After ditching Firefox for Safari less than 48 hours ago, I am back using Firefox again. Safari’s memory leak was simply unbearable. After doing some surfing on how to boost both Safari and Firefox’s performance as well as reduce potential for memory leaks, I came across this nifty command line to check leaks:
For Safari, in the command prompt, run
2
3
4
5
6
7
Process 16320: 296847 nodes malloced for 47252 KB
Process 16320: 56 leaks for 6176 total leaked bytes.
.
.
.
(lines and lines or error codes)For Firefox, run
2
3
4
5
6
7
Process 16320: 309998 nodes malloced for 47750 KB
Process 16320: 111 leaks for 3440 total leaked bytes.
.
.
.
(lines and lines of error codes)
When
1 | leaks Safari |
was executed, the error codes ran for pages and pages in the command prompt. It was so long that the command prompt’s buffer ran out of memory (and only after I piped the errors to a text file did I find out that the error code generated a 20MB plain text file!!). And that was after I launched Safari fresh with 10 tabs. In comparison, Firefox’s error code was only a few mouse scrolls away. On top of that, after only having used Safari for less than 12 hours yesterday, I watched it gobbling up almost 200MB of RAM where as in Firefox, I can go on for days with keep the memory occupancy at less than 135MB. Again, this was all with about 10 tabs opened simultanously at all times.
After I decided to quit Safari (again), I closed the windows one by one after transfering all the pages to Firefox. And it gave me this error:
The following world leaks were detected (the check is done when all browser windows are closed):
2 WebView objects, 1 WebFrame object, 1 WebDataSource object, 1 WebFrameView object, 1 WebHTMLRepresentation object, 1 WebBridge object, 2 JavaScript interpreters.
Please write a bug report about this, along with reproducible steps if possible.
Supposedly Finder and almost everything else leaks memory as well… But I am surprised the OS holds up so well after having gone weeks (sometimes months) without a reboot… I wonder how XP and/or other OSes and their Desktops/X hold up against leaks. But I have never heard of Linux having to restart from crashes or bad memory leaks. And OSX has been pretty stable for the past 3.5 years in various versions I have been using. So Windows must just suck more then?
Argh… memory leaks are annoying…