Here we (me) go again: Safari memory leak

[rich in distress]

TheCaber called it...
Thanks!,

[deckeda]

rich in distress wrote:
TheCaber called it...
Thanks!,

So the answer is to all of sudden not use Safari, because Activity Monitor is actually NOT showing me "which part" of Safari is out of control.

But I'm certainly game to ditch Rakuten and see what happens.

We're at 19+ GB usage now.

[rich in distress]

Ditching rakuten would be the next step for the experiment.
But the real answer is to not think twice about quitting safari once in a while.
I’ve never understood the need to keep many tabs open indefinitely.
I do the multitabbie for example, while perusing the forum, or reading news. But cmd-w as soon I’m done.
I also keep a my-most-recent-research-spree folder... and use the reading list.
And my favorite: spending good money maxing out the ram, only to keep a browser happy.
I mean, cmd-q is free haha.

[TheCaber]

Which version of MacOS or macOS?
Which version of Safari?
What website in the open Safari tab is leaking?
What browser extensions is Safari running (e.g., NoScript, DuckDuckGoPrivacyEssentials, HTTPSEverywhere, OneTab, AdNauseam, DownThemAll!, F.B.Purity, SlickDeals, SponsorBlock)?

On my MacBookPro (2020) running Catalina (10.15.7), after having run Safari yesterday and then quit, today there are still Safari processes even though the browser is not running:



Quit Safari in your main account.
Log into a guest account, and run Applications->Utilities->Activity Monitor
Switch to the Memory tab and type safari in the search area to the right of the tabs.
You should see something like the above.

In the guest account, start Safari with one empty tab. Watch Activity Monitor, does it show rapid memory footprint growth in any process?
Visit the bizarre memory usage web site, does Activity Monitor show rapid memory footprint growth in any process?


Do you run Spotlight on a network drive or cloud drive? The index could grow without bound...
Is Time Machine allocating lots of snapshots? This would affect disk free space more than memory...

[deckeda]

Which version of MacOS or macOS? latest
Which version of Safari? same

What website in the open Safari tab is leaking? various; like I said before, activity Monitor never revealed a website issue here

What browser extensions is Safari running (e.g., NoScript, DuckDuckGoPrivacyEssentials, HTTPSEverywhere, OneTab, AdNauseam, DownThemAll!, F.B.Purity, SlickDeals, SponsorBlock)? As mentioned, Rakuten

You should see something like the above. Yes I looked at all of that when I said Activity Monitor never provided the answer.


I disabled the Rakuten extension, which requires first quitting Safari and removing the corresponding app. So the clock has been reset since last night, however I'm not seeing a memory leak build today. Perhaps Rakuten was the problem, either its app or its extension (they work together).

I would have preferred to not have had to find the problem by process of elimination.

[TheCaber]

Sorry, I never used Rakuten. You can try reporting the extension to the application provider's support group. Tell them to look at and test their extension's event handler code because they are leaking memory at a ridiculous rate in Safari.

Sometimes you just have to find causes the old, slow, way.

I'll go away now.

[deckeda]

I appreciate it! (The help, not the going away!)