.
And I think the average Mac home user doesn’t even know how to empty the cache (or what cache is) so I am hoping the next version of Safari manages this better.
I think Peter Gabriel hit the nail on the head with it (plus, I’m a big fan. 😉 )
If you notice your system slow while using Safari check the activity monitor. This is particularly true of particular Safari + Flash – we had a SWF on a site that was essentially a slideshow, but using some of the new Flash 8 or 9 effects (blur, etc…) and every time it cycled Safari gobbled up a bit more RAM.
Otherwise Safari seems much faster to me than Firefox – I’m not necessarily speaking of page load/render time, since the difference is neglible. I’m talking about UI usage, browser start, tab opening…it just feels better (of course, this is frequently mitigated by the behavior I mention above).
Fuck you! I prefer Lynx over both any time!
Hmmm…
After Effects = Adobe
Photoshop = Adobe
and now
Flash = Adobe.
And QuickTime didn’t slow down either machine in any browser?
I say let’s blame Adobe for this!
I’ve recently switched to Firefox because I noticed a similar performance hit with Safari, particularly if I left the browser open for a couple of days without restarting. Also, I’ve read somewhere that having a large number of bookmarks in the browser toolbar can affect Safari’s performance adversely. (My wife often complains of spinning beachballs in Safari, and I have noticed that she does horde bookmarks in her toolbar, but other than that, I haven’t done too many tests of my own to confirm that theory).
I also read a pretty thorough comparison of the browsers on macintalk that seems to favor Safari and the Webkit browsers.
You say potato, I say whatever floats your boat.
Any chance you can do a quick retest with Webkit nightes?
I’m calling BS on your theory, because I just performed a similar test, and here’s my results.
First – equipment – Macbook Pro (1st gen), 2.16ghz, 2GB RAM
OS X 10.4.8
Firefox 2.02, and latest Safari.
I’ve opened 5 tabs in each browser, and loaded the exact URLs in each.
Here’s Activity Monitors readout:
Safari – 1.5%CPU, 11 Threads, approx 484MB Mem
Firerfox – 2.6%CPU, 11 Threads, approx 84MB Mem
Yeah, Firefox is using 400MB less memory than Safari. If you have a lot of memory hog apps (A/E, PS, etc) open, this could slow your system down.
But you know what? This was after Safari had been open all day (nearly 8 hours). Once I quit Safari, and reloaded all the pages in the 5 tabs, here’s what it reported:
SafarI – .2% CPU, 7 Threads, approx 56.50 Mem.
So, the longer Safari stays open, the more real memory it consumes. I venture to guess that if you left Firefox open for that long, you’d get similar results (Firefox’s memory leak have been well documented).
So, the moral of the story is – use what you want to surf the web, and once you are done surfing and start working on other things – quit the browser. Wow. Such an inconvenience!
Glad to see this article. So Safari isn’t just slower to render than Firefox, it slows down other applications, as well. I didn’t know that. But I did know that running on older iMacs Safari is a dog. I recently switched my wife to FireFox after seeing the horribly slow paint time she was putting up with in Safari.
Oh – I should point out that Macintalk’s tests were done prior to the release of Firefox 2.x, so the results could very well be quite different if they were to test it again.
I actually noticed the same thing with Parallels. Parallels will start to feel DOG slow until I quit Safari. Then everything is fine. Using Firefox does not have the same problem, but I can’t quite use it…
What about some of the background tasks that Safari does (i.e. fetching/updating RSS feeds, syncing to .Mac bookmarks, etc). I am sure some of those things happen in the background and can potentially take up a lot of resources.
As far as the CPU goes, Flash will use any CPU that is available. Working as designed.
Forget Firefox, it’s hugely bloated too. Opera is the only way to go if you want a nice clean codebase. Whing about lack of extensions and adblock and other nonsense is just an excuse, because you can do most anything you need to do in Opera if you learn how.
Safari was an AMAZINGLY snappy browser…back when it was in beta mode years ago. the last few OS revisions of it have made it slower and bulkier and not to mention glitchier. i can’t tell ya on how many sites the plugins that are there do not work or how many myspace pages with transparency the damn thing locks up on. I was just about the switch entirely to firefox when i read how the iPhone will use safari. I decided to stick with it then so my bookmarks stays synced but otherwise Firefox has become the much better user experience
Like others have pointed out previously, the Photoshop and After Effects tests rely heavily on ram usage, while the Quicktime export is mainly just CPU power.
Myself i’ve observed Safari causing a larger and larger swapfile the long its running and the more browsing i’m doing. I’m one of those people with at least 30 different pages open in a bunch of tabs and windows at any time, and i use Saft to automatically restore all open pages when i launch Safari.
The record hit on the swapfile by Safari that i’ve observed myself, was just about 2GB. Namely, before i quit Safari i had 3.8GB of used swapfiles (as reported by MenuMeters), after hitting Quit, and waiting about 2-3 minutes till it actually quit, i was magically down to 1.8GB of used swapspace already 😛
I see this happen with Safari on a daily basis, which has led me to relaunch safari at least once every few days, and on average i get about 500-1000MB of swap space back when i relaunch it.
I’m guessing its a bug or memory leak with the current version of Safari and/or webkit, cause this has only been happening the last 4-5 months at the most. And then i believe it was a bit longer than that since Apple last updated Safari, its time they do 😛
But aside from the current ram addiction Safari has, i still classify it better than Firefox, for many reasons, but the one worth mentioning is probably the cpu usage test i did last year at some point while playing a flash movie/cartoon/whatever (i don’t remember exactly what it was anymore :P), and firefox continuesly ate about double the amount of CPU time as safari did displaying the same page and flash animation.
the upshot is that if you use safari you are a f*cking idiot
time to start coding websites so they specifically exclude safari users
What about if you use WebKit instead? http://www.webkit.org
It’s basically the in-development version of Safari and is very close to what will be released with Leopard very soon. They’ve made some monumental improvements internally with speed, so I’d be interested to see what happens when you include that in your results.
Once upon a time I was using transparency in CSS because it was convenient (which is a bad idea). In Firefox, everything was fine with around 20 (non-overlapping) semi-transparent objects on the page. In Safari, the same page pegged the CPU.
Given those sorts of quirks, results found on a certain page are not necessarily representative of general browsing behavior. That said, I don’t find these results hard to believe, and I also use Safari as my primary browser.
I love Safari but would have never thought that it was a process drainer. However, I have to say that Firefox is probably the most usable and scalable browser available.
I wonder if Safari will encounter similar issues when running on the new iPhone coming this summer. I understand that no one will be using their iPhone to render video or create gig-sized files from Photoshop but will it effect anything else? Just a thought.
And could someone be so kind as to send me a virb invite? You can send it to incredibilistic@gmail.com.
‘preciate it.
I use Safari because it does something i do a lot of “mail contents of this page’. Firefox only sends links. There are work arounds but Safari is better. Command I does this send contents automatically.
It’d be nice to do a little more investigating to see if you can narrow down what the problem might be. My guess is that either 1) Safari is eating up a lot of your RAM and thus slowing down memory-hungry applications or 2) one of the sites you are browsing to is eating up the CPU usage when Safari is in the background.
As for #1, I’ve noticed that Safari tends to eat memory like a goat in a petting zoo. To see if this might be your problem you could just check in Activity Monitor to see how much RAM Safari is using. I wrote about my experience here:
http://cutterpillow.com/content/view/41/35/
Safari had ballooned to using 1.3 GB of RAM and neither closing the windows I had open nor emptying the cache would release that memory. Only quitting Safari would get my RAM back. This would definitely slow down apps that benefit from large amounts of RAM. Right now Safari’s up to 595 MB of RAM and growing.
To check for #2 also use Activity Monitor and check to see how much CPU usage Safari is using. If the usage is more than 5% (mine is usually only 1-2% when Safari is idle) then the problem might be with one of the websites you have open. Try closing windows/tabs in Safari until the CPU usage goes down. If I were to guess I’d bet the problem is with MySpace as it is particularly ugly (both coding & design). If you can narrow down what website has the problem then it’d be a good idea to submit a bug report to Apple about it.
A few others in the comments have touched upon it, but I really, really want to see CPU and memory stats from activity monitor included.
Specifically, I would like to know the page in/out values before, and after, the operation sans browser, with Safari and with Firefox (and with other browsers if you can be bothered).
From my own experiences, Safari is a memory hog and occasionally I end up restarting it. But in terms of CPU usage etc. I have noticed nothing unusual. And this is coming from a guy who turned off iTunes’ “Sound Enhancer” option because 7% CPU usage on playback[1] seemed way too high.
[1] Mac Mini, Core Duo 1.66
Upgrade your Ram!
You went through all of this trouble to post this flawed theory and you don’t even have enough ram for this type of work. All you’re doing is sreading FUD with this type of BS. Nice going!!!
2 GB for rendering out in AE, especially when being shared by all other running apps and of course the system, is simply not enough.
I’m only on AEPro 6.5 at the momment, but because of OS X, it can have its own 2GB block of memory, and If AEPro 7 works like CS2, than it would take advantage of OS X’s caching feature. This would allow AEP to grab as much available ram as needed, if avaiable.
Why the hell are you using AfterEffects in the first place? You don’t have enough RAM and the fact you’re emulating these apps “does” make matter worse and that’s not even debatable.
Since you have a pathetic amount of RAM at the momment and you’re wasting CPU cycles to emulate AE, close all other programs running and purge its memory before each render.
Irony – I’m reading this site on my PC (don’t shoot me), and I couldn’t read the page at all via Firefox 2.2 (dark grey page). Used IE Tabs to switch to Explorer, and it diplays fine. Probably just because it’s a PC, but still funny.
Fuck Lynx! Links is even better!!!
Anonymous,
Yes, throwing RAM at a poorly performing application is bound to solve some problems. However, this was a $4000 computer (the Mac Pro, at least) with 4 processors, and it SHOULD be able to view a web page while rendering an After Effects project.
The point here is that both Photoshop and After Effects run just fine, both alone and with Firefox, and NOT when Safari is running.
2GB of RAM is NOT too little memory to run After Effects and surf the web, it is too little memory to run After Effects and surf the web WITH SAFARI. Why should you have to buy a $500 memory upgrade for a Mac Pro in order to use a web browser? I’m am as big an Apple fan-boy as the next, but that is just a plain silly argument.
And while we’re at it, so is expecting users to close Safari every 2 or 3 hours and restart it to regain some speed. If that is by design, and “common knowledge”, it should be in Safari’s “Help” section.
I think from the other comments here and elsewhere linking to this article that more than a couple people have noticed that something is wrong with Safari’s memory allocation process.
However I think you are right in that this is entirely due to RAM issues. Based on the Cinebench scores and the QuickTime exports, I believe there is no actual significant performance hit CPU-wise when using Safari, I think it all has to do with how quickly its RAM requirements spiral out of control.
-The Doc
Thanks for your study, that raises many questionings.
Since Safari is my favorite too, it is sometime terribly slowwww by itself in some of conditions (like when you hit an arrow key for the first time = minutes of beach-ball-thinking-process).
In fact, I find Camino way faster, but wait, not Camino 1.x but Camino 0.6. This version is faster than any other browsers and I still use it for its performances and better UI. If you can find this version, try it and you’ll see how it is fluid.
It should be a good idea to do these tests with other apps (apart from Adobe ones) activities. I’ll maybe try some 🙂
I’m not use to Firefox, it seems fast and well done but don’t talk me about Opera and its UI, this browser is a full PITA (Pain In The A**)!!!
Would love to see the WebKit comparison others have asked for! 🙂
I am a fan of the Opera browser, http://www.opera.com/ . They say that it is light on CPU resources, and I think it would be interesting to see if this is true. If you could test Opera 9, it would be greatly appreciated. Thank you very much in advance and keep up the good work!
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So, the longer Safari stays open, the more real memory it consumes. I venture to guess that if you left Firefox open for that long, you’d get similar results (Firefox’s memory leak have been well documented).
So, the moral of the story is – use what you want to surf the web, and once you are done surfing and start working on other things – quit the browser. Wow. Such an inconvenience!
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BUT why should Safari (and other browsers IF they do) hog the memory and only relinquish when you QUIT???
I want to keep certain pages open ALL the time and it IS an “inconvenience” to quit Safari if I’ve done a lot of surfing – which I DO for work.
It even gets to the stage of force quitting usually (MacBook Pro 2 GHz, 1.5GB).
If Firefox quits you can restore the previous session.
I STILL prefer Safari – just hope Apple will deal with the problem!!!!