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Safari uses a lot of RAM. Especially when you add Safari's use to WebProcess's use: it comes to about 1.5 GB of memory (for me, anyway). How can I limit the amount of RAM Safari and WebProcess use?

I know a similar question was asked last summer, but two of those answers have to do with the program in question (Dropbox) and the other answer encourages use of Terminal, which I find terribly confusing. Are there any other methods?

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Frustrated by the same problem, except with 3-4 GB rather than 1.5, I made the switch to Google Chrome a few months ago. I've long used Chrome on Windows, but preferred the native platform experience of Safari on OS X. Chrome's gotten very good at acting like a native app, and I've been happy with it. Subjectively, the UI feels more responsive than Safari, and they share the awesome WebKit rendering agent. Most importantly, I've had no trouble with memory leaks or freeze-ups. I hate restarting my browser, and I regularly leave tabs open for weeks. – Cody Gray Apr 5 at 22:07
@CodyGray I've actually migrated to Safari from Google Chrome—I don't have Flash installed except for Chrome's version, which saves system resources in general. When I want to use Flash, I just open it in Chrome! – timothymh Apr 5 at 22:20
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I recently upgraded to 10.6 and I use Safari for most of my browsing on a MacBook white w/ 2GB.

Much more frequently than in 10.5, Safari seems to get "angry" at google-based pages like plus and gmail, and eat up all available physical memory.

It took me a while figure out the new format for "top", but RSIZE races above 1250M, always has the plus next to it, and "PhysMem" plummets. When it gets below 40M, the entire system starts to thrash painfully.

In the past, I would quit safari, recently I tried doing a kill on WebProcess, and it seemed to cause all the tabs to reload, but otherwise was much less painful than locking up or quiting the app.

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Thanks, but this doesn't really answer my question. – timothymh Apr 5 at 22:21
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