[X4U] Memory leak in Safari

[Zane H. Healy]

> I read somewhere that Safari has a memory leak and bring slowly the  
> speed of a Mac down.  Restarting Safari doesn't help.
> I don't notice this.  I use a G5/2.5 desktop Mac and leave the Mac on  
> 24/24 with sleep while not working.
> 
> Paul Moortgat

This is a key complaint with Mac OS X for me.  This has been an issue since
Safari was released.  Though the one posters comments about how it is
behaving sounds much worse than what I've been dealing with (I'm still at
10.3.9).  Safari's memory performance is *MUCH* worse than that of the first
*ALPHA* release of Firefox 2.0.  In fact that Alpha release is so good, and
so much more stable than Safari, that I've not bothered to go through the
trouble of messing with any of the newer releases.  Its memory usage is so
much better than Safari that it isn't funny.

Having said that, the problem isn't just with Safari, the problem is with
the OS itself.  Its handling of Virtual memory is pathetic, and the amount
of virtual memory used by the applications is just plain crazy.  As near as
I've been able to tell, Virtual memory is never really released, it mainly
just grows.  Sure if you quite applications you can free up some virtual
memory, but not as much as you should be able to.  Eventually to speed the
machine up, you have to remove.  On a dual 2Ghz G5 with 3.5GB RAM, I can
keep the system up for about a month or so before I have to reboot, but that
also depends on what I'm doing.  Before I switched to Firefox, I had to
reboot more often.

		Zane