Using Safari Slows Your System?

sandoz writes "Macenstein has up an interesting article with some evidence that running Safari seems to slow down unrelated programs. While the speed with which a browser renders a Web page is an important measure, the difference between browsers is usually a matter of a few seconds at most. To my mind, a more important measure of speed is how a browser affects the overall speed of your system." Some responses to the article suggest that memory handling in WebKit may be the culprit. The Safari developers have already responded to this article on the webkit.org blog. They explain why the slowdown might be occurring and how it's (probably) already been fixed in the nightly build. And they request more minimal test cases.

Comments

OMG

[cowscows]

Hey wow, a piece of software isn't perfect, and the developers are trying to fix it. This is an exciting new paradigm for programming. Thanks for keeping me updated!

my test case

[gEvil (beta)]

I have a 5-1/2 year old iBook. Running anything slows my system down... : p

Bloomin' OS X copycats

[tttonyyy]

Don't you realise Windows has this technology already - it's been slowing down unrelated programs for years! (Sorry, I know it's cheap, but I couldn't resist!)

Re:Bloomin' OS X copycats

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you realise Windows has this technology already - it's been slowing down unrelated programs for years! (Sorry, I know it's cheap, but I couldn't resist!)

No, Apple has had this technology for years and Microsoft just copied it, as usual.

Re:Bloomin' OS X copycats

[cyfer2000]

Xerox, as usual.

Weird...

[avalys]

A few months ago, I switched to Firefox because I was convinced Safari was slowing down my system. Just this morning, I fired up Safari again - and it is at least three times as fast as Firefox. Don't know what I was thinking...

Re:Weird...

[peragrin]

Safari has a memory leak. run safari for several days. Then close all but the last tab. Safari is use several hundred megs of ram. now I simply close safari when i am done browsing or when i am about a launch a memory intensive app. The new app kicks out all of safari's crud and it launches instantly.

Firefox is the same speed no matter what, but it too has an occasional memory leak when you open and close lots of tabs.

Re:Weird...

[Afecks]

The ENTIRE OS works perfectly. Everything.

This was modded insightful? This is the "perfect" example of fanboy behavior. One zealot makes a broad sweeping claim that nobody in their right mind would dare to make and then another comes along and mods him insightful. Only a self-delusional fool would think perfection is attainable and there is nothing insightful about deluding yourself.

Known Annoyance

[Anonymous Coward]

I have both the nightly and the original Safari version installed. The latter leaks ram like crazy which tends to slow things down. You would think they would have fixed this ages ago. But they haven't. Try closing Safari periodically.

Another observation I have is that 1GB of ram is really only marginally adequate on my 2.16Ghz Macbook pro. If you have safari open, iPhoto open, and god forbid, a rosetta app (e.g. Word) open - you're waiting five seconds for windows to come up as disk gets paged out. Unacceptable.

Running Nighlty code

[failedlogic]

Just wondering what other's experiences have been running the nightly code. I've been doing it with Firefox (and when it was Firebird for 2 years). But I've not tried with WebKit. Is it fairly stable, better rending of pages and faster?

There are a few sites that are noticeably slower on Safari. Its one of the only reasons I'm using Firefox. That and there are a few plug-ins that are better than Saaft and company.

Re:Running Nighlty code

[Serious Callers Only]

I have found Safari to be almost completely unusable.

http://kbb.com/ - Failed validation, 67 errors
http://www.az501st.com/ - Failed validation, 207 errors

You're blaming the wrong people; try complaining to the people who made the broken websites and didn't test or at least validate them.

I concur

[rattler14]

I love safari and gladly use it over any other browser. However, since 10.4.5+, I have noticed that (as a whole) there appears to be an inability of OS X to free RAM up as efficiently as it used to. Programs like Safari, after many hours of usage, will remain as a HUGE RAM/virtual memory sink. I constantly quit Safari to try and alleviate/fix this.

But what seems to happen is that the process "kernal task" keeps eating up more and more ram even after Safari is shut down. After a couple days of usage, I feel the need for a restart just to flush out this annoyance.

Sure, in the grand scheme of things, It's only a minor annoyance, but it is definitely noticeable and something I hope is dealt with when 10.5 comes out.

Re:I concur

[loafing_oaf]

Just switch to Firefox. I'm using it right now on Windows XP, and I haven't noticed any problems with memory le*$@!!- NO CARRIER

But I wonder

[raynet11]

If a train leaves Boston with an I-MAC running Safari doing 40MPH heading west and a 2nd train leaves Chicago doing 60MPH heading East with an mini MAC running Safari and Quake 4. How many I-PODS will be sold funding more "Hi I'm a MAC" comercials before: a. My Karma can be kicked down another notch b. The code will be fixed ? c. This post will be changed to flame bait d. This post is silly and you can't believe your still reading it?

it's the memory stupid

[goombah99]

I'v already tested this on my computer. here's the facts. 1) at idle on normal web pages safari consumes much LESS cpu time than other browsers 2) if you run a cpu intensive script background it is not slowed by safari in any measurable way.

in the macenstein article they too noted that cpuintensive tasks like quicktime were not slowed but memory intensive tasks like photoshop were. Also they noted that the in memory and virtual memory footprints were several fold higher for safari than for firefox.

clearly this is a no brainier. Safari is using more memory and doing so in a demanding way. I don't know why but I assume it probably has something to do with how it handles the back-forward cache, fast page compoaition, and images. Maybe there's some memory leak too, since safari's offtprint grows during the day.

But this is utterly unsurprising. If you run a big memory app like photshop you already know better than to be running other apps that consume memory.

The only problem I've had with safari is not this but there are just some webpages that don't seem to comlicated that make it grind to a halt and use 60% of the cpu. One example is pricegrabber.com.

Re:it's the memory stupid

[MojoRilla]

But this is utterly unsurprising. If you run a big memory app like photshop you already know better than to be running other apps that consume memory.

Really? You know, this isn't 1997 when OS's did cooperative multitasking and machines had 32 megs of RAM. In 2007, many people have dual core machines and 1 gig or more RAM, and like to run more than one program at the same time. In this day and age, people want and expect to be able to run multiple apps (including web browsers, instant messaging programs, office apps, and, gasp!, photo editing apps) at the same time.

Re:it's the memory stupid

[bberens]

In my experience Photoshop will chew through my 1GB of RAM quite easily. It does have a pretty advanced disk caching mechanism so usually it will perform about the same with less memory, but still. Like running a database it will consume as much memory as you let it for maximum performance.

Re:Safari or Firefox?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Since I upgraded to 10.4.8, Safari crashes on me about once a week. Forum advice was to run "repair permissions", I did but it didn't help. "

That seems to be the advice given for everything by some people. I'm not sure why anyone should think it would help in this case or many others.

I suppose you could try reinstalling the application after getting it off the install disc with Pacifist:

http://www.charlessoft.com/

before doing that you might also try removing Safari's preference file: com.apple.Safari.plist from the "Preferences" directory in your Home library, so that a new one is generated, in case there's a corruption in that causing problems. All this, again, is unspecific advice, but at least it's not Voodoo.

You might also like to try the Camino browser. That also uses Mozilla's Gecko engine, but has far better integration with the platform. It also uses a Safari-style bookmark manager:

http://www.caminobrowser.org/

Re:Firefox is a better browser.

[Paulrothrock]

I've yet to find a solution for the keychain password storage, but there's a plugin from Google called Google Browser Sync that I use to keep Firefox on my Powerbook and the mobile Firefox on my flash drive synchronized.

Re:Firefox is a better browser.

[SuperMog2002]

Opera for Windows and Mac has been free as in beer for quite some time now. Go download it from Opera.com, it's pretty good.

Hmm

[bill_kress]

I'm not an apple fanboy yet, but I'm really impressed with the immediate response of the Safari development team. Imagine if IE was slowing down some other program--the last group you'd expect to hear from would be the IE dev team--so far outside the realm of possibility as to be laughable.

Re:WTF

[cowscows]

This story isn't about some exciting new program, or some cool technology, or even an updated version of a popular piece of software. This is a report about a non-critical bug for a web browser. A web browser with limited market share and a number of good alternatives. Oh, and the developer has already acknowledged it, explained it, and described some of the progress being made to fix it. This isn't about technology, it's about a minor decision in the production of a web browser not being the optimal solution.

Slashdot covers a huge range of topics, a lot of information goes through it each day. It's constantly bring in new editors, and they get craploads of submissions each day. Keeping all of that in mind, I just fail to see how anything in this article was worthy of a front page spot on the site. I'm not calling for the firing of the editors or anything, just making fun of them a little bit for posting something silly.