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Posted By: artie505 Safari Networking CPU Usage - 12/27/20 02:47 AM
Recently, Safari Networking has, multiple times each day, spiked to over 100% CPU % (as shown in Activity Monitor), causing my fans to ramp up and necessitating my force quitting the process.

I'm kind of oblivious to stuff like this at the outset, but I'm pretty sure it began with Safari 14.

Is anybody else experiencing this, or is it perhaps a function of some website(s) I visit?

Thanks.
Posted By: ryck Re: Safari Networking CPU Usage - 12/27/20 06:34 PM
Originally Posted by artie505
Is anybody else experiencing this......
Not me...and I'm 14.0.2. I had Safari slowness issues, which I believe were associated with 14.0.1, but this version seems to have cleared them up.
Posted By: artie505 Re: Safari Networking CPU Usage - 01/17/21 08:45 AM
After running with Activity Monitor open on my desktop and actually managing to pay attention to it, I've determined that the Safari Networking/fan ramp-up results from my visiting the NY Times website and that it can be reliably reproduced.

As I mentioned earlier, the process must be force-quit, and that results in short term fallout such as necessitating the reloading of Safari pages because of freezes, but I've been unable to document the fallout.

I hope the problem will be resolved in the next Safari release, but until it's corrected, I guess I'll just use Firefox to visit nytimes.com and see if there's any way to pass feedback to the Times. (NY Times contacted.)
Posted By: jchuzi Re: Safari Networking CPU Usage - 01/17/21 12:37 PM
I have not seen that problem with Safari Networking (I just checked with Activity Monitor and it is a t 0% CPU). I visit NYTimes many times per day and I don't have this issue. I am using Safari 14.0.2.
Posted By: artie505 Re: Safari Networking CPU Usage - 01/17/21 12:52 PM
I invariably see Safari Networking climb to 100+% when I visit nytimes.com, even with extensions disabled (which I just tried once more to be certain).

It appears to be at 0% under ordinary circumstances, just rising and falling back to 0% as I click on links.

Do you ever quit Safari or shut down your iMac?
Posted By: jchuzi Re: Safari Networking CPU Usage - 01/17/21 02:10 PM
I rarely quit Safari but I do shut down at the end of each day.
Posted By: joemikeb Re: Safari Networking CPU Usage - 01/17/21 03:44 PM
Originally Posted by artie505
I invariably see Safari Networking climb to 100+% when I visit nytimes.com, even with extensions disabled (which I just tried once more to be certain).

It appears to be at 0% under ordinary circumstances, just rising and falling back to 0% as I click on links.
Networking should rise when you click on any link, and with a content rich site like NYT it should rise a lot. Every page has multiple links to other pages which must be opened, and often those have links to still more content that have to be opened. It is a virtual cascade of links to be resolved. Be that as it may, driving your system to 100% of a core and causing the fan to spin up to seems excessive. I don't like to use Activity Monitor in that way because it is often among the top three or four CPU users on my system and because of that it distorts the results preferring instead Marcel Bresink's System Monitor which shows the individual cores, but it only identifies the top 5 apps. I am using Safari 14.0.3 and as far as I can tell it generally uses one of the low performance cores and seldom, if ever, switches to a high speed core.
Posted By: ryck Re: Safari Networking CPU Usage - 01/17/21 08:08 PM
Originally Posted by artie505
Do you ever quit Safari or shut down your iMac?
Originally Posted by jchuzi
I rarely quit Safari but I do shut down at the end of each day.
I am also Safari 14.0.2 and use the NYT site without issue. I often quit and restart Safari (e.g. before going to a financial site in order to clear unwanted cookies) but I seldom shut down my iMac. At the end of day I log out, which quits all applications first.
Posted By: artie505 Re: Safari Networking CPU Usage - 02/07/21 01:06 PM
Originally Posted by joemikeb
Originally Posted by artie505
I invariably see Safari Networking climb to 100+% when I visit nytimes.com, even with extensions disabled (which I just tried once more to be certain).

It appears to be at 0% under ordinary circumstances, just rising and falling back to 0% as I click on links.
Networking should rise when you click on any link, and with a content rich site like NYT it should rise a lot. Every page has multiple links to other pages which must be opened, and often those have links to still more content that have to be opened. It is a virtual cascade of links to be resolved. Be that as it may, driving your system to 100% of a core and causing the fan to spin up to seems excessive. I don't like to use Activity Monitor in that way because it is often among the top three or four CPU users on my system and because of that it distorts the results preferring instead Marcel Bresink's System Monitor which shows the individual cores, but it only identifies the top 5 apps. I am using Safari 14.0.3 and as far as I can tell it generally uses one of the low performance cores and seldom, if ever, switches to a high speed core.
I guess it's safe to post at this point...

Problem solved!

I'll spare you the gory details except to say that part of my problem was that I've heard "If the problem doesn't follow you to a test account it's in your home folder" so many times that it never occurred to me that it might actually be an app that didn't follow me, and, indeed, it turned out to be Cookie.

I had Cookie's timer set to delete non-favorite cookies, tracking cookies, and cache every 60 seconds, and that configuration worked just fine through Catalina, but something changed in Big Sur, and deleting cache somehow began causing Safari Networking to spike irredeemably.

I unchecked the box, and the process has spiked only once in the past two days, as opposed to multiple times every hour.

Appendix 1: I agree that a third party app could be more useful than Activity Monitor in many instances, but it was quite sufficient in this one.

Appendix 2: I discovered a bug in Safari 14 that affects troubleshooting: Hitting either Safari > Develop > Disable Extensions or command-E immediately results in your tool bar icons disappearing and Safari > Prefs > Extensions showing no extensions, BUT it doesn't disable your extensions until you quit/relaunch Safari, as opposed to their being disabled immediately as they have been.
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