4 ms·

The sites are still cached in-memory for fast history browsing.

• eklitzke 16y ago
  Is that really where all of the memory goes? On a normal consumer-grade HDD a disk seek is ~10ms and reading a megabyte sequentially is another 10ms or so. Conservatively speaking it should be possible to load a site from the disk cache in under 50ms, and in practice that would probably be quite a bit faster (especially if the data is in the page cache). With that kind of speed it would make sense to persist these caches on disk if a page isn't actually opened in any tabs. I don't know if data like this exists in an easily understandable format (i.e. not just cryptic massif dumps that would only make sense to WebKit hackers), but it would be interesting to see a heap profile of a WebKit/Safari session to see what's using all of the memory in an "empty" browser session.
• Joeri 16y ago
  Fast history browsing is useful only when clicking the back button. Caching the sites after tabs are closed is just a bad design, no excuses.
  • Qz 16y ago
    Fast history browsing is plenty useful when undoing a closed tab. Not sure if Safari does this, but on Firefox if you undo a closed tab, the tab comes back exactly as it was before, with history intact. I use that feature quite a bit.
    • borism 16y ago
      it works like this with Chrome too, but without keeping all the stuff in RAM.