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
Safari definitely has a memory leak. I frequently defer reading links while surfing via Digg and Slashdot et al, and it’s not unusual for me to have 50 or 60 Web pages on my menu. If I don’t catch up soon enough, the spinning pizza of death takes over and doing anything at all in Safari, even just bringing a different window to the front, begins to take 20, 30, or 60 seconds to complete. At that point it is a race against time to see if I can actually read everything before Safari crashes. (This is on an iBook G4 with 640 MB of physical memory.)
I have submitted error reports to Apple, but nothing seems to get fixed.
I love seeing what people have in their dock.
Looks like you have a fair amount of hard drive space as well.
500GB for iTunes stuff?
nice.
🙂
Um, thanks Phil.
I also noticed this Flickr post
http://www.flickr.com/photos/caldaean/405465067/
on TUAW about Safari using over 1GB of memory when left on, and 3.67 GB of virtual memory.
I’m looking forward to Mac OSX 10.5 and its Safari update for sure.
-The Doc
http://webkit.org/blog/?p=96
Tried the latest WebKit build and I’m getting the same bog down.
No one has said this yet (forgive me if I missed someone), but this has only been the case with Safari since the last system update. Anyone else notice that? I’ve only noticed this bog down in the last month or so. My guess is the latest update tweaked something it shouldn’t have.
I’m running 2ghz MacBook.
MacBookPro 15 CoreDuo2.0 , 1GB RAM, 100gb –
I use Multiple browsers, and leave them open all day long (usually) so i see alot of the “hogging up ” unused resources.
My Browsers By Preference:
Seamonkey – Firefox speed and plugins-, plus an OPEN mail client (thunderbird) , AND uses Apple’s appearance manager (i use shapeshifter so appearance support IS important)- no ugly windows!! – the best of all worlds even if you DONT use the mail. (the only thing i miss is the dedicated search field), even open ALL day , mail and browser windows, its the slimmest in resource use/mystery slowdowns.(CeepeeYou only reports 8-11% even when in use!)
Sea Monkey also tend to “release” ram simply by closing windows, as opposed to safari and firefox needing a re-launch.
Firefox – I use firefox regularly to open tab sets , html files , etc. it by far has the fastest launch and render times.- a good #1 if i didnt SO love seamonkeys and its mail and Appearance.( it actually holds 12-18% in use and 6-11% at idle [negligable] ) But i quit it when im done, and you should too!.
Safari – safari is SLOW, it doesn’t adhere to appearance manager (and makes for ugly shapeshifting) it brigns the rest of the machine to a halt, i wouldnt dream of gaming w/it running, “CeePeeYou” jumps at least 55% during use, and an average of 19% even when idle!
Its minor CSS issues, and color rendering problems prevents me from using it in our production env. other than for basic cross browser compatibility)- Try – Create a .gif with a fixed html color code, then place it against a background wiht the same html color code, in firefox the object is identical color, and invisible, in safari the colors are DISTINCTLY different.
I used Camino before firefox was available back in the day before it was named Camino, it was a bettter choice then Safari then .. and i cant imagine it’d be Much worse today.
For my Regular service customers, I’ve switched to recommending Firefox over Safari, and ThunderBird over Mail, Sea Monkey may perform better, but for the basic users they just “dont get it” usually.
Safari – DOES NOT render mySpace more accurately, just more complacently.
Firefox actually is more accurate, its the MYspace USer’s dirty code thats the issue.
safari tends to forgive/guess on bad code, where firefox vomits(it bombs occasionally)
.
And i’d recommend you look at that CPU meter while there, you may notice firefox -20%, Safari – 80%
ITs NOT new, its been this way for many moons.
The Switch to thunderbird came after trying to import/export mailboxes and contacts from “Mail” the unexpected benefit was the ability to use some firefox plugins AND plain text mails that don’t require a “save AS” for every individual file to get a human readable backup.
SAFARI HAS HUGE MEMORY LEAKS.
Sad, but true. I use a little utility app called “Memory Monitor” to keep track of this. I find myself restarting Safari every couple of hours to free up RAM. No one will have the definitive word on Safari vs. other apps without taking RAM usage into account.
Some sites are worse than others. I find that the forums at dpreview.com are the worst of all for Safari, particularly when big pix are shown in the discussion threads. Safari rapidly grabs enormous chunks of RAM and doesn’t let go.
Tests on Safari would need to standardize on how much RAM it’s got, which varies according to how long & where you’ve been surfing.
Informative article, amusing comments. Fanboyism aside, the fact is that Firefox destroys Safari in speed, usability and customization. Behold the power of open source!
I have had numerous slowdowns when using Safari with a few tabs, and it takes forever to switch from one tab to another. I’ve tested 5 other browsers (Opera, Shiira, Omniweb, Firefox, Camino) and Camino is by far the best of the bunch (Firefox has bugs and looks awful, Opera looks awful, Omniweb is too big), and Camino is a million times more responsive than Safari when working with tabbed browsing. (Shiira is also very fast, but has a few annoying bugs, so Camino gets my vote).
On my PPC Safari take about 4 seconds to start up. Firefox takes about 25 seconds! Enough reason for me to use Safari.
“Informative article, amusing comments. Fanboyism aside, the fact is that Firefox destroys Safari in speed, usability and customization. Behold the power of open source!”
Pathetic. Putting Firefox on a Mac is like putting a hessian sack on a beautiful girl. Firefox looks awful; its platform integration is laughable; and even its text-handling is poor:
http://www.zeldman.com/2006/11/27/safari-beats-firefox/
As for the crap about “teh power of open spurce!!!” –now *that’s* fanboyism. There’s plenty of bad open-source software and plenty of good closed-source software. Besides, here’s the source code for webkit:
http://webkit.org/building/checkout.html
The memory hogging is not a new phenomenon. I have suffered it for years, since the early versions of Safari. And this is not unique to Safari. I moved to Firefox hoping it would cure the problem and it’s just as bad. I don’t know how that squares with the Adobe app speed tests – maybe you didn’t browse long enough for Firefox to grab the memory, or maybe Firefox and Safari grab memory in different patterns?
Anyway, whichever browser I use, I have to quit and relaunch every couple of days to reclaim memory.
Wow…you certaintly have more time on your hands, that I am very jealous of. Thanks for the information you presented here, I did similar tests on my machine and had the same results.
Just a side note…you have a crap ton of icons on your dock.
Thanks Mike…if I’ve riled you up, then my work here is done.
Ya’ll do know about apps like SafariSpeed. Also Safari has an RSS feature which is on by default. That will definitely eat memory.
Now what I need to do is see if cache size affects the memory issue. That said if you have a fast connection, turn of caching. Its just a waste of space, and if you are a developer caching is not ideal.
Definitely recommend playing with setting in debug window. Also same goes for Firefox. There are apps to tweak Firefox performance and they do work. My Firefox on our iMac C2D 2.0Ghz is faster than Safari.
Also from a pure browsing perspsective performance can be affected by connection. My iMac is WiFi’d to a Linksys and has some delays (wired is faster) so any test of browsing should involve wired connections.
Also History eats a lot of memory. I see this in Firefox on my Windows Laptop (run session saver, with always 5-8 tabs open) and well memory is umm ALOT!
just some thoughts
I’ve just tried opening safari, and watching activity monitor. Its pretty obvious that it keeps the contents of a page opened in its memory cache, and doesn’t release it until the application is closed – i.e. open a tab, and open a graphics and flash laden page such as http://friend.ac/rick watch the real memory rate rise. Close the tab, and it doesn’t release the memory back – so if you’re browsing lots of sites, then this will rise – I guess until safari releases it.
I think the difference with FF and Safari, is that safari is prepared to keep content stored in its RAM cache whereas FF releases it back after the pages are closed…
Sorry, I didn’t have the time to read all the comments, so please excuse me if this is repeating anything previously mentioned, but while running OS 10.2 I had occasional problems with Safari and Photoshop crashing at the same time eventually becoming so common an OS reinstall became necessary. I believe I had to reinstall 3 times in the 2 years I ran 10.2 because of these issues. I upgraded from 10.2 to 10.4 and have not had similar problems except once or twice where both Photoshop and Safari will crash at the same time but it has never been common or caused me to have to reinstall the OS. Anyway, as a web developer it is not at all uncommon for me to have 20-50 Safari windows open and 50-300 Photoshop files open at the same time, plus many other programs running all day every day so I know I’m pushing my machine but thankfully things don’t crash often on my 10.4 system now. Anyway, it’s not at all surprising to hear you say that things should run slower after using Safari. Just guessing, but it seems Safari and Adobe products somehow share the same memory or processing code somehow and that they don’t always play as nice with one another as we would hope. And btw, I love Safari (even with it’s quirks and shortcomings) and Adobe (especially Photoshop) so don’t think I’m just criticizing — just a few things I’ve noticed after years and years of daily use.
Well i have no high hopes of apple fixing the issues. They rather make more trouble. That is who apple is today. I miss the -80’s.
When OSX was in version 10.1 such problems as memory leaks was not present. Well 10.1 was not fast but I’ve would say it was the best coded version of OSX maybe not the most optimiced version.
Forgive me for this intrusion. I saw the title of the entry and, as an avid Mac fan since the Lisa, had to just scan over the replies. I, unlike many of you, do not have unlimited time to test or respond to tests nor make disparaging, rude, crude or childish remarks to one another. I will merely make a quick observation on the point and fade off into the sunset. It seems to me that a difference of 30-90 seconds in one’s life should not be a “life-altering” event. Like I said, I did not take the time to read all the replies but, of the ones I did read, nobody mentioned all the facets which could be involved. Everyone is so into CPU and RAM and “POWER” they forgot other possibilities. Could there be hard drive issues. Is your drive thrashing itself about trying to find and put together all the little pieces of information for your projects? It could even be power supply issues, software versions and updates, other bloatware which is interfering, extensions, control panels, all kinds of stuff. I am happy for all of you who took the time to tell us what “YOUR” experiences are only to have it refuted by someone else “running the exact same thing.” BULL!!! Just be happy the Mac is alive and well and stable . . . oh, and if a difference of 30 seconds makes a big dent in your life you’re booking yourself way too tight!
I am having a problem with Bit Torrent utterly hogging all my CPU power. It slows down Safari to a crawl and frequently makes it impossible to load a whole page. Trying to open other applications while Bit Torrent is busy at work can cause them to stall, thus making ‘Force Quit’ necessary.
Solutions?
Hey Cam,
I agree 30-90 seconds is nothing in the great scheme of things. The point though in the After Effects rendering tests is that was a small section of a larger project, so that 30- 90 seconds of extra time in the real world, rendering the project at its full length of 2 minutes, and at its full resolution, actually would correspond to an extra hour of rendering time.
For the Photoshop tests, again, an extra minute or two to open and and to save a file may only add 4 minutes to your day, but the reality is once you open a large file, you usually want to work on it. Suppose you wish to do a “blur” or some other time-intensive effect. Suddenly waiting 60% longer for each thing you do to happen becomes a big deal.
-The Doc
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 (seeUPDATE3, ABOVE).
-The Doc
Maybe Safari sucks up a lot of CPU because it has to acces\load a lot of external plugins\resources (like it is just a 5mb app) and like camino(40mb app) does not have to do this? I don’t know shit about memory or cpu usage but it is amybe a point to look at too,
As a long-time After effects user I can tell you that the problem is not just with Safari. After Effects want as much RAM as it can get. The speed of an After Effects render is based not just on processor speed, but also on how much of your comp’s elements it can preload and hold in RAM. If you have enough RAM for After Effects to load all of your composition’s elements, the render will move much quicker than if After Effects has to reload elements while it renders. If you want to really see what’s going on, expand the “Current Render Details” drop down in the render queue window. I guarantee you will see the computer take longer to load elements when After Effects to compete with other apps for system RAM.
It is actually quite simple, the more apps you have open while rendering, the less RAM available to After Effects. Safari uses more RAM than Firefox, so After Effects has less RAM available when using Safari. Open up lots of memory hogging apps other than Safari and you will see the same thing happen.
Sure, Safari’s memory leaks don’t help the situation, but I wouldn’t blame the problem solely on Safari.
An interesting test and even more interesting results.
From my experiences with Macs I’d say the problem is both Safari’s and Photoshop’s fault, as your test with QuickTime suggests. But I think most interesting is the screenshot showing the memory consumption of the different browsers, I think that’s the key. Look at the virtual memory, not the physical! Safari’s even worse compared to all the others in that point.
Have you been monitoring the CPU-load and memory-consumption _during_ your tests? It would be interesting to see, what actually is causing the computing costs, because it doesn’t necessarily have to be the actual processing, but could just as well be the swapping and caching. – I first noticed this on iBooks and PowerBooks, that where significantly slower compared to desktop-macs although their CPU and RAM where of very similar configuration. It turned out to be a an issue of harddisk-speed, which led me to some investigation on the virtual memory management of MacOS X.
What it came down to was this: It sucks. Poorly designed. MacOS X is kind of obsessed with swapping even if there seems to be no need for it at all (e.g. on Desktop-Macs with loads of RAM running only a few applications open) and it wastes a lot of resources on swapping. Changing the boot process to create a ramdisk for the swap (and /tmp) speeded the system up considerably. (Although it’s not recommendable, as MacOS X also need’s loads of swap, so even on a machine with 8 GiB RAM, where you can allocate e.g. 4 GiB for a ramdisk, MacOS X will fill up that swap sooner or later and crash as soon as there’s no more space to fill up with pointless swap. You’re better off with a really fast harddisk for the swapfile or even as boot-disk. Mind: Even 7.200 or 10.000 rpm means that the harddisk’s a snail compared to the rest of the hardware in modern computers, so in most cases the cpu has to wait and wait and wait forever for harddisks to respond. So ‘really fast’ means server-grade, don’t even consider harddisks below 10.000 rpm, think big, think 15.000 rpm or better.) So considering the screenshot with the Activity Monitor open I’d say swapping is the key in this case, too.
Let’s hope that Apple will replace MacOS X’s NeXT-based, stoneage swap-management in Leopard (swap-partitions instead of files would be nice, but the whole swap-management is the real problem) – but I don’t think that’s very likely. So in the end, faster harddisk are the only solution, but that’s not really an option in most macs and for most users. Even if you were willing (and able) to exchange the harddisk, MacBooks and MacBook Pros can’t supply the cooling and power necessary, Mac mini’s can’t either and lack the space, with iMac’s it’s the same. But we can’t all buy Mac Pros!
Well, the hardware quality that Apple ships has been getting better lately after it’s been going rapidly downhill the last couple of years, it’s not really superb again, but their’s hope. Maybe Apple will start shipping hardware of really good quality again soon. I think they’ll have no choice, because they can’t bond MacOS X no longer to the crappy, over-priced stuff they’ve been shipping for the last years.
Safari, including the latest WebKit nightly as I write this, still has a very obvious memory leak somewhere. It’s also extremely easy to demonstrate and reproduce. Point the browser at http://www.apple.com/startpage/ and take a look at the memory usage in Activity Monitor or your favorite command-line tool. Refresh the page every few seconds for several minutes. Don’t load any other pages or anything that would muddy the waters. Have a look at Activity Monitor again. You’ll see that Safari or WebKit is eating up more RAM than before. For example, reloads every minute for 10 minutes took the latest WebKit memory usage from 34.34MB for me to 35.57. That’s a small leak, to be sure, but expanded over hours of browsing on multiple web pages it could certainly add up quickly.
Hey Michael,
Is that a memory leak?
I just tried it in WebKit, and yes, it happens, but it happens in Firefox even faster. I think it is an issue with most browsers. The memory usages goes up 1/2 a MB each time you hit reload in Camino, 1/2 to 1 MB in OmniWeb, and maybe 1/3 a MB in WebKit. I agree on paper there is no reason this should happen, since none of the content is changing, but this seems to be a universal “feature” of all browsers.
-The Doc
Since my first days on a G3 PB w/256 memory I have seen Safari get slower as it’s session got longer. I flush it regularly by habit now,even w/an MBP 2.33. FireFox does some things quicker but isn’t very stable on this machine. I ride it until it crashes and then go back to Safari. I agree with the poster who emphasized a detailed tweaking
I used safari for more the 2 years now and is much faster then firefox, anytime.
Robert, one more time..
We’re not comparing the speed of each browser, we were comparing the speed of other apps when USING the browsers.
-The Doc
I’ve had similar problems. Safari hogs up to 800Mb of RAM and makes my brand new 17″ MBP feel slow. The thing with it keeping windows in RAM may be true, but if I close it and reopen with Saft active, restoring each and every window as it was, my used RAM goes from maybe 1600Mb to 400Mb. Dreadful. Definitely a leak, not a feature.
hey this is great. answers my frustration i’ve been having recently. thanx!!
by the way, dr. macenstein, you can change colour of the bars by double click on one of the bars (or click on the bar if graph is already selected) and then pick colour or image fill from object inspector, then you can change the colour!
to the safari detractors – at least safari is fully acid2 compliant.
a lot’s written here, forgive me for my errors, but i only skimmed through. all these clocks and watches but no mention of cache emptying. f does the doc (self-styled tinkerer) know how to, even. firefox is all bloat and gui, and tries to be everything but a browser. it appealed to novice web geeks on windows back in 2003, spurred by a big campaign to be different and shake of ‘internet explorer’ the guide to a virtual world for adult-new entrants….shaking off mummy’s hand is being ‘cool’….but that pubescent Firefox talk is all crap. it wants to be a web development tool too. it wants to be with you when you write a poem on a napkin. for a browser to be fast it needs to have some memory use, and caching. considering firefox and safari only as ‘realistic’ is nuts,what the hell is realistic, then? trying to be sort of like real is not being real, more smug, and lazy.
Opera has poor code too., sorry. it fails to re-render,especially images. so how about shiira then, it is quick, and has a neat way to empty the cache, or limit it, as you wish. and it doesn;t try to be a web-developer tool either. full marks to shiira, based on webkits too, i.e the core system.
I believe that I stumbled onto your conclusions as well. I have been having major slowdown problems on a maxed out iMac that has major problems with Parallels. Had tried everything until I literally just shut down Safari as a test and then Parallels seemed to run with a much minimized slowdown period. Am still testing, but Safari seems to be a big contributor.
Well screw mac, I’m getting a pc next time.
Reason 1: Any system that eats so much cpu shoul have its head engineers examined. I am always surprised of how fast internet browsing can be every time I use a pc (which notably is much ‘slower’ than my 2gb 1.5 GHz powerbook)
Reason 2: My image as a eco-minded person is slowly deteriorating due to Apples consistent denial to improve their polluting laptops – go for a Lenovo if you’re concerned about our common world
Reason 3: Apple refuses to sell spare parts and has thus created the basis for an internet shop like ifixit.com that sells spare parts from old macs. The left fan of my powerbook sounds like an old man with a cold sleeping on his back but despite the fact that I am capable of opening my computer and replacing such small details, Apple needs to have it in for repair which probably would ten-double the cost of shifting the fan.
Reason 4: You can install windows on a mac, but it is illegal to do the opposite (installing osX on a pc). Isn’t that a bit arrogant?
Reason 5: PC’s are cheaper
Reason 6: PC laptop companies have finally realised that design is an important factor when the consumer buys a computer.
I do like my Mac and it has many features that I really love and would miss on a pc, but I have had it with this arrogant company.
As far as the CPU goes, Flash will use any CPU that is available. Working as designed…
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.
* dr mac is the man! … huzzahs for calling out pokey safari!
…. damn you, pokey safari!
* cam is an utter moron:
the delay imposed by a wobbly browser running on a dodgy platform (osx,windows, linux, take your pick – all of them crack under pressure) is not a one-time loss of 20 seconds once in a life-time: when things start to fall apart, every single action (there can be a sequence of dozens or hundreds in a task) can be interrupted by a 20 second – or a 200 second! – delay. Things that should take minutes consume hours! Sometimes work in progress on a heavy-duty app does not allow for a total restart – so one has to start tip-toe-ing around one’s own machine in order to snag a few fleeting cycles for this or that ‘lightweight’ task.
obviously, cam, you do not have to work in the a production environment in the real world or else he would not dare make such an obtuse comment (and have such a squeamish objection to the rough & tumble of bbs debate … with the obvious exception of the two linux gearheads who resorted to profanity in lieu of an actual arguement).
cam – you officially stripped of your bragging righst about your long mac/lisa history: you are demoted to level of moron, second-class: your windows machine is waiting for you.
* rick is not a moron but he is wrong:
“safari keeps the contents of a page opened in its memory cache, and doesn’t release it until the application is closed”.
FALSE: External resources can be purged by turning off plugins & javascript; a full restart of the whole app is not necessary to release piggy resources.
However, this technique is not always effecting at returning safari to a quiescent state: it only works if the browser has not already stumbled; once a browser (Safari’s) runs into difficulty with external resources (flash, javascript, plugins in general) then deactivating access to these resources might not prevent the ‘cascade of death’ – only a restart of the app or sometimes the whole system will cure the problem.
The Cause? part of the problem is the obvious defects at the application level – actionscripts/javascripts that are shiite, and using the damn Flash as a video delivery instead of a proper codec like h.264) …. but i suspect that theie are deep system issues in the event model & the thread model for osx itself that are also to blame.
osx has a ‘funnel’ kernel thread model (one for network; one for everything else) – and before tiger, things were even worse (only one kernel thread!) … i cant recall if leopard has fixed this glaring weakness …
but it is possible that part of the problem is that when crappy javascript/actionscript makes synchronous calls, everything else gets jammed up because of the damn funnel.
(note: this the cpu side of the problem – the cascade of death; i dont hink it directly effects the memory issue).
As for being a memory pig …. there might be a side-effect of the cpu cascading beachvall (network) problem with the memory problem:
* even when heavily loaded (hundreds of tabs), safari will enter a quiescent state only when it does not encounter a problem (with javascript/actionscript or maybe just bad html!) ….
activity monitor will show memory & cpu useage fall in half if safari is left alone for a long time: from 200MB++ RAM to much less than 50MB- … from 30% cpu to 3%
* but after a ‘collision’ (synchronous network threads getting jammed by errant actionscript/javascript; whatever the reason might be), sometimes safari (or any other browser) can never be clamed down … even after access to external resources is deactivated in the prefs.
The Result: it is simple.
JUST SAY NO!
No to Plugins ….
No to Flash video, the idiot encoder!
No to Actionscript (used by interactive flash)!
No to javacript!
I seldom find these absolutely necessary to use the web: when they are, css could have been used instead – these are used mostly by lazy or stupid web designers who have not given any serious thought to their object model, who want to a cheap band-aid to cover up their lack of talent.
I surf without this junk turned on … just as everyone now surfs without pop-ups turned on.
They are more than a distraction they bloody well interfere with the operation of the computer.
As for the safari tram … well is it too harsh to say that we have not seen so much sloppy engineering since the cretins at netscape punished us with ver4 and its successors in the 90’s? … they damned well deserved to have their heads handed to them by msie! ….
i just hope that mac users (er, windows/iphone users too, i guess) have some light at the end of the tunnel from apple …
it would be a shame to have be forced to use clunky firefox (that does not have essential osx features) or have no other choice but flaky camino (that does have osx features, but is hugely late at keeping up with core moz/ff technology & builds — plus is burdened by refugees from, wait for it, the infamous netscape V4+ team that – did i mention this already? – has already achieved infamy as among the worst engineering teams in history).
Thanks for your results, it confirms my thoughts on Safari
Definitely recommend playing with setting in debug window. Also same goes for Firefox. There are apps to tweak Firefox performance and they do work. My Firefox on our iMac C2D 2.0Ghz is faster than Safari.
Also from a pure browsing perspsective performance can be affected by connection. My iMac is WiFi’d to a Linksys and has some delays (wired is faster) so any test of browsing should involve wired connections.
Also History eats a lot of memory. I see this in Firefox on my Windows Laptop (run session saver, with always 5-8 tabs open) and well memory is umm ALOT!
The Cause? part of the problem is the obvious defects at the application level – actionscripts/javascripts that are shiite, and using the damn Flash as a video delivery instead of a proper codec like h.264) …. but i suspect that theie are deep system issues in the event model & the thread model for osx itself that are also to blame.
Well, the hardware quality that Apple ships has been getting better lately after it’s been going rapidly downhill the last couple of years, it’s not really superb again, but their’s hope. Maybe Apple will start shipping hardware of really good quality again soon. I think they’ll have no choice, because they can’t bond MacOS X no longer to the crappy, over-priced stuff they’ve been shipping for the last years.
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. ? ok
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!
Hmmm… I wonder how much this post is very subjective. Well, if subjective is the right word, that is. What I mean is that it may be system dependent, not so much browser dependent. Some browsers tend to work differently on different system or software combinations– which, obviously, means you’ll never be able to pit one browser against another in this kind of thing. Hmmm… still… I do tend to think Firefox is better all round.
I’m not sure if this is an advantage or disadvantage to me. Although I’m an avid user of FF, I still think it’s unfair to compare it with Safari. Did you know that there software or plug ins that work well with Safari and not with FF and there are some that work well the other way around.
I think they’ll have no choice, because they can’t bond MacOS X no longer to the crappy, over-priced stuff they’ve been shipping for the last years.
Tests on Safari would need to standardize on how much RAM it’s got, which varies according to how long & where you’ve been surfing.
I do tend to think Firefox is better all round.