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Is Safari 4.0 chomping system resources?
Using Activity Monitor, we decided to take a look and see just how much juice Safari 4.0 would use as we increased the amount we did with it. Currently I have one window open. The CPU percentage is relatively steady at .8 percent. The number of threads however seems extremely high at 16. Let's go further.
Simply opening a new window spiked the CPU usage to over 60 percent and the threads jumped to 20. After the page was loaded the CPU usage has settled to about 2.4 percent across 16 threads. Loading YouTube requires an additional 3 threads and CPU usage is now over 5 percent consistently. Streaming a video spikes the CPU to a consistent 84 percent usage across 23 threads.
If you find that your system seems slow, check out Activity Monitor and see if Safari is using up your system resources. If this kind of CPU usage continues with Safari, it could determine changes in workflow. Our test was performed on a Black MacBook with a 2.0 GHz Intel Core Duo running 10.5.7 with 2 GB of RAM - reader tests may vary.
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Read this MacFixIt article announcing the release of Safari 4.0.
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Not an issue here. I have DrudgeReport, WorldNetDaily, CNN and Neopets open. Real RAM is staying at 104 MBytes, CPU around 1.8 percent and threads = 22. But then I don't use ANY Safari plug-ins or add-on's. Maybe that's why I see no issue here???
This final 4.0 is very FAST...
Seems to be a problem that doesnt affect everyone, but is for a few people. I've got had any problems so far, but people could be running on specific sites that might not agree with the Nitro javascript engine. People should post them here so other folks can try them out...
Surfing MySpace, Facebook or Youtube causes the JavaScript caches to gobble up virtual memory (sometimes as much as 2G or more) and swap space. Saw this happen on my Windows machine, too. Remember getting "the paging file is running low, expanding" or something like that on my Windows machine.
Only Firefox on the Mac and Chrome on Windows don't have this problem.
iCab and Opera might not have these issues either, as well as miscellaneous browsers like SeaMonkey. I've been trying iCab for about a week, after I got tired of seeing Safari slow to a crawl too often, and I'm not seeing any of these issues. iCab is also pretty fast, most of the time.
9 tabs
cpu thr rsize vsize
1.7 17 209.98 MB 1.18 GB
Yes Safari 4 is grabbing lots of CPU.
Google Videos are spiking CPU to about 84% on my Powerbook G4.
I too have noticed the dramatic drop in CPU usage with shutting off Javascript. I tried working various web sites with javascript on and with it off. Each time I had it on, the page download would freeze, turn it off, and it worked great. Now, the challenge for Apple is to fix this.
Not sure how you can claim it to be "huge" so quickly--maybe you're basing on Safari 4 Beta experience, too?
I'm not seeing much JavaScript trouble yet on Safari 4 release, yet. I've even been hammering it with Google Chrome experiments (http://www.chromeexperiments.com), and it seems to handle several of them so far.
I've been watching how Entourage 08 behaves with Safari 4, since the Beta caused it to crash (http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/2009/03/entourage_and_safari_4_beta_woes.html"), with "WebCore" as a blame module. So far, no crashes with Erage 08 (12.1.5, 081119) and Safari 4.0 (5530.17).
Have not tested applied Office 2008 Update 12.1.9, yet.
Is there any way to create an applescript (to which I'd assign a keyboard shortcut) to toggle Safari's javascript on/off? That sounds like a smart workaround (e.g. when I want to work in other apps with Safari displaying pages in the background).
I'm on one of the last PPC Macs that was made, so that might have something to do with it, but I only really started seeing this problem pop up within the last 6-12 mos. I don't think I'll be updating to 4.0 until either I get a new Mac or I'm certain 4.0 will run ok.
What I have observed with Safari 4 is that the CPU usage will spike very high for a short time and then return down to a low steady state quickly. This steady state is lower than I typically got with the old Safari. The overall behavior is consistent with increased/improved multithreading which is a good thing. It allows Safari to make better use of multiple processors. A good multithreaded application allows the OS to give it more of the available resources (not needed by other applications), split the tasks over multiple processors, get stuff done and then return those resources for other applications to use. That's how the new Safari seems to be behaving on my machine (dual G5, 7GB RAM, 10.5.7).
- by gregandsuedavis June 10, 2009 3:25 PM PDT
- I wondered why my early 2009 MacBook Pro was down to about 15% battery after a little over an hour's use (following an overnight charge). I found Safari burning 145% of my two cores. I quit and restarted Safari and it started using less than 10%.
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