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Safari memory leak impacts on performance.

andrew_jorgensen202andrew_jorgensen202 Member Posts: 12 ✭✭
edited March 2018 in General
So I noticed that safari kept on shouting at me about significant energy usage being used by my Onshape document tabs. Having realized I hadn't spent the time to cleanup my iMac for a few years. Clear out caches, make sure old background apps were not running etc. I did a thorough cleaning of my OS X install and along the way discovered some forum threads that indicated from time to time there are Safari updates that can cause significant memory leaks because of conflicts with your pre-existing cache and preference files from your old Safari installs. 

So following the advice of one such thread I went through and cleared out my preference files, caches, etc, and did a genuine fresh install of Safari. The memory leaks stopped, and my anecdotal experience is that Onshape is running better now.  I have 32gb of ram, so I rarely notice memory issues until they become very large, eg a memory leak that continues indefinitely. 

To discover if you are having a similar problem, monitor the memory usage of "Safari" in the "Activity Monitor" under the "Memory Tab". You should notice the memory usage slowly increasing over time into the several gigabytes range. After having cleaned up my Safari install. The listing for Onshape under the memory tab as "https://cad.onshape...." seems stable at 1gb - 1.5gb of memory usage regardless of how long the tab stays open. Much better than the 3bg - 6gb of memory usage I was seeing before with it slowly climbing to who knows how high depending on my session. 

If you haven't taken the time to do a cleanup of your operating system and browser install, i'd highly recommend reading up on it. One big factor that I've noticed a lot of people don't pay attention to is percent of hard drive usage. Once you exceed 75% storage capacity on your HDD it can really bog your  OS system performance down at least in the realm of Mac OS. And it's soooooo easy to forget about the automatic picture & music syncing from mobile devices, old install files, and random video downloads that quickly bloat your junk files on your hard drive.  I'm sure most people are probably aware and on top of these issues. But for those who aren't hopefully this helps maximize your computer resources. I was able to remove within a half hour about 150gb of total junk files without much effort. 

Best of luck! 
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