Safari Beta 2 seems to be a CPU hog...

[John Whitney]

I had been browsing a few sites with Safari Beta 2 (v73), end closed all opened windows.

Then I started playing around with loading screen savers in the background (in this case, Serene Screen's Marine Aquarium). I noticed they were moving in an annoyingly jerky fashion. So I renice'd the screen saver process to the highest priority, and it was still stuttering.

At this point, I started quiting running applications. There weren't many. Immediately after quiting Safari, all stuttering in the screen saver vanished. I don't see this when running other browsers, such as Camino.

So why, with no windows open, is Safari hogging so much CPU time? Loading it up again introduced a small stutter in the screen saver, but not nearly so pronounced. Could there be a memory leak over time?

John

[iBrowse]

I haven't had any problems with Safari yet.

[grad student]

are you sure it was hogging CPU time? it could be that graphics resources on the video card were getting exhausted by buffers created in safari... and that the OpenGL performance suffered as a result... what is your hardware specs? To see if it was actually consuming tons of CPU - run top -u in the terminal, and look at the processor usage... or run process viewer.app

-D

[CubeDude]

I don't have any trouble with running screen savers behind Safari. It probably is your graphics card.

[John Whitney]

Originally posted by CubeDude
I don't have any trouble with running screen savers behind Safari. It probably is your graphics card.

First off, Safari running in the background with no open windows should not be taking up and graphics processing power. The screen saver was running smoothly without the Safari running, so why would it be the graphics chip?

Second, not all screen savers are equal. Marine Aquarium, for example, tends to take a constant 40-50% of my CPU time. Slideshows, on the other handle, mostly take up less than 5%.

All that being said, I haven't been able to reproduce the behaviour, so I am not sure what I was seeing. :\

[VanDeWaals]

I actually have had similar issues with Chimera/Camino in this regard. Occasionally I'll go to a web page and the CPU usage spikes (I checked in top and also via my CPU meter in the menu bar). When I go to a different page, it stops. Go back to the page, it happens again. I used to have it happen occasionally with Chimera 0.6, and its happened a couple times since Camino 0.7. I was wondering if it has something to do with the way some web pages are coded? I have NOT seen this in Safari...but I do not use it much.

[trevorM]

I am fairly impressed at the moment with it And I have been really trying to test it out a little. I would add tho that I had my first unexpected crash ever with Safari the first time I ran the new version, which was this morning!

[AsLan^]

Originally posted by grad student
run top -u in the terminal

-D

hey neat command, thanks :smokey:

[PB]

Originally posted by John Whitney
So why, with no windows open, is Safari hogging so much CPU time?

I have noticed that problem once or twice. I think it depends on the website visited too. I was viewing a site with flash and javascript content and after some time the fan of the powerbook started operating, sign that I have reached 100% CPU usage. Weird ... I launched terminal and with "top -u -s5" (to take samples every 5 seconds) I saw CPU usage from Safari at 70% or more! Quitting and relaunching Safari obviously solves the problem.