Safari Web Content consuming all my memory

I'm having a problem with Safari Web Content.
I've jst re-loaded Mountain Lion in a brute forcve attempt to resolve my issue, but it's still occurring.
The issue is: with very little running, if I run Safari and bounce around a few websites, I can easily consume all my memory. I end up with this:
As you see, Active memory is too high (before this test I had Mail open, and Avtive memory was about 2GBm what you might expect normally).
Actibve memory had actually peaked at about 3/4 of the total, but then some must have got swapped out to Inactive.....giving us the picture above.
But look at the Real Mem occupied by Safai Web Content! That can't be right, surely.
Nevertheless, I'm led to believe that OSX's memory management algorithm's will swap out Inactive for Free when it is required....well, this isn't happening. I saw Free memory down to 7MB at one point, not a typo. Everything grinds to a halt.
If I am patient, and try to Quit Safari, I end up back here:
Clearly showing that if I manage to kill Safari, the memory gets freed up again.
I understand why OSX wants to handle memory with the Inactive concept - "you've just closed Word, but maybe you'll open it again in the next ten minutes so we'll leave it in memory, inactive, so when you try and open it, it will open really quickly". Right now, I'd rather turn that freature off and have memory behave more primitively and take the hit on re-opening.
As I mentioned, I reloaded OSX Mountain Lion and the problem persists. When you re-load or upgrade your OS, there are many configuration settings (desktop, mail, safari) that are kept so that the upgrade looks seamless; clearly whatever is corrupting me here has been kept also. For that reason I'm loathe to go to Mavericks, because I presume the same corruption would exist (and also I hear Mavericks is still a bit shaky with the native Mail app).
What config type files should I look to safely delete and have the OS rebuild? Any ideas?

OK, so I tried a Safe Boot. It wired 5GB of memory, and for a while I thought what was left would behave itself, but within about 10 minutes I consumed everything again.
Here's the before:
And here's 10 minutes later, after bouncing around a few websites:
I also tried firing up Safari, going to Facebook, and letting it sit for a while. No effect.
So, the problem occurs when visiting multiple sites - memory isn't getting released properly.
I think I'm left with a move to Mavericks.

Similar Messages

Killing "Safari Web Content"

Hi,
I recently upgraded to Safari 6.0.
In the previous version of Safari (whatever the latest 5.x was), when the process "Safari Web Content" got too large (memory-wise) I could force-kill it using Activity Monitor. The behavior when that happened was that most (if not all) of the Safari Web Content memory would be freed, and all of the open tabs on Safari would be reloaded. This was very good behavior, IMO, because it allowed me to retrieve some memory without losing any content (other that now being unable to go back.)
In Safari 6.0, when Safari Web Content is killed, the entire Safari process is killed, and you have to start from scratch.
Was this an accidental feature (aka a bug) in Safari 5.x, or was this change intentional? Is there any way to free up memory in Safari 6.0 without killing the whole thing? Safari 6.0 seems to continue the trend of Safari being a real memory hog (apparently much worse than Google Chrome), and the behavior of 5.x was very useful in that regard.
Thanks,
Geoff

Clear the history...
From the Safari menu bar click Safari > Reset Safari
Select Clear History
Deselect the other boxes then click Reset.
Quit then relaunch Safari to test.

Safari Web Content eating up 2GB of my RAM?

I posted about my iMac crashing some months ago, after having some concerns that Safari was causing my system to hang up and/or crash; but I was told that my ESET AntiVirus was at fault and that I should uninstall it despite it being no problem for over a year that I've had it.
However, I now finally have evidence at hand that Safari IS indeed the problem and would like to know if anyone has been having this issue. I currently have no tabs open other than the page that I am now using to compose this text, however Safari Web Content is somehow still using up 1.21GB of RAM on it's own despite only having one page up. I only have 4GB of RAM installed since purchase, however since this issue is fairly reoccurring I have as of today ordered some more compatible RAM to upgrade to 8GB to see if this helps the problem. However this is not a solution as Safari should not be consuming this much memory on it's own anyway.
With 3 or more tabs open, my RAM had dropped to literally 21MB free, and over 2GB was used by Safari. Why is it doing this, is this normal? How can it be fixed?
OS X 10.8.4
Safari 6.0.5
iMac 21.5 inch late 2009
3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4.0GB DDR3 1066MHz RAM

Yes, Safari Web Content can use a lot of RAM. However, I don't think that would be the cause of crashing; lots of memory use rarely causes crashes. Poorly written software that runs in kernel space (AV software fits this), can cause this.
Safari Web Content is "caching" a lot of stuff. More than I'd like it to. If you have 47 tabs open, and close them down to 1, SWC will still often be taking up a lot of RAM. If you quit and restart Safari it will give the memory back, though in general if the system is under memory pressure I think SWC will also release some more RAM. In general I never notice this to be an issue.
I think with OS X Mavericks things may improve as well, based on details on the Safari tab, as well as with "Compressed Memory" which would help as your system approaches using all its RAM:
http://www.apple.com/osx/preview/advanced-technologies.html

Disk Churning by Safari Web Content

Starting about four or five days ago, Safari Web Content is almost constantly using 25% - 30% of my CPU, and my drive is beign accessed almost constantly (reading and writing hundreds of GB each to my data drive). At first, it only affected my wife's account, not it's affecting every account on the machine. There are brief pauses (20-40 seconds), but I usually hear constant disk access. Looking at memory access, nothing seems fishy, so I don't suspect it's something like the OS using my external data drive for swap space. I'm more than stumped at this point.
Ray

A new data point:
Somehow our iCloud connection was "lost" and I had to re-login into iCloud and re-set the option to sycn bookmarks. While this was happening, I kept getting alerts that bookmarks couldn't be changed because iCloud was sync'ing. What's interesting is that Safari was "idle" in the background at the time. I wasn't using Safari, but it was busy churning away.
I've already re-set and even totally deleted all of our bookmarks, multiple times since upgrading to 10.8, so I don't think yet another reset and bookmark purge is going to help.
Ray

Safari Web Content using 2GB of RAM?

I posted about my iMac crashing some months ago, after having some concerns that Safari was causing my system to hang up and/or crash; but I was told that my ESET AntiVirus was at fault and that I should uninstall it despite it being no problem for over a year that I've had it.
However, I now finally have evidence at hand that Safari IS indeed the problem and would like to know if anyone has been having this issue. I currently have no tabs open other than the page that I am now using to compose this text, however Safari Web Content is somehow still using up 1.21GB of RAM on it's own despite only having one page up. I only have 4GB of RAM installed since purchase, however since this issue is fairly reoccurring I have as of today ordered some more compatible RAM to upgrade to 8GB to see if this helps the problem. However this is not a solution as Safari should not be consuming this much memory on it's own anyway.
With 3 or more tabs open, my RAM had dropped to literally 21MB free, and over 2GB was used by Safari. Why is it doing this, is this normal? How can it be fixed?
OS X 10.8.4
Safari 6.0.5
iMac 21.5 inch late 2009
3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4.0GB DDR3 1066MHz RAM

Hi,
Just jumping in here as I'm having a similar problem, but I have 16GB of RAM. My symptoms are not just seeing how much RAM is being used by Safari web content (3+ GB) in Activity Monitor, but that it has only *recently* started, and it is slowing Safari down to a crawl... I get the spinning beachball a lot now, often for a minute or more at a time. when I hit the down arrow to move down a webpage. I'm not doing anything special on these webpages, these are just webpages with text, some graphics (and sometimes Flash video, which is a whole other can of worms), but the point is: I've ALWAYS been doing that. Nothing has changed. I had it with 10.8.4 and now 10.8.5. I have enough RAM to run on so I really wouldn't care how much RAM web content was taking if it wasn't making my machine suddenly - and sporadically - run so slow.
Any thoughts? I'm starting to see other threads on this topic, and some are saying "wait for 10.9." Well, yeah, but I'm an audio guy so I'm not going bleeding edge with 10.9 for a while, until they get everything sort first with software and drivers.
Best,
Joel
2008 MacPro (3,1), OS 10.8.5, 16 GB RAM, 1 TB internal boot etc. (yes, I have plenty of room on my boot drive, over 500 GB).
Message was edited by: joelfriedman

Safari Web Content Process

So I like to keep a lot of tabs open in Safari, and most of them have flash (would rather they not, but nothing I can do about it), of course this absolutely kills my computer and when you open Activity Monitor, you see Safari Web Content using over 100% CPU and about 2.8GB of memory.
Ok, so in Lion I could simply stop the Safari Web Content process and it would reset all the tabs, but the tabs wouldn't load until I made the tab active. This brought the CPU load down to a normal 5-10% and anytime the process got out of hand, I could simply shut it down again. But now in Mountain Lion, if you kill the Safari Web Content process, it simply quits safari. This s.u.c.k.s. because I then have to reopen it, all my tabs and windows open back up, and I'm right back at over 100% CPU usage.
Does anyone know of a workaround for this or how I could change the default action to simply reset the tabs, like in Lion?

Disabling Java and quitting/restarting Safari does seem to address the problem. Further, visiting Adobe's website and downloading and installing the latest version of FlashPlayer also seems to address the problem while allowing Java to be enabled.
In short, the problem seems to have to do with the Flash Player that shipped with Mountain Lion (or was the most recently installed under Lion).
james r. from Northern CA

Safari Web Content Gone Wild!?!?!?!

I use a product named Scannerz for drive testing. I visited their site last night and they had an article about using Activity Monitor to evaluate performance problems with Mountain Lion. I posted several links to it last night. Here's the link:
http://scsc-online.com/Activity%20Monitor.html
In any case, in it they describe a Safari Web Content problem where, for some reason it uses tons of memory. I was cruising this site, doing some posts, and guess what? The very same problem they described happened to me. I've never seen this before.
Here's what happened:
I was reading a post in the iMac section and the guy linked to another post. I did a right-click to his link and opened it up in a new window. That post was about setting hibernate levels, so I opened up another Safari window to do a Google search on hibernate levels. I found an article and clicked on it. I read the article. At the bottom was a link (an ad) for Microsoft Surface (their tablet, I guess). I clicked on it just to see what this thing was all about for kicks. In any case, when the page loaded, Safari pretty much locked up. It wouldn't load anything, and all Safari Windows were locked up. The fans on my system suddenly kicked on full speed - so loud I could hear it, which is weird for them. I opened up Activity Monitor and Safari Web Content was eating up over 2GB of RAM, the memory readings on the memory graph were fluctuating like crazy. One second (and I do mean second) it would show hundreds of megabytes of free memory, then there would be none, then there would be a little, ......you get the picture, it made no sense.
I might have thought this reasonable if every single Safari Window I had open were all playing hi-def videos, but they were all essentially just basic HTML pages with no dynamic content at all. The only one with dynamic content (at least I think it was dynamic content - the page never loaded) was for Microsoft Surface (or whatever it's called) - I closed that page when the "Safari Web Content Gone Wild" session began.
After closing all Safari windows but this one, the system seems to have settled down. I assume this is a Mountain Lion/Safari Web Content bug (either that, or Apple is conspiring against Microsoft to the point they aren't allowing their ads to show!! )
Anyone have any idea what triggers this? Is it system related, or will this happen on anything running ML?
Thanks in advance.

I have seen this with a javascript widget. This widget had a revolving set of page thumbnails that you would cycle through when scrolling them. However, when you scrolled them in Safari, it locked up as you describe.

Safari Web Content

I am running the following
Maverick - 10.9.2, with Safari Version 7.0.2 (9537.74.9)
This build of Safari seems to be incredibly slow, not only when it opens but when you open multiple tabs, the iMac stops reponding, unable to use any applications until Safari starts again. Multiple instances of Safari Web Content are running
I have removed all Extensions, and have disabled Plug ins - any suggestions?
Many Thanks

Please read this whole message before doing anything.
This procedure is a diagnostic test. It’s unlikely to solve your problem. Don’t be disappointed when you find that nothing has changed after you complete it.
The purpose of the test is to determine whether the problem is caused by third-party software that loads automatically at startup or login, by a peripheral device, by a font conflict, or by corruption of the file system or of certain system caches.
Disconnect all wired peripherals except those needed for the test, and remove all aftermarket expansion cards, if applicable. Start up in safe mode and log in to the account with the problem. You must hold down the shift key twice: once when you boot, and again when you log in.
Note: If FileVault is enabled, or if a firmware password is set, or if the boot volume is a Fusion Drive or a software RAID, you can’t do this. Ask for further instructions.
Safe mode is much slower to boot and run than normal, with limited graphics performance, and some things won’t work at all, including sound output and Wi-Fi on certain models. The next normal boot may also be somewhat slow.
The login screen appears even if you usually login automatically. You must know your login password in order to log in. If you’ve forgotten the password, you will need to reset it before you begin.
Test while in safe mode. Same problem?
After testing, reboot as usual (not in safe mode) and verify that you still have the problem. Post the results of the test.

When I am in e-mail. I get the spinning color wheel. Then, when I check the activity montior, it notes high cpu usage (99%) for "Safari web content.". then I quit this process and cpu usage drops way done. but I have to log in again to my e-mail. what can

When I am in e-mail, I sometimes get the spinning color wheel, which lock up everything. when it doesn't go away, I see on the activity monitor, that CPU usage is very high (99%), for a process calles " Safari web content'. When I click on the proccess and quite, the CPUusage goes way down. Problem is that I have to then log back in to e-mail. What can I do to eliminate this proble. thanks

How much FREE RAM do you have when this occurs. It's easy to tell, when it beach balls open Activity Monitor (Applications - Utilities - Activity Monitor) click the System Memory tab and note how much FREE RAM is listed. If it's 500MB or less it's time for a RAM upgrade.

Safari Web Content - Constantly using CPU time even when no tabs

Hello,
I have a MacBook Pro Retina (2012), with 16GB of RAM. It is running OSX Mavericks (10.9.4). Recently, I have switched from using it with multiple external monitors, to using it on its own. Here, I have noticed unusually raised usage temperatures - even without any applications (other than Safari) running. Looking at Activity Monitor, it seems Safari Web Content (com.apple.WebKit.WebContent) is constantly using one of my CPUs. Whilst it does not affect the speed of the computer much, it does mean that "idle" temperatures are significantly raised, which is a pain when I am using it on the road.
I have done the following, all of which have not succeeded:
Disabled all Safari extensions
Cleared the cache
Closed all tabs
Sampled the process - unsure of what the output of this means, but if you require it, then I can post it here.
I am unsure what else to try. Currently, the only action that resolves the issue is completely quitting Safari - obviously, this isn't something I can really do for normal usage.
Has anybody come across this before? Is there anything more I can do to investigate the issue? Finally, is there a known fix for this problem?
Thank you in advance,
Richard

Do you have any of the following installed:
anti-virus/internet security software?
"Cleaning" or "tuning" software?
third-party backup software (not Apple's Time Machine) that came bundled with an external hard drive?
online backup software (Carbonite, OneDrive, GoogleDrive)?
Also please do "About Safari" from your Safari menu so we can verify your version. On July 11, Apple inadvertently posted a Seed release of a Safari version still under development for the next OSX version. People who had updates set to "automatic" got the "not ready for prime time" version. If you have Safari 7.1, you were "gifted" with that little bag of post-processed cattle feed.

Any fix for Safari Web Content 100% cpu?

Last I checked, the only fix for this was to restart the browser. Of course, it eventually comes back. My cpu stays between about 75% to 99% because of Safari Web Content process.
Besides restarting the browser, has any one run across a fix for it?

From the Safari menu bar, select
Safari ▹ Preferences ▹ Extensions
Turn all extensions OFF and test. If the problem is resolved, turn extensions back ON and then disable them one or a few at a time until you find the culprit.

HT2497 My Mac keeps closing Internet. The message states "Safari Web Content quit unexpectedly" and then the window is full of computer jargon. HELP!

I click on the Safari logo, page opens but then quickly after closes and the message "Safari Web Content quit unexpectedly" opens with a whole load of computer jargon below.
Any ideas how to fix?
Thanks

This crash is caused by a bug in the way Safari synchronizes with iCloud.
Uncheck the box marked Safari in the iCloud preference pane. You may also need to do as follows.
Back up all data.
Triple-click the text on the line below on this page to the clipboard, then copy it to the Clipboard (command-C):
~/Library/Safari/Bookmarks.plist
Quit Safari.
Select
Go ▹ Go to Folder
from the Finder menu bar. Paste into the text box that opens (command-V), then press return.
A folder window should open with a file named "Bookmarks.plist" selected. Move the selected file to the Desktop, leaving the folder open.
Relaunch Safari. It will open with the default set of bookmarks. Delete them all. Select
File ▹ Import Bookmarks
from the Safari menu bar. Import from the bookmarks file you moved to the Desktop. Arrange the bookmarks as you wish.
Select from the menu bar
History ▹ Clear History
and confirm. As far as I know, you don't need to reset Top Sites, but I'm not sure of that.
You can then try to re-enable Safari in iCloud. It may start to crash again. In that case, you'll have to leave synchronization disabled until a more permanent solution turns up. Sync bookmarks with iOS devices in iTunes instead.

I am getting an alert window that says: "SAFARI web content has quit unexpectedly"

I am getting a alert window that says: "SAFARI web content has quit unexpectedly" - but Safari hasn't shut down or anything. It happens a few times a day.
QUESTION: How do I fix this?
There is a HUGE long block of text that appears, here's the opening set of lines:
Process:         com.apple.WebKit.WebContent [386]
Path:            /System/Library/StagedFrameworks/Safari/WebKit.framework/Versions/A/XPCServices /com.apple.WebKit.WebContent.xpc/Contents/MacOS/com.apple.WebKit.WebContent
Identifier:      com.apple.WebKit.WebContent
Version:         9600 (9600.1.17)
Build Info:      WebKit2-7600001017000000~8
Code Type:       X86-64 (Native)
Parent Process: ??? [1]
Responsible:     Safari [364]
User ID:         501
Date/Time:       2014-10-22 11:08:40.126 -0600
OS Version:      Mac OS X 10.9.5 (13F34)
Report Version: 11
Anonymous UUID: C4AFA704-2C2F-2CAB-2A2D-CD5F959444A5
Crashed Thread: 4 JavaScriptCore::Marking
Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)
Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x0000000000800028
VM Regions Near 0x800028:
-->
And - Here's what it says on Console > All Messages > Diagnostic and Usage Information >
10/22/14 11:08:40.836 AM Safari[364]: CFPropertyListCreateFromXMLData(): Old-style plist parser: missing semicolon in dictionary on line 3. Parsing will be abandoned. Break on _CFPropertyListMissingSemicolon to debug.

Hi Mike ..
Reinstall OS X. That will also reinstall a new copy of Safari for you.
Startup your Mac while holding down the Command + R keys.
From there you should be able to access the built in utiliities to reinstall OS X using OS X Recovery.

SafariDAVClient and Safari Web Content hogs my iMac

I am running Mavericks 10.9.3 on my iMac 27", 2.7 ghx Core /i5. Frequently the browsing becomes worse than sluggish, actually at a stand still. If I put my mouse point over Safari, it shows the rotating BeachBall. If I start Activity Monitor, Safari, SafariDAVClient and multiple copies of Safari Web Content appear to be the processes using the cpu power (I have one cpu with four cores). Also, no surprise, Flash Player (Safari Internet plugj-in) is using around 5% of my CPU even though it is only used in a tab of a window which is fully hidden. I am not running any movies on any page. I wish I could be sure which adware might be using the excessively overused Flash plugins and wasting my cpu power. In theory there should be no flash contents being processed.
I've seen this problem since OS X Lion and it has continued through Mountain Lion and Mavericks. With Snow Leopard I used to be able (on the same iMac or its predecessor which was slower) four or five broswer windows each having 5-7 tabs. These open web sites usually didn't not involve animation except for what advertisements did. Since updating to Lion and worse with each release since then my performance in browsing has done a nosedive. To put this in context, three years ago, at work I ran a moderately speedy PC (not as fast as my iMac) with Windows XP. XP didn't perform as well as Snow Leopard but it clearly outperformed every OS X system I've run since then. I noticed a clear step backwards at each new OS major release. The dot releases in between the major releases didn't have a noticable good or bad affect. Some bugs were fixed, a very good thing, but performance stayed as bad as it was before the update.
Don't misunderstand me, I rather like OS X. In featuers and usability it tops Windows any day (through XP, don't get me started on Windows 8, I never used Windows 7).
I have tried other broswers. In turn I have used Safari, Chrome, and Aurora (Firefox alpha) exclusively. when I make the switch things get better. But in a day or two, they bog down again. Chrome is probably my favorite overall but Safari is good in most ways. I've had issues with Firefox besides performance. My daugher recommented Aurora as working better but it is an alpha release so less stable.
Please do not refer me to the discussion at https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3204349?start=0&tstart=0. It does not work with Mavricks. It tells me to turn off Bookmarks in SysPref/iClouce - there is no Bookmark check box at the moment. It also tests me to rename two files name bookmark.* in ~/Library. There are no such files. ~/Library only contains directorys and a search using Find ~/Library |grep -i bookmark had no matches when run in Terminal.
Any other suggests relevant to Mavricks?
Thanks,
Bruce

When you have the problem, note the exact time: hour, minute, second.
These instructions must be carried out as an administrator. If you have only one user account, you are the administrator.
Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Console in the icon grid.
The title of the Console window should be All Messages. If it isn't, select
SYSTEM LOG QUERIES ▹ All Messages
from the log list on the left. If you don't see that list, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar at the top of the screen.
Each message in the log begins with the date and time when it was entered. Scroll back to the time you noted above. Select the messages entered from then until the end of the episode, or until they start to repeat, whichever comes first. Copy the messages to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.
☞ The log contains a vast amount of information, almost all of it useless for solving any particular problem. When posting a log extract, be selective. A few dozen lines are almost always more than enough.
Please don't indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Please don't post screenshots of log messages—post the text.
☞ Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

Mail and Safari (web content) hog the CPU

Ridiculous proportion of CPU is hogged by Mail and by Safari, causing sluggish performance of all applications
Never experienced this before upgrading to Mavericks.
Any suggestions?

I have an update which seems to have worked for me - things were getting so bad, streaming audio was dropping out, so I had to do something.
I downloaded and ran the latest version of OnyX which told me I needed to repair my boot drive - this process took about an hour, then I cleared out pretty much everything using the OnyX Cleaner.
One of the things I have running is Little Snitch (mainly because I want to know what's being sent out from my machine). When I rebooted for the final time, some Google app (ksurl) kept asking for permission to connect to Google. I'd previously blocked this, but given all the problems I had with Safari, I decided to let it go this time.
Now, I don't know whether it was the reboots, OnyX cleaner, the boot parttition errors or Little Snitch, but I've been running for over four hours now, using Safari and Safari Web Content is constantly below 2% CPU, audio streaming is working without dropouts and overall everything seems to be much smoother.

Safari Web Content consuming all my memory

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