Safari's memory usage?

Question

safari

Good day to all. Noticed very strange memory usage in Safari on mac os x.

It's a safari with 5 open tabs. Nothing special.
I reduce the number of tabs to two and ... I see that almost nothing has changed.
I restart safari and voila, the amount of memory has decreased.
This begs the question, is it possible for safari to reduce the used memory itself, without restarting?

Answer 1

On a Mac, memory allocation works this way - if the process requested 500 megabytes once and then freed it, it will still be considered that the program uses 500 megabytes. This is just a mark, so much data is not really in memory. Let's say if you open a new tab, Safari will have to reuse some of that 500MB without allocating any new memory.
In addition, the memory there is virtual, so even what is actually there can be flushed to disk if not used.

Answer 2

This is fine. Why does this bother you?