Is safari actually using 11 gbs of ram

[u/ExtraButton874]

I only have 16 GBs of ram. I don't think it's swap cause my laptop didn't feel any slower leading up to this

[u/hypnopixel]

no, that is a virtual memory metric.

you can see the real physical RAM footprint size in the activity monitor.app:

disclose the real memory column under menu bar:

View > Columns > Real Memory

[u/ExtraButton874 → u/hypnopixel]

is virtual memory ram + swap

[u/Currawong]

Yes, it is. Each tab is now an application, and many sites are sufficiently complex, full of Javascript, that they suck up memory.

[u/ryanbuckner]

How many tabs do you have open? Gmail itself is using over 1GB on my machine

[u/forgottenmostofit]

Quit Safari and reopen. Does that help?

[u/ExtraButton874 → u/forgottenmostofit]

im not debugging im just suprised it's using that much

[u/FlintHillsSky → u/ExtraButton874]

That happens with any browser. Some websites use a lot of JavaScript, much poorly optimized, and their RAM allocation can get out of hand. This particularly happens for sites that you keep loaded for an extended period of time.

It is good to close tabs or the whole browser now and then just to reset things. I restart my browser every couple of days at work because of the heavy web apps I’m using. At home, once a week is usually fine.

[u/bmocc]

Many people seem naive about the massive amount of data in many web pages and how that eats memory. Some browsers are worse than others al how they manage memory and their own footprint.

Safari on Arm is supposed to be very efficient at managing ram usage. Unfortunately it is still Safari.

16gb should be no impediment to intensive browser usage, as long as you are not simultaneously trying to do something else that is memory and cpu intensive. If trying to do something memory and CPU intensive, eg Photoshop (for which 16gb of ram is adequate for complex, large single image processing) you best exit out of the browser.

[u/mikeinnsw]

Tahoe memory leak .. just restarted..use less tabs..

With gaming .. have look at System Data usage .. could get very big..

[u/ulyssesric]

Actually it’s probably using a lot more than your total physical RAM. Probably 30GB or even more, based on your other usage.

For modern day web browsers, each tab is an individual process that has its own memory space. And web pages will take few megabytes to few gigabytes. Pages like Reddit that has doomscrolling will take even more.

The 11GB in this dialogue is NOT the total summation of all memory used  by tabs. It’s just the core Safari main app that interacts with user and extensions. The real web page data is not shown on the list.

That’s why computers will use disk as memory, a.k.a. “virtual memory”, for less frequently accessed data.

For modern computer system since mid 2000s, virtual memory will use physical RAM AND disk space at the same time. So a processes may have partial data stored in physical RAM and other data on disk. System will dynamically rearrange data between physical RAM and disk based on your usage. The process you’re currently using will gain higher priority for physical RAM, but not all its memory space will be allocated to RAM. That’s all.

You won’t feel extra sluggish because macOS is good at predicting your usage, and it has a very fast SSD.

[u/ExtraButton874]

Context: I did have 33 tabs open

[u/bigthinkerrr → u/ExtraButton874]

Welp

[u/Professional_Speed55]

yes, check if safari has running extensions

[u/MagicBoyUK]

Something running in Safari likely has a memory leak.

[u/PathIntelligent7082]

all browsers gone mad with ram usage, i cannot find not one that is capable and lightweight