You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

Safari pages using huge amount of memory

I have seen this some years ago, but I thought it was getting better. My wife goes to lots of web sites using Safari, mostly about cooking. She leaves lots of tabs open. After a week or two, the computer becomes very sluggish, and I see in Activity Monitor that there are many web pages that are using over 1 GB of memory. Is there any way to stop these web pages in Safari from using this huge amount of memory? We bought this MacBook Pro with 16 GB of RAM that was the most possible at the time, but it should not become unusable by simply opening web pages in Safari.

MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 10.14

Posted on Jul 26, 2020 11:56 PM

Reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply
4 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jul 27, 2020 9:26 AM in response to ericf2000

Hi Eric,


Some web pages will hog resources regardless of what you do, and RAM has nothing to do with it. This will definitely bite someone who leaves pages or tabs open in the background for long periods.


I can reproduce this on demand with Safari or FireFox if I leave the Amazon home page open in the background. I had the same thing happen while tracking election returns during the US 2018 mid-term elections. The elections page I found was excellent with data, but I was running my MacBook Pro on battery and the charge level was plummeting, the same as when I leave Amazon open. When I closed that page, the battery drain reverted to normal, and Activity Monitor returned to normal CPU and energy use patterns. When I worked in law enforcement, we called that a "clue."


I used Activity Monitor to verify that certain sites were a problem, just as you have done. Outside of convincing web developers to do a cleaner job of coding, all you can do is see what sites are the worst and ask your Lady to close unused tabs if possible.


AJ

Safari pages using huge amount of memory

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple Account.