[dustman]

Hi everyone,

This program acts very strange once in awile. In time of active use it simply eats memory like crazy. Is it normal for OmniWeb users to start it and close after visiting few website? Most of the time I keep browser on as long as machine is up and running, with occasional reboots for the box after security upgrades from Apple. With OmniWeb I'm forced to take snapshots and re-start the program when ram usage is up to 500Mb active and 1Gb+ virtual.

My main concern is that such a hole could potentially be exploited for buffer overflow by unnamed malicious website. I can continue using Lynx+Safari combo, but many small things makes OmniWeb better potential #1 browser than Safari, if such problems will be addressed.

Best,
dustman

[Forrest]

A few other threads on this:
http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthre...ht=memory+leak
http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthre...ht=memory+leak
http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthre...ht=memory+leak
http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthre...ht=memory+leak

[dustman]

so it means this problem is very old but still not fixed? since safari is also based on khtml but doesn't have this problem, I assume it's specific to OmniWeb. Am I wrong?

[xiamenese]

Originally Posted by dustman

so it means this problem is very old but still not fixed? since safari is also based on khtml but doesn't have this problem, I assume it's specific to OmniWeb. Am I wrong?

Yes you are, I'm afraid ... read the other threads Forrest quoted and you'll know all about it!

Mark

[Forrest]

Sorry, it helps to know Len Case is/was a dev on OW but his name is no longer in bold.

I was trying to point out that this subject gets brought up very often, but more often than not it's just a misunderstanding of how OS X manages memory. You'll see there was at least one leak in 5.5 in testing, but since then none have been found.

OW will use more memory than Safari because it has things like graphical tabs and workspaces. Unless you're finding that your free and inactive memory is hitting zero, there's probably not a problem.

For me, OW is currently using 715MB real and 1.94GB virtual. I've only got 86MB of free memory, but I have 1426 of inactive. I have 4.5GB of RAM, and for some reason I can never get it to actually use more than 3GB.

[dustman]

I must admit memory management in mac os x is not the subject I got deep knowledge of. I agree that unless you have no free/inactive memory left, it's not a real problem.

IMO, problem is that craftly designed websites can exploit this feature of OmniWeb and make your box crawl. Since I've only got 1Gb ram on my g4 1.42Ghz, it's rather problematic once in awhile. I did noticed small increase in ram usage by OW while box was idling. Nothing spectacular, just few Mb on top of couple of hundreds. I would disable url's from third sites to limit ram usage even more, but Wiki is one of my favs and uses this option alot for images.

I did read all links posted but could not find any indications on why this problem persists. Not to imply anything, but developers were aware of it for long time.

I think it's quite reasonable to compare OW to Safari due to similar underlying engine and optimization for mac os x. I might accept higher ram usage by OW vs. Safari, but it's hard to justify when this difference is more than 100%. Argument 'it's only few websites causing such problem' looks like a poor excuse to me.