Using Safari Slows Your System?

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.

OMG

[cowscows]

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!

Re:Known Annoyance

[freedumb2000]

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.

Re:But I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

What is it with you retards who insist on capitalizing the abbreviation "Mac" as though it's an acronym? A MAC is something totally different to a Mac. You even go one step above and beyond the usual retardation by capitalizing and hyphenating "iPod"! Have you never seen the fucking product name written down anywhere (by a non-retard)?

You belong with the other fuckwits who keep spelling the name of a popular CPU "Athalon".

Re:Firefox is a better browser.

[Paulrothrock]

Not only that, but the number of plugins available for Firefox make it really worth it. Adblock and Greasemonkey and Web Developer and Firebug give me functionality that's simply not available with Safari or WebKit.

Re:I concur

[_|()|\|]

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 this article [mikeash.com] the other day, which argues that you shouldn't be shy about creating pools. I'm hoping that garbage collection will help, but it may be a while before the majority of apps. are compiled for 10.5+.

Re:Known Annoyance

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably has something to do with RAM prices. 2GB SODIMMs aren't exactly cheap.

Re:it's the memory stupid

[MojoRilla]

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.

Hard to take this guy seriously...

[sofla]

<p>From the article:</p>

<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>

Re:Running Nighlty code

[Graff]

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 sites that choke Firefox but work fine on IE.

The upshot is that web developers shouldn't be coding to a specific browser, they should be coding to the web STANDARDS. If a browser doesn't work with the standards then it's the browser's developers that should be working on the problem, not the web developers.

Safari (and KHMTL on which WebKit is based) are forerunners in being standards-complient. They do work around messy web code but it's pretty tough to actually figure out what a web developer meant when he coded something ugly. You can only sanity-check so far, at some point the onus is on the web developer to get his act together and make his web page work with the standards. This isn't about "elitist snobbery", this is about doing the right thing.

Re:Weird...

[Afecks]

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:Running Nighlty code

[jZnat]

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).

Hmm

[bill_kress]

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.

Re:Weird...

[Anonymous Coward]

While I admit that it was a rather strange way of saying it, I believe that the grandparent was trying to say that the entire OS works perfectly well with only one button, and that there isn't any place that requires two.

Of course, I don't agree with that either, since I find myself using the multi-finger tapping on my mbp quite often, and Ctrl-clicking can be terribly annoying.

Re:WTF

[cowscows]

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.

Re:Weird...

[Brandybuck]

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, so take them all at once!

Unused condoms are wasted condoms, so wear them all at once!