How to reduce Safari/WebKit logging verbosity?
I only recently updated to Sierra (10.12.4). Now when I use the Console program to view console messages, I see a massive amount of logging by WebKit, especially about "Current memory footprint":
This makes it very hard to use Console to view messages by any other application. Is there any way to hide specific application messages in the new version of Console? Failing that, is there a way to make Safari stop logging this level of detail, or log them elsewhere?
Select one of those "com.apple.WebKit.WebContent" entries and right-click. There are a few different options to help you hide these verbose WebKit entries. You can filter them out by process name, process ID, category, etc.
Similarly if you want to just focus on the output of one application, you could right-click on one of its entries and select "Show Process 'com.mydomain.myapplication'" to only see entries generated by that application.
While the accepted answer probably represents the right thing to do, there’s another way to narrowly answer the question, i.e. how to reduce the logging verbosity of the WebKit subsystem (permanently):
sudo log config --subsystem 'com.apple.WebKit' --mode "level: error"
Now, only error-level messages should be logged. (Caveat: I haven't tested it.)
But I won't recommend this; rather just filter for the messages you need.