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Using Safari Slows Your System?
Posted by
kdawson
on Thu Mar 01, 2007 09:52 AM
from the need-for-speed dept.
from the need-for-speed dept.
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.
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OMG (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://shawn.redhive.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday May 26 2005, @09:04AM)
it's the memory stupid (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:it's the memory stupid (Score:4, Informative)
Re:WTF (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://shawn.redhive.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday May 26 2005, @09:04AM)
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.
my test case (Score:5, Funny)
(http://evil.google.com/)
Bloomin' OS X copycats (Score:4, Funny)
(http://www.cooldark.com/ | Last Journal: Monday April 26 2004, @05:31PM)
Weird... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Weird... (Score:4, Informative)
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... (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
http://kbb.com/ [kbb.com] - Failed validation, 67 errors
http://www.az501st.com/ [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.
Java issues (Score:2)
I suppose it could be Safari's fault or Java's fault, but I would sooner suspect an issue with a stale clientserver connection or something else within the Java app.
Depends on content of page? (Score:2)
(http://www.exacttarget.com/)
Firefox is a better browser. (Score:2, Interesting)
Safari incorrectly renders lots of sites. Firefox seems to be better about most sites.
And....it's free.
-ted
Re:Firefox is a better browser. (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.movetoiceland.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday June 02 2004, @11:02AM)
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. (Score:4, Informative)
Err, can't have it both ways (Score:2)
I concur (Score:3, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Funny)
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
Of course it slows your system (Score:2, Funny)
Safari or Firefox? (Score:2)
I use Safari because I want that whole "Apple" experience, and I also like the bookmark manager. But there have been a few times when web pages didn't work quite correctly in Safari, so I had to run Firefox anyway.
I've been thinking about formally switching to Firefox, seems like it would be less trouble, but I'd hate to have to do that somehow.
boxlight
But I wonder (Score:3, Funny)
"We've already fixed that in the next version" (Score:2)
Nokia have solved this ..... (S60 Webkit) (Score:2, Informative)
(http://www.compactbyte.com/symbianbible | Last Journal: Wednesday February 28 2007, @08:31PM)
proof (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Tuesday June 27 2006, @03:46AM)
1) You use Safari
2) You state Safari slows down your system
3) You post it
3) Gets posted in Slashdot
4) You get slashdotted
5) The holding system slows down
The funny thing is that Safari may slow down other system than yours as well.
Also, Dashboard widgets would slow things down (Score:2)
wasn't the slowdown natural?? (Score:3, Interesting)
So when I read this item, I told myself "oh, so... what I'm experiencing isn't normal. it can be news in slashdot... wow." Firefox has different effects on different people I guess...
* Using a clean profile + a nightly build doesn't help. Submitted bug reports do not get any interest from devels except tagging it with "perf" (I know, they're busy, but look - it's news on slashdot when it's Safari on Mac).
bugs in question? so far, I was lazy enough to file just these: 366728; 368365; 368908; 369044; 369682; 370697
pls don't reply w/ "worksforme". I spent considerable time trying to not reproduce the slow down effects, as you might guess...
memory leaks (Score:1)
(http://www.motorcityaudi.com/)
Safari, the bootstrap tool for firefox (Score:1)
To MY Mind... (Score:2)
Well that may be to your mind. To my mind, that's nothing more than your entire rational for writing this article. For most people, when they're browsing they're not doing anything else at the time except perhaps checking for e-mail, so that the performance hit on any other applications is non-consequential.
Hard to take this guy seriously... (Score:2, Insightful)
<quote>
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.
</quote>
<p>Put another way: "Surely letting the computer ONLY do my render won't be any faster than letting the computer render AND surf the web". Surely you jest? Doing a standalone render vs. doing (anything else) while rendering should make your render take longer. If it doesn't, file a bug with Adobe and ask them why they aren't utilizing the hardware properly.</p>
Safari, nice but leaky. (Score:1)
(http://wbh.org/)
After a week of uptime, and a week of use of Safari, it had got reeeaaaaaaallllllllllyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy slowwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.
So I quit it. 17 MINUTES of thrashing like a dead whale later, it finally died. 17 minutes to quit on a 1.83GHz Core Duo with 2GB of memory. Wow. I mean really. Wow. That. App. Leaks!!! (Safari has saft installed, and RSS disabled. This box was also running mail.app, terminal, SOHOnotes, gvim and iTunes. I checked!)
I get it... (Score:2, Funny)
How much of a leak? (Score:2)
(http://www.something...eednt-know/index.php)
Is it normal that at startup my powerbook has over a gig of virtual memory?
I kind of assumed ... (Score:1)
(http://savewizwar.com/)
Thanks for the Memory (Score:1)
For me, it's the memory issue. I tend to run Safari for days without restarting, and while I cannot confirm that there are memory leaks, I can tell you that it eventually consumes any memory that it can find. Closing all open windows has little or no effect (I did not trying clearing the cache on the odd chance that it might be affecting the situation). If I restart Safari, the memory footprint shrinks back to "normal" (whatever that is), and the entire performance of my system improves.
When I get an overall slowdown, top shows lots of pageouts. I'm guessing the disk hits are what is actually killing much of the performance.
Occasionally, I go to a page that sucks the CPUs dry, but that's the exception. Memory seems more of the culprit...
Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Safari doesn't clear its own cache (Score:1)
I still use Safari over Firefox or Camino as the page rendering and scrolling are much smoother on Safari. I've tried changing the scrolling settings on FF and Camino, but the scroll acceleration on Safari seems to be more refined.
"a few seconds" for every page you ever view (Score:2)
> of a few seconds at most.
That is a few seconds for every page. Here is a casual suggestion to lose a minute of your life for every 20 Web sites you visit, so that you can make background tasks go faster.
Safari is not one browser (Score:2, Interesting)
Safari 1.x runs on OS X 10.3 and earlier.
Safari 2.x runs requires OS X 10.4.
All the performance fixes go into Safari 2.x only. The only fixes for Safari 1.x are for security problems.
I'm running OS X 10.3, and I have noticed that Safari has severe severe performance problems. I think it is caused by Flash applets, which bring it to its knees. Websites with flash applets frequently will cause 100% cpu usage. And trying to use flash based video players often can't keep up, because it is demanding more than 100% cpu.
So now that there are so many flash ads, exploring the web is a painful experience.
* * *
OK, I know this is futile, but I'll try to head off the obligatory responses:
Q. Do you really expect Apple to enhance Safari for older operating systems?
A. I don't expect them to. But I wish they would fix the performance problems.
Q. If Flash ads are the problem, why don't you block them?
A. The ads pay for the web sites.
Q. Why don't you upgrade to OS X 10.4?
A. Because that would break certain other software needed for work.
Q. Why don't you use another browser?
A. I do.
Q. Why don't you just get a get a new, faster computer?
A. Because I keep expecting Apple to release a new model, in between a Mac mini and a Mac Pro.
Safari still seems to need "under the hood" work (Score:1)
I also find the persistent "memory leak" problem referred to by others. In addition, when an page is slow to load - and the "beachball" is going - I often cannot cancel the page load by clicking the "X" button; the application will not respond.