Safari is taking too much memory

Can't say I've seen that. Running Safari with a couple tabs open for 15-20 mins is using about .5GB. Memory usage actually went down a little since I opened it and the tabs. Maybe a problem with an add-on?

I have had this and found that it was site specific. If you open Activity Monitor and select the Memory tab, then type "safari" into the search at the top right of the window, you should see a list of websites with ... after them. Each of these entries can contain more than one site, but by closing the entry with the obvious memory leak in Safari and then quitting the process in Activity Monitor, it is just a process of deduction to discover the offending sites.

I appear to be experience the same issue. Just opening Safari causes memory usage to climb about 1GB every 60 seconds.

A Force Close is required to close Safari. No particular website has to be visited, just simply opening the browser causes the issue.

I am seeing this constantly with any Google Docs item. Sheets is particularly bad and I memory usage over 3 gb after several minutes. This was not an issue until Beta 2.

The release version(s) are memory hogs too, so I doubt there's anything unique to complain about for any of the betas.

I had this exact issue. And I've been using Chrome, hoping that a new beta release would fix it. Turns out no response yet from the released betas.

But I found what appears to be a solution - go to your Home>Library directory (~/Library) and delete the Safari folder.

Note: Doing so you will reset your Safari, all bookmarks, history, all Safari data will be lost.

Open Safari and a new Safari folder will be created - and no more crazy memory leak/usage.

As of now Safari is only using ~100mb instead of the crazy 1G/min business.

Hope this helps 🙂

This helped me! Well at least temporary. To not lose your Bookmarks and History, you can just copy the "Bookmarks.plist" and all the files with "History" in the name somewhere else and copy them back in later

Hi, normally each opened web page within Safari (14.1) use a low amount of memory (around 50-60Mb). With time, it may happen that each page use up to 1Gb or more. As suggested as a fix in a video several years back (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuemMEM0pnM), you may need to clean up some safari files, in particular:

• the Safari folder in the Library folder (~/Library),
• the com.apple.safari in ~/Library/Containers.

To be safe, do the following:

1. close Safari,
2. move the ~/Library/Safari to the Desktop (e.g. ~/Desktop/Library/Safari)
3. move the ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.safari to the Desktop (e.g. ~/Desktop/Library/Containers/com.apple.safari)
4. reopen Safari
5. move back your bookmarks (e.g. ~/Desktop/Library/Safari/Bookmarks.plist) to the ~/Library/Safari folder

You can check in Activity Monitor that Safari and the Safari Web Content items use a reasonably low memory.

Running Safari 11.1.2 just fine on a vintage 2007 iMac 20-inch desktop limited to El Capitan (OS 10.11.6). Memory leak problem only arises when visiting the general Yahoo website. Yahoo Mail is fine, but news or finance or anything else is bloated beyond reason, and even more so since Verizon took it over. Way too much advertising and animation and who knows what else they are doing. I watch Activity Monitor and restart Safari every time the graph goes yellow. Also have Firefox and Chrome available for any other website that becomes too problematic for Safari. Yes I know it's almost 2022 and I'd upgrade but concerned about transferring all my legacy software licenses to a new machine. And tossing all my DVDs. The 8-inch floppies and old SCSI peripherals went long ago.

Agree, I have had to stop using Safari, it disables my Mac completely. I have no memory available when it is open even tho having slimmed it down. Close Safari, lo and behold I have 6.5g (out of 8) available and the Mac starts working again. Sad state.

I have run a simple test.

The following tabs have been opened first in Safari. My M1 Mac was then turned off and powered back on, I then opened the same tabs in Edge.

4 x Gmail tabs (each with a different account) 1 x Youtube Music tab playing in the background 1 x Bloomberg News tab

Safari RAM usage between 6 and 7GB

Microsoft Edge Same tabs

Edge RAM usage remained stable at under 2GB

I'm at a point where one gmail tab + youtube will use all my RAM and be forced into swap. It slows down my mac to a point where I simply cannot use it. There is a clear massive requirement of RAM by Gmail in browser but nowhere near as high in Edge. I never thought I'm gonna say this but I have started using Edge as my default browser, all these years Microsoft has tried to convince me to use it, finally they made it happen.

I intend to create a more comprehensive post with screenshots and everything.

P.S. the only reason I have even tried Edge was curiosity relating to their Bing integration with ChatGPT. Don't worry, Bing is still horrible but their version of ChatGPT is nice.

Today this is still an issue where Safari sits idle, and the browser tabs go off on a memory consumption rampage. The same sites, when opened in Chrome tabs when viewed in Activity monitor, Chrome does a better job managing the memory. Imagine running out of memory on an M2 max doing absolutely nothing.

Apple Silicon M2 Max, 32GB macOS 13.4.1 Safari 16.5.1

Even the same with me. I am using MacBook Pro M1 Pro 16" 2021 with 512 GB of storage and 16 GB of Memory. 9 GB of Memory used just with 2 Safari tabs and Activity Monitor. More than 4 GB of Memory with a specific lightweight application, which most people use for messaging worldwide. While using Xcode with the simulator running and Safari with two tabs, it uses more than 3 GB of SWAP. They are telling me to take the backup of my MacBook and reinstall the OS but all of my external drives are full. I just switched from Windows to Mac, such a horrible experience and it just got in this month.

same here. each browser window uses 1-2GB of ram while sitting idle. Safari is using over 10gb of ram in total. very inefficient browser. and Acrobat also using 3+GB with just 1 PDF open...

Is this normal?