X

Safari: more on AutoFill and delays; memory leaks

Safari: more on AutoFill and delays; memory leaks

CNET staff
3 min read

Yesterday we covered a reader report that many Safari slowdowns -- indicated by the dreaded "spinning beachball" -- can be avoided by disabling the "Other forms" box in Safari's AutoFill preferences. We've received confirmations that this "fix" works from a good number of MacFixIt readers. In fact, Chris Gervais notes that with the right tools you can actually see why some of these delays are happening "under the hood":

"I can definitely confirm this. Once I deactived AutoFill, Safari is much quicker and more responsive. If you have Apple's developer tools installed, run the Spin Control application and add Safari to its watch list. It appears that the slow down isn't necessarily Safari's fault; it's a side-effect of how Core Foundation is handling the serialization of property lists (a structure that allows developers to store and recall data). AutoFill form values are kept in a property list (aka plist) in ~/Library/Safari/Form Values. I believe the version written to disk is the binary, not XML, variant. Hopefully Apple is resolving this in Tiger."

Unfortunately, disabling the "Other forms" AutoFill option also means that you don't benefit from Safari's AutoFill feature for any sites listed in the Edit dialog. If you want to keep this functionality for certain sites, just open the Edit dialog next to the "Other forms" checkbox and delete all the sites you don't regularly visit. For most users, this will reduce the number of sites significantly, thus helping to alleviate some of the performance issues caused by this particular issue.

Alternatively, reader "landi" notes that "If you have just a few AutoFill pages, disable AutoFill in [Safari] preferences and then add the AutoFill button to your [Safari toolbar] for 'manual AutoFill' as needed." (You can add the AutoFill button to the Safari toolbar by choosing View -> AutoFill.)

Memory leaks We periodically receive messages from readers about excessive memory usage by Safari; the most recent version of Safari, version 1.2.2 (v125.8), seems to be generating more of these reports than we've seen in quite a while. Over the past couple days, we've received two email messages that are fairly representative. Pat Slice has been experiencing "World Leak" error messages when quitting Safari. (We've received similar reports from readers who see these error msesages when closing Safari windows.) And D. Bruce Stevens writes:

"I've stopped using Safari for the most part (unfortunately) because of the delays and spinning beach ball. During the time I was using it, I noticed that after I experienced a delay in Safari, I'd find delays in other apps as well, especially switching between them. Though I'm not highly technical, it seemed to me that this was caused by a page-out. So I downloaded Memory Stick to alert me to page-outs. I found that during the spinning beachball delays with Safari, I was getting page-outs...sometimes two or three within a few minutes. I don't know if that's due to a memory leak or what, but it was excessive. When I stopped using Safari and began to use Mozilla, things were a lot better."

At least one MacFixIt staffer has seen similar behavior using the latest version of Safari, as well as significantly more crashes and "spinning beachballs" than with previous versions.

Resources

  • Memory Stick
  • More from Late-Breakers