Safari is a Big Fat Memory Hog

60 tabs may be a lot to have open at once, but Safari (4.0.2) is using 1.8 GB of RAM and 2.3 GB of virtual memory! This seems pretty unreasonable just for keeping some web pages open. I don't think that any of them are using Flash or any other memory intensive technology. Having to periodically quit and restart Safari is not a great solution, just time consuming and annoying. Does anyone have an explanation or a cure? Thanks.

60 Tabs is a lot to have open at once, and because you do, it requires more RAM and virtual memory to keep those items in the cache, as well as using up disk space for Top Sites.
If I were you, I'd stop opening so many tabs at once (half that should be sufficient), as well as start clearing out your caches and disable Top Sites if you don't use it or don't want to use it. You can start with this:
If you don't want to use the Top Sites feature, open Terminal and copy/paste this command:
defaults write com.apple.Safari RSSBookmarksInBarAreSubscribed -bool false
Then press Enter or Return and quit Terminal. Then go to ~/Library/Safari and delete the TopSites.plist file and the WebpageIcons.db file.
Go to ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari and delete the contents of that folder, then use the Get Info panel to Lock the folder.
Go to ~/Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari and delete the contents of that folder, then use the Get Info panel to Lock that folder.
Go to ~/Library/Safari and delete these files:
Downloads.plist
History.plist
LastSession.plist
And if you have a folder named LocalStorage, delete it's contents and then use the Get Info panel to Lock that folder.
Use Disk Utility to Repair Disk Permissions; then restart Safari and test it out.
Post back with results.

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