Using Safari Slows Your System? 242
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.
Weird... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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:Running Nighlty code (Score:1, Informative)
Nokia have solved this ..... (S60 Webkit) (Score:2, 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.
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:Running Nighlty code (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Weird... (Score:3, Informative)
Er, it does. Switch them on from the menubar.
Re:Safari or Firefox? (Score:3, Informative)
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 from the "Preferences" directory in your Home library, so that a new one is generated, in case there's a corruption in that causing problems. All this, again, is unspecific advice, but at least it's not Voodoo.
You might also like to try the Camino browser. That also uses Mozilla's Gecko engine, but has far better integration with the platform. It also uses a Safari-style bookmark manager:
http://www.caminobrowser.org/ [caminobrowser.org]
Re:Firefox is a better browser. (Score:4, Informative)
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: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.
Re:Safari or Firefox? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Weird... (Score:3, Informative)
Give Camino [caminobrowser.org] a try. It's a nice mix between Firefox and Safari.
Re:it's the memory stupid (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Firefox is a better browser. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Weird... (Score:3, Informative)
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 and usually Firefox is that process), but it's still slow and unresponsive.
Many Firefox users will think I'm just imagining or having system specific issue, but it's the same experience on any system I tried so far: people, you've forgotten what a fast browser means. Safari/IE/Opera are all few *times* faster than a bare bones firefox install.
I'm still using Firefox though.. FireBug/WebDev Toolbar have no viable alternatives on the other browsers
Re:I concur (Score:3, Informative)
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 task; those threads run in the kernel task.