An expose of one of my two screens.
OK, to start this off I must admit that I'm a Screen Rat - the digital version of a Pack Rat. I keep tons of applications open at once with literally dozens and dozens of windows open (I just counted and I have 26 applications and almost a hundred windows open right now, and that's after I just quit Safari). But with 5.5 GB of RAM I can afford to have everything open at once. Safari though, like no other application, just seems to gobble up RAM like a goat in a petting zoo (watch out for those fingers kids).
The first rule of being a Screen Rat is to never quit an application, NEVER! You should only quit an application when you need to shutdown your computer, there's no other excuse. Well, that is unless that application is Safari. For some reason if you keep Safari running for a few days its memory footprint will just keep increasing. Sure, it'll start off using a nice cool 20-30 MB, but after a few days of browsing and countless windows open it will balloon to 1.3 GB. 1.3 GB of RAM! For a web browser! That's actual RAM in use, not the virtual address space, the virtual address space is well over 2 GB.
Normally what you do when an application starts hogging RAM is release some of its resources. In this case, you start closing those dozens of windows that you've opened over the last few days. That would be enough for most apps, but not Safari. No, just now I closed all but one window in Safari and the RAM usage went from 1.3 GB to 1.2 GB - 100 MB. Sure 100 MB is a good chunk of RAM, but it's only about 8% of what Safari was using. How could the last remaining window be using 1.2 GB of RAM?
Anyway, at that point I was fed up, I'd need to quit Safari to reclaim my RAM. I repeat this cycle every few days and the only solution I've found is to quit Safari. I've tried emptying the cache, closing all the windows, clearing the history and using the Debug menu to empty all of the caches (WebFoundation, WebCore, JavaScript, etc.). Nothing works. Once Safari has ballooned into a memory gobbling behemoth there's no way to reclaim the memory short of quitting the application. This is utterly depressing for us Screen Rats.
Maybe I'll have to try using Camino or Firefox instead to see how well they behave. I do use them both often, but not nearly as much and as long as I use Safari. They seem fairly well behaved right now, but I wonder how well they hold up after a week of continuous use and dozens of windows opened. Can any fellow Screen Rats comment?
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