Safari CONSTANTLY quitting

Question

for at least the past two months now, I have Safari either quit or freeze on my twice a week. It's quit at least 10 times in 6 weeks and have gave apple a piece of my mind in every "crash report" I've sent including how many times it's crashed. In addition to the crashing is persistent freezing. The problem with the freezing is that it's not a crash thus I can't report those instances to apple. I've a heavy safari user, usually at least 5 window open, and at times upwards of 10 easily. I'm running on a 17" Core Duo MacBook Pro with 2Gb of RAM and notice that Safari usually uses usually 500Mb of actual RAM but anywhere from 1-4GB of virtual RAM.
My hard drive space is getting limited and will get it upgraded soon, but not now. My current available space is only 1.7 Gb and I'm wondering if that's why Safari is constantly quitting, because it's running out of space for cache or temp files or whatever it's using upwards of 1GB virtually for. This constant quitting is VERY annoying as I leave pages up that I want to check on later open or minimized, then these crashes come and I loose all that. Is it just me or is Safari very unstable? I'm highly debating switching to Firefox, but in my current state, don't feel that downloading another application because of lack of HDD space would help.
Any other suggestions or do I just need to wait until Leopard for a solid build of Safari and not this crash ridden one I have now?
-Brian

Answer 1

Brian
You need to have a minimum of 10% of your HD space free at any time for the OS to use as Virtual memory, temp. files etc. More if you're doing a lot of work with video or any app that deals in very large files.
This is exactly why you've been having crashes, and unless you sort this issue out immediately you are very likely to suffer data corruption and loss.
Did I say immediately? How about even sooner than that.
So, let me be clear, this is not a "crash ridden" build of Safari - mine runs for days on end with more than 5 tabs open - but it is a very overcrowded disk. You are courting disaster.
Regards
TD