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I bought OmniWeb some time ago and used it only briefly. The problem was that it went along fine for a while and then it would start eating memory until the CPU on my iMAc G5 was seriously affected to the point of crippling. I could only shut down and restart and move to another browser. This is why I stopped using OW.

Yesterday I downloaded the latest version to see if there had been a resolution to the problem. As for speed, it is vastly improved and I was thrilled, because I love this browser above all others. But this morning after a couple of hours the same old thing - memory spike followed by CPU in overdrive.

I want to be clear on one thing. This happens with every single browser in existence for Mac and I have them all. I would think it is my machine, but I've read in enough forums to know that this is a problem for very, very many, though not all Mac users. (None of this applies to my Toshiba PC laptop, btw, where any Windows browser works fine.) At first I blamed Firefox for Mac or Safari and that is how I ended up with all of these browsers, including OW.

So I can't blame OW for doing what every other browser in creation is doing. But OW is the only one I paid for, so I am hoping this issue has received better attention and is on the way to being a non-issue.

Again, I love this browser. But is there anything that can be done? Any trick I can use? Any hope for the future?

Thank you.
 
Sounds like it's specific site or a few of them. There are some poorly built sites that can cause quite a CPU spike. This happens to me even on my PC, though it's usually less noticeable there.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Forrest
Sounds like it's specific site or a few of them. There are some poorly built sites that can cause quite a CPU spike. This happens to me even on my PC, though it's usually less noticeable there.
Thanks. I did think of that, but it really doesn't seem to be one site over another. New sites, old sites, it's all the same for me. If anything, it seems to be time used, an hour to a few hours. Just now I am on Shiira, but already today it's happened with Camino, Safari and Firefox, as well as OW. And it's an ongoing problem, never, ever stops happening.

I just had my iMac out for three months to see if it could be the machine. The place I bought it from tried all of the browsers and had the same issue. They sent it to Apple, but they claim the problem doesn't exist, (although they were nice enough to replace my power supply for free since it was on its way out apparently). It's pretty frustrating, though, with this browser thing. I have a gig of memory so it should be enough, I don't play games or use graphics software for anything, but the memory is just sucked up and then the CPU seizes sometimes to 100%.

I'm hoping the developers can do something. It would be great if they could somehow get through to Apple on this and come up with a solution.
 
Let me tell couple of sites you may experience such stuff.

1) Slashdot (.org), when you enable the "new moderation system". They managed to make a evil Browser benchmark/error test without knowing it. We can't blame Slashdot since I don't think they are happy hitting unknown browser glitches either. It happens on Opera 9.10, Omniweb and Safari and interestingly, Omniweb is the least effected.

2) Digg (.com) stuff with huge amount of replies (1000+). Another thing which was never intended but it became so common (including Firefox) that it became a common joke there about browser stability test.

The web switching to some never thought before type of functionality and it hits browsers/html renderers since those features were never used that way on popular sites. You know the new fashion tricks such as "disappearing messages". Before Youtube, Flash video was used only on couple of sites which weren't so popular, Flash was basically "jumping smiley ads" for common websites. Now there are terabytes of streaming done daily over flash and even end user homepages carry flash videos.
 
Thank you, Ilgaz. I can see how what you describe could have an effect. However, I used my PC laptop every day for the three months my iMac was out for service, visiting the same sites as ever without a single incident. I've had no history of this with the laptop, not one time ever. This was one of the reasons I decided to raise the question again.

My iMac returned here only a few days ago and already I am caught up in the problem several times a day no matter what browser I use and with no change in site viewing habits. Also, it's not like I would visit a site and suddenly the CPU spikes. It's a more gradual process, slowly the memory use builds and builds, the machine slows bit by bit, before any noticeable overwork by the CPU. Identifying exactly when at which particular site the problem starts up, for that reason, isn't all that reliably done. I've watched it on Activity Monitor many times, and whatever this is, it doesn't appear to be site-specific or doesn't indicate until much later.

In reading threads yesterday I noticed most were from last year, so in that time perhaps there has been some kind of progress among the developers. I will check in later. Thanks again.
 
I did a test on a video page I watched a couple of weeks ago on my laptop with no problem.

http://64.27.176.201/earthday/

First on Shiira, the CPU spiked almost immediately to 60% and the browser crashed.

OW did the same but did not crash and when I closed the page things went down to normal, which is much better naturally.

So I see what you mean about the sites causing something like this to happen. However, the result was not exactly what I'm talking about. First it wouldn't have seized the CPU immediately but over time; and second it wouldn't have let go of the CPU when I closed the page or even the browser, but only on restarting the machine.
 
Just to tell you: In the Webkit version OW uses at the moment, there is a JavaScript garbage collection issue. A garbage collection is a part of the engine of a scripting language like JavaScript that looks at all the presently used variables and at all the memory that has been claimed to see which parts of the memory aren't used anymore in order to free them.

This doesn't work as it should, so the CPU usage goes to high values, and the memory isn't freed as it should be.

I'm not sure if this is the case for the older version of WebKit Safari uses, but it is for the current OW - not for Firefox or Camino, though, as they use a different rendering engine. So, if you regularly use heavy JavaScripting sites, for OW and maybe Safari you _might_ know the cause. This will hopefully be solved in future versions. For the other browsers I can't help you (and have never experienced the described behavior, but as I rarely use them at all, this doesn't mean anything).
 
Thanks. That makes sense to me. I'm glad to hear there is hope for the future.

Thank you, everyone.
 
 


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