MacOS has always been a platform of choice for me on Portable PCs. I am a purist so I tend to use native applications on my PC.

My primary web browser is Safari (currently version 4.0.5) and it works decently well for my needs. However recently I noticed that it has been consuming excessive amount of resident memory. While staring the browser the memory usage was fine, but as and when time progresses, it started consuming upto 1GB of Resident memory and started swapping out other applications to the disk.

Searching on Google landed me to lots of people facing the same problem. I was not using any external plugins, so chances of there being a memory leak is eliminated.

Turned out that Safari was trying to prefetch lots of things for “Top Sites” which it shows when a new Tab is opened. Going to Preferences -> General and changing both New windows open with and New tabs open with to “Empty Page” seems to have fixed the problem.

I am still keeping a watch on Activity monitor to make sure that the problem is indeed fixed.