Safari leaking memory?

Posted:
in Mac Software edited January 2014
Has anyone noticed that leaks memory like a sieve?



If I leave Safari 2.0 running for over 24hrs, real memory usage climbs from about 40MB to over 100MB.



Closing tabs has no effect. Is this normal?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 7
    spiers69spiers69 Posts: 418member
    hmmm, my version of Safari is currently using 150mb of real memory... i think you may be right, it's been running for about 7 hours.

    I'm gonna quit and restart and see what it's like in a sec
  • Reply 2 of 7
    spiers69spiers69 Posts: 418member
    yeh your right. now it's only using 25mb, after i relaunched it
  • Reply 3 of 7
    hirohiro Posts: 2,663member
    Just because an app uses memory and does not get smaller does not mean it is leaking. I don't know whether these would be considered leaks or not, depends on how it was allocated and whether Safari is holding it for future use once it has it, or if access is actually lost and leaked. Holding onto cached objects and updating attributes can be much faster overall than wantonly creating and assassinating objects. Makes it really hard to determine whether memory is leaking or just not returned to the OS, when you don't have access to the source and appropriate tracking tools. Even if it is not leaking, not returning it may not be the best policy.
  • Reply 4 of 7
    drazztikkadrazztikka Posts: 240member
    If something is leaked than there would be a loss of data right?

    In this case there is more information kept than actually needed, but why not use the ram if there is enough space on it. If there is the ram, u can better use it right?



    My guess is that safari or osx keeps all surfed-to-pages in the ram as long as possible to get faster access to pages u already surfed to. If your ram is getting full, older ones get overwritten to new pages.

    If safari quits, then the memory will be freed.

    Probably this is the cache-memory that u can empty in safari's menubar.
  • Reply 5 of 7
    a_greera_greer Posts: 4,594member
    This has been happenin g to me since tiger...I just make a mental note to restart safari every hour or so.
  • Reply 6 of 7
    drazztikkadrazztikka Posts: 240member
    try to empty cache in safari's menu bar and see if this frees up memory.
  • Reply 7 of 7
    hyperb0lehyperb0le Posts: 142member
    Safari does appear to be leaking memory (open Terminal and type 'leaks Safari'), although not much (5 kb here).
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