The OSX/Apple support thread

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moustachebandit

1,269 posts

143 months

Friday 15th August 2014
quotequote all
Does anyone else experience major issues with Safari?

I have noticed my mac getting slower - especially online, using Safari.

Checking the activity monitor Safari Web Content was using up most of my RAM - I have 16gb RAM on my Mac and Safari Web Content was using 9GB! My Mac was barely working with only 14mb RAM.

I had 11 tabs open on a mixture of pages - extensions wise I have last pass, adblock, session restore and screen grab.

If I close Safari down I free up some memory - then if I run a memory clean I might be lucky to get maybe 3gb RAM back - the only option is to shut down the machine and start again. Which is an arse if it means doing it in the middle of work.

I never had an issue with this previously but its gone downhill since around the start of the year.

I have just restored last nights session and its already eating up 1.5gb. WTF is going on?

Is it just Safari or is there something wrong with my Mac?

Tonsko

6,299 posts

215 months

Friday 15th August 2014
quotequote all
Safari does go wrong sometimes. It's probably flash, but I'm not sure, never bothered to investigate, I've just force quit safari (Apple-Q) and restarted it, and it's been fine. You don't need to use the RAM cleaner, OSX memory management is pretty good. If you look at the memory info on system monitor, only the stuff marked as 'Wired' or 'Active' is actively in use. 'Free' is there, ready to use and 'inactive' is previous programs left in RAM ready to use again if the program is re-started, so the disk doesn't need to be used. If another process needs ram and 'free' has run out, it will unload stuff in the 'inactive' part to use for the new process, as I understand it.

LordGrover

33,545 posts

212 months

Friday 15th August 2014
quotequote all
Are you in a position to install and try chrome browser?

marshalla

15,902 posts

201 months

Friday 15th August 2014
quotequote all
LordGrover said:
Are you in a position to install and try chrome browser?
Chrome goes the same way, eventually. It's either caused by Flash or something in the Javascript on some websites and poor garbage collection in the browser. Eventually, it just seems to use up all available memory and the only solution is to close the browser and start again.

LordGrover

33,545 posts

212 months

Friday 15th August 2014
quotequote all
Ah, apols. As well as adblock super and ghostery, I use flashblock so never see this issue.

qube_TA

8,402 posts

245 months

Friday 15th August 2014
quotequote all
moustachebandit said:
Does anyone else experience major issues with Safari?

I have noticed my mac getting slower - especially online, using Safari.

Checking the activity monitor Safari Web Content was using up most of my RAM - I have 16gb RAM on my Mac and Safari Web Content was using 9GB! My Mac was barely working with only 14mb RAM.

I had 11 tabs open on a mixture of pages - extensions wise I have last pass, adblock, session restore and screen grab.

If I close Safari down I free up some memory - then if I run a memory clean I might be lucky to get maybe 3gb RAM back - the only option is to shut down the machine and start again. Which is an arse if it means doing it in the middle of work.

I never had an issue with this previously but its gone downhill since around the start of the year.

I have just restored last nights session and its already eating up 1.5gb. WTF is going on?

Is it just Safari or is there something wrong with my Mac?
What version operating system are you using, and on what hardware?

With the memory usage are you also using swap?






HereBeMonsters

14,180 posts

182 months

Sunday 17th August 2014
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Anyone got a Snow Leopard install DVD I could borrow for testing purposes?

moustachebandit

1,269 posts

143 months

Monday 18th August 2014
quotequote all
Hi Gents,

Thanks for the responses.

I am currently running Lion on a 2012 iMac. Qube-TA - sorry you will need to educate me, whats SWAP? Never heard of that before.

Grover, I have tried Chrome and with only 3 tabs open it was munching as much memory as Safari. Firefox isn't so bad, but has been responsible for a number of crashes and lock ups so I gave up using it.

Whats really getting me is that once its used up monster amounts of Ram the only away I can get it back is to restart the machine? If I don't restart the machine it limps along nearly running - and I only realise that all the RAM has gone when I try and do something complex in Illustrator / Photoshop and the machine just hangs for eternity!


moustachebandit

1,269 posts

143 months

Monday 18th August 2014
quotequote all
Hi Gents,

Thanks for the responses.

I am currently running Lion on a 2012 iMac. Qube-TA - sorry you will need to educate me, whats SWAP? Never heard of that before.

Grover, I have tried Chrome and with only 3 tabs open it was munching as much memory as Safari. Firefox isn't so bad, but has been responsible for a number of crashes and lock ups so I gave up using it.

Whats really getting me is that once its used up monster amounts of Ram the only away I can get it back is to restart the machine? If I don't restart the machine it limps along nearly running - and I only realise that all the RAM has gone when I try and do something complex in Illustrator / Photoshop and the machine just hangs for eternity!


qube_TA

8,402 posts

245 months

Monday 18th August 2014
quotequote all
moustachebandit said:
Hi Gents,

Qube-TA - sorry you will need to educate me, whats SWAP? Never heard of that before.

Grover, I have tried Chrome and with only 3 tabs open it was munching as much memory as Safari. Firefox isn't so bad, but has been responsible for a number of crashes and lock ups so I gave up using it.
If your machine has processes that are occupying all the RAM then it'll use the hard drive as a buffer, it'll swap data between RAM and the hard drive to make room. On Windows they use a 'pagefile' for the same thing. Linux uses a separate partition. OSX uses a 1GB buffer.

As OSX is based upon Unix it'll always try to make use of all the RAM regardless of how much you have, if it's not using any of the swap then it's probably OK.

as you're using an iMac does it have a hard drive or do you have an SSD drive in it? If it's the former Apple bundle low powered 5400RPM drives into their machines which are horribly slow if you're running applications that need a lot of resources then it'll be a nasty bottleneck. I'd suggest at least swapping it for a better drive or an SSD (they're quite cheap these days).



marshalla

15,902 posts

201 months

Monday 18th August 2014
quotequote all
moustachebandit said:
Grover, I have tried Chrome and with only 3 tabs open it was munching as much memory as Safari. Firefox isn't so bad, but has been responsible for a number of crashes and lock ups so I gave up using it.
Can you give us an idea of what's in those tabs, please ? I have a suspicion that one of the sites is heavily dependent on Javascript and interaction with the server.

moustachebandit

1,269 posts

143 months

Monday 18th August 2014
quotequote all
marshalla said:
moustachebandit said:
Grover, I have tried Chrome and with only 3 tabs open it was munching as much memory as Safari. Firefox isn't so bad, but has been responsible for a number of crashes and lock ups so I gave up using it.
Can you give us an idea of what's in those tabs, please ? I have a suspicion that one of the sites is heavily dependent on Javascript and interaction with the server.
The last session where Safari consumed 9gb of ram - the sites were Zurb Foundation, Ink, An instructables, 2 Creative Bloq pages, Pistonheads, IOD, Insider Media, a Blog post and my own sites WP back end.

I had suspected Creative Bloq but restoring the session I have slowly closed down each tab without it making any difference in the ram consumption. I then switched off each extension and it still didn't seem to change.

At the moment Safari is hovering at 1.2gb ram usage - I think it tends to get substantially worse if I put the machine into sleep at any point during the day.

I have just installed Ghostery and click to flash to see if that helps.

moustachebandit

1,269 posts

143 months

Monday 18th August 2014
quotequote all
qube_TA said:
If your machine has processes that are occupying all the RAM then it'll use the hard drive as a buffer, it'll swap data between RAM and the hard drive to make room. On Windows they use a 'pagefile' for the same thing. Linux uses a separate partition. OSX uses a 1GB buffer.

As OSX is based upon Unix it'll always try to make use of all the RAM regardless of how much you have, if it's not using any of the swap then it's probably OK.

as you're using an iMac does it have a hard drive or do you have an SSD drive in it? If it's the former Apple bundle low powered 5400RPM drives into their machines which are horribly slow if you're running applications that need a lot of resources then it'll be a nasty bottleneck. I'd suggest at least swapping it for a better drive or an SSD (they're quite cheap these days).
Ahh thanks for explaining that - the iMac is running a conventional 1TB drive at the moment. Think Is I can play with some really big files in illustrator & photoshop and other software at the same time - no issues, even doing complex processes the machine doesn't struggle. Just sat here surfing on and off for the day and 9gb's can get swallowed by Safari!

qube_TA

8,402 posts

245 months

Monday 18th August 2014
quotequote all
moustachebandit said:
qube_TA said:
If your machine has processes that are occupying all the RAM then it'll use the hard drive as a buffer, it'll swap data between RAM and the hard drive to make room. On Windows they use a 'pagefile' for the same thing. Linux uses a separate partition. OSX uses a 1GB buffer.

As OSX is based upon Unix it'll always try to make use of all the RAM regardless of how much you have, if it's not using any of the swap then it's probably OK.

as you're using an iMac does it have a hard drive or do you have an SSD drive in it? If it's the former Apple bundle low powered 5400RPM drives into their machines which are horribly slow if you're running applications that need a lot of resources then it'll be a nasty bottleneck. I'd suggest at least swapping it for a better drive or an SSD (they're quite cheap these days).
Ahh thanks for explaining that - the iMac is running a conventional 1TB drive at the moment. Think Is I can play with some really big files in illustrator & photoshop and other software at the same time - no issues, even doing complex processes the machine doesn't struggle. Just sat here surfing on and off for the day and 9gb's can get swallowed by Safari!
Not trying to be rude but how do you know it's being 'swallowed'?





moustachebandit

1,269 posts

143 months

Monday 18th August 2014
quotequote all
qube_TA said:
moustachebandit said:
qube_TA said:
If your machine has processes that are occupying all the RAM then it'll use the hard drive as a buffer, it'll swap data between RAM and the hard drive to make room. On Windows they use a 'pagefile' for the same thing. Linux uses a separate partition. OSX uses a 1GB buffer.

As OSX is based upon Unix it'll always try to make use of all the RAM regardless of how much you have, if it's not using any of the swap then it's probably OK.

as you're using an iMac does it have a hard drive or do you have an SSD drive in it? If it's the former Apple bundle low powered 5400RPM drives into their machines which are horribly slow if you're running applications that need a lot of resources then it'll be a nasty bottleneck. I'd suggest at least swapping it for a better drive or an SSD (they're quite cheap these days).
Ahh thanks for explaining that - the iMac is running a conventional 1TB drive at the moment. Think Is I can play with some really big files in illustrator & photoshop and other software at the same time - no issues, even doing complex processes the machine doesn't struggle. Just sat here surfing on and off for the day and 9gb's can get swallowed by Safari!
Not trying to be rude but how do you know it's being 'swallowed'?

Only for the fact that my Mac barely functions and hangs heavily on every action. Thats normally when I notice that something is up. Or like when it crashed out of illustrator loosing me an afternoons worth of work - apparently that time I only had 3mb of free Ram! I am not a tech so I don't understand the specifics of memory allocation etc - but from my experiences Safari can use up all of my free Ram rendering my mac unusable. Quitting Safari doesn't really help the issue - as a vast proportion of free Ram just goes missing (until I restart the machine)

Leithen

10,909 posts

267 months

Monday 18th August 2014
quotequote all
moustachebandit said:
Only for the fact that my Mac barely functions and hangs heavily on every action. Thats normally when I notice that something is up. Or like when it crashed out of illustrator loosing me an afternoons worth of work - apparently that time I only had 3mb of free Ram! I am not a tech so I don't understand the specifics of memory allocation etc - but from my experiences Safari can use up all of my free Ram rendering my mac unusable. Quitting Safari doesn't really help the issue - as a vast proportion of free Ram just goes missing (until I restart the machine)
Can you check CPU tab in activity monitor - Is your CPU % high on any processes when this happens?

qube_TA

8,402 posts

245 months

Monday 18th August 2014
quotequote all
moustachebandit said:
qube_TA said:
moustachebandit said:
qube_TA said:
If your machine has processes that are occupying all the RAM then it'll use the hard drive as a buffer, it'll swap data between RAM and the hard drive to make room. On Windows they use a 'pagefile' for the same thing. Linux uses a separate partition. OSX uses a 1GB buffer.

As OSX is based upon Unix it'll always try to make use of all the RAM regardless of how much you have, if it's not using any of the swap then it's probably OK.

as you're using an iMac does it have a hard drive or do you have an SSD drive in it? If it's the former Apple bundle low powered 5400RPM drives into their machines which are horribly slow if you're running applications that need a lot of resources then it'll be a nasty bottleneck. I'd suggest at least swapping it for a better drive or an SSD (they're quite cheap these days).
Ahh thanks for explaining that - the iMac is running a conventional 1TB drive at the moment. Think Is I can play with some really big files in illustrator & photoshop and other software at the same time - no issues, even doing complex processes the machine doesn't struggle. Just sat here surfing on and off for the day and 9gb's can get swallowed by Safari!
Not trying to be rude but how do you know it's being 'swallowed'?

Only for the fact that my Mac barely functions and hangs heavily on every action. Thats normally when I notice that something is up. Or like when it crashed out of illustrator loosing me an afternoons worth of work - apparently that time I only had 3mb of free Ram! I am not a tech so I don't understand the specifics of memory allocation etc - but from my experiences Safari can use up all of my free Ram rendering my mac unusable. Quitting Safari doesn't really help the issue - as a vast proportion of free Ram just goes missing (until I restart the machine)
OK, I suspect the memory usage is a red herring. Have you done the usual OSX house-keeping tasks (reset NVRAM, cleared caches, reset permissions, etc) What version of OSX are you running? 10.9.4?



boyse7en

6,730 posts

165 months

Monday 18th August 2014
quotequote all
moustachebandit said:
Does anyone else experience major issues with Safari?

I have noticed my mac getting slower - especially online, using Safari.

Checking the activity monitor Safari Web Content was using up most of my RAM - I have 16gb RAM on my Mac and Safari Web Content was using 9GB! My Mac was barely working with only 14mb RAM.

I had 11 tabs open on a mixture of pages - extensions wise I have last pass, adblock, session restore and screen grab.

If I close Safari down I free up some memory - then if I run a memory clean I might be lucky to get maybe 3gb RAM back - the only option is to shut down the machine and start again. Which is an arse if it means doing it in the middle of work.

I never had an issue with this previously but its gone downhill since around the start of the year.

I have just restored last nights session and its already eating up 1.5gb. WTF is going on?

Is it just Safari or is there something wrong with my Mac?
If i leave Safari open then the Flash plug-in eventually (over a couple of days) gobbles up all of my RAM (usually about 4GB of Virtual memory by the time I notice). I just quit and re-start Safari and it all works OK again.
I get around this by using Firfox 90% of the time. Unfortunately there is one website that I need to use that only works in IE or Safari.

qube_TA

8,402 posts

245 months

Monday 18th August 2014
quotequote all
Given how similar Chrome is to Safari I'd use that and uninstall Flash as it's not needed with that browser


ReaderScars

6,087 posts

176 months

Monday 18th August 2014
quotequote all
Moustachebandit, maybe google osx memory leaks? Plenty of info regarding your issue, you're definitely not the only one.