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

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!)

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...

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.

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

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: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.

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.