Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
Search

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Slashdot Log In

Log In

Create Account  |  Retrieve Password

Using Safari Slows Your System?

Posted by kdawson on Thu Mar 01, 2007 09:52 AM
from the need-for-speed dept.
OS X Operating Systems Businesses Apple
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.
+ -
story
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Using Safari Slows Your System? 50 Comments More /

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More
Loading... please wait.

  • OMG (Score:3, Insightful)

    by cowscows (103644) on Thursday March 01 2007, @09:54AM (#18193980) Journal
    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!

    • it's the memory stupid (Score:5, Informative)

      by goombah99 (560566) on Thursday March 01 2007, @10:23AM (#18194352)
      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 (Score:4, Insightful)

        by MojoRilla (591502) on Thursday March 01 2007, @11:03AM (#18194852)

        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 (Score:4, Informative)

          by bberens (965711) on Thursday March 01 2007, @11:52AM (#18195548)
          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:WTF (Score:4, Insightful)

        by cowscows (103644) on Thursday March 01 2007, @03:26PM (#18198680) Journal
        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.

  • my test case (Score:5, Funny)

    by gEvil (beta) (945888) on Thursday March 01 2007, @09:55AM (#18193986)
    I have a 5-1/2 year old iBook. Running anything slows my system down... : p

  • Bloomin' OS X copycats (Score:4, Funny)

    by tttonyyy (726776) on Thursday March 01 2007, @09:58AM (#18194028) Homepage Journal
    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: (Score:3, Funny)

      by 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.

  • Weird... (Score:5, Informative)

    by avalys (221114) on Thursday March 01 2007, @10:00AM (#18194050)
    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... (Score:4, Informative)

      by peragrin (659227) on Thursday March 01 2007, @10:19AM (#18194312)
      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: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Brandybuck (704397)
          Unused RAM is wasted RAM.

          While that's a nice little bundle of syllables, it isn't true. RAM isn't like cellphone minutes. Here's some more nice sounding syllable collections (with editorial commentary), but they aren't true either:

          Unused harddrive space is wasted harddrive space, so start ripping!

          Unused bandwidth is wasted bandwidth, so make sure you're constantly downloading.

          Unused car seats are wasted car seats, so never drive a sedan without four passengers!

          Unused sleeping pills are wasted sleeping pills

    • Re: (Score:2, Redundant)

      by JavaLord (680960)
      I have had the same experence. Granted this is anecdotal evidence, but Safari runs much quicker than Firefox on my mac.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by troc (3606)

          Oh how i wish Safari had tabs

          Er, it does. Switch them on from the menubar.

              • Re:Weird... (Score:4, Insightful)

                by Afecks (899057) on Thursday March 01 2007, @12:32PM (#18196098)
                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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by moosesocks (264553)
      Hmm. I've had the same experience actually.

      Give Camino [caminobrowser.org] a try. It's a nice mix between Firefox and Safari.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by suv4x4 (956391)
      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...

      Same experience on Windows. I have lots of RAM, so let's say I don't care it wants to eat 100-200 MB ram for a few tabs. But I can't help the CPU problem. Not only it slows everything down terribly when loading pages (I frequently launch task manager to see what process eats my CPU a

  • Known Annoyance (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 01 2007, @10:01AM (#18194068)
    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: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by freedumb2000 (966222)
      It's really shame that the Macbook/Pros are limited to 2GB of RAM. More RAM has always been the best way to keep old systems usable over the years. At least the new ones accept a total of 3GB now.
    • I was blown away by this as well. I have a 12 inch powerbook about 2 years old with 512MB and never really had major memory issues with running iphoto, safari, and mythfrontend. I got a new mac mini a couple weeks ago with 1GB and noticed paging- mythfrontend took about a minute to start. I bumped up to 2GB and performance improved by an order of magnitude.

  • Running Nighlty code (Score:4, Interesting)

    by failedlogic (627314) on Thursday March 01 2007, @10:04AM (#18194120)
    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: (Score:3, Informative)

      by ArsonSmith (13997)
      I have found Safari to be almost completely unusable. Sites like http://kbb.com/ [kbb.com] wont let you look up certain car values. some web controlled APC power strips we have wont even display the first page, and http://www.az501st.com/ [az501st.com] most of the menu's don't work.

      • Re:Running Nighlty code (Score:5, Informative)

        by Serious Callers Only (1022605) on Thursday March 01 2007, @11:15AM (#18195010)

        I have found Safari to be almost completely unusable.


        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.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Graff (532189)
            The problem is not just bad code. What is happening is they are coding specifically to bugs in IE. IE has a number of quirks that web developers code around. Once the site works in IE they declare the site done and don't bother to check how it works in other browsers. Firefox has a quirks mode where it basically emulates IE's quirks so it mostly works. Also, a lot of developers check for Firefox compatibility because it is the second most-used browser out there. Even with this there are still a lot of

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by jZnat (793348) *
            Well, if the web browsers handled errors the way they're supposed to (ignore them in some cases, completely fail in other cases like malformed XHTML), people wouldn't be able to get away with errors. Since SGML was so lenient in the first place, we've had the problem where we have an XML standard that lots of people use but hardly anyone uses according to the standards (a big no-no when it comes to pretty much any other XML standard or standard in general).
  • I've noticed that Safari takes a lot of CPU on my system. It happens after I have used a specific java-based web app.

    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.
  • I know on my core duo laptop running XP, both firefox and IE tend to bog my system down on pages that have flash animations (using 100% of a single core for 50% overall). How is this news on a techie site that running something in the background may have an impact on other processes? Do we want to go back to the OS 8 days when programs could steal all the processor? I thought SMP was a good thing?
  • As a recent Mac convert, i'll be the first to admit that Firefox is a better browser for both Mac and PC.

    Safari incorrectly renders lots of sites. Firefox seems to be better about most sites.

    And....it's free.

    -ted
  • Dave Hyatt actually makes it clear that safari doesn't slow the machine as much as speed up javascript / flash...

  • I concur (Score:3, Informative)

    by rattler14 (459782) on Thursday March 01 2007, @10:11AM (#18194190)
    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 (Score:4, Funny)

      by loafing_oaf (1054200) on Thursday March 01 2007, @10:19AM (#18194302) Homepage

      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

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by StressedEd (308123)
      ...is that the process "kernal task" keeps eating up...

      Can anyone give a concise explanation of what "kernel_task" actually is? I have seen some broad chatter and an overview [bleepsoft.com], but nothing significant. I too notice it going banannas from time to time. Then again I use MATLAB and various other memory eaters quite a lot...

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Guy Harris (3803)

          The short and simple answer is: Kernel_task is the kernel.

          And a more correct answer is "kernel_task is the Mach task to which all kernel threads belong".

          Each user-mode process has a Mach task corresponding to it; each pthread in that task has a Mach thread corresponding to it. Those threads can be executing kernel code if they're in the middle of a system call, so not everything done by the kernel is done in a kernel_task thread.

          The kernel has threads of its own, not started within a user-mode process's

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by _|()|\| (159991)

      Memory is a real problem on OS X, especially with Apple programs. After Safari and Mail have been open for a while (say, a day or two), they get sluggish. Measuring memory is tricky, but Safari is almost always one of the first two or three processes in top sorted by rsize or vsize. (Is it bad if vsize for a single application exceeds the total RAM?)

      I suspect that some programs have been conservative in their use of autorelease pools, causing garbage to lie around longer than necessary. I ran across t [mikeash.com]

    • 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

      They must be using code from Firefox...

      (ducks)

  • Going on Safari is supposed to be a chill out vacation isn't it. And because nature is so balanced, life speeds up for all the wildlife who have to run like fuck when they see you approach with your high powered rifle.
  • 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.

    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

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by 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/ [charlessoft.com]

      before doing that you might also try removing Safari's preference file: com.apple.Safari.plist

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by NickFitz (5849)

      Forum advice was to run "repair permissions", I did but it didn't help.

      It didn't help because the people who gave you that advice are imbeciles who believe in voodoo. [daringfireball.net] It was able to help with occasional problems caused by Classic and bad installers circa OS X 10.1, but there are hardly any circumstances where it will make any difference to anything on more recent versions, as explained here. [unsanity.org]

  • But I wonder (Score:3, Funny)

    by raynet11 (844558) on Thursday March 01 2007, @10:14AM (#18194242)
    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?
  • I have that one on a laminated pocket card they issued me the first day of Programming School.
  • The S60 webkit [nokia.com] is a port of Webkit to the Series 60 3rd edition platform. Nokia has created a memory manager for this port that can make the webkit works with low memory. If only I can have the low memory footprint browser in my Mac.
  • Using safari slows down any system:
    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.

  • wasn't the slowdown natural?? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by towsonu2003 (928663) on Thursday March 01 2007, @11:09AM (#18194920)
    I've been using Firefox in Linux so long, I got used to Firefox slowing down every inch of my laptop when I go to sites that use transparent PNGs or javascript (digg and sourceforge are a major slow-downers for instance - I don't go there anymore... and I can't comfortably use slashdot's new commenting system)*

    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...

  • Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bill_kress (99356) on Thursday March 01 2007, @12:58PM (#18196438)
    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.

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 Geeknet, Inc.