Hi Jonathan, thanks for sharing an update with us.
We believe it is a combination of a bug in Webkit/Safari and something in our Atlaskit shared UI library that manifests itself in the high CPU load.
Webkit has acknowledged and fixed the bug
In the meantime, the Atlaskit team has also made some changes to the components we use in Bitbucket, and we are working on upgrading these affected components right now, and will be deploying the changes soon. This should mitigate some of the Safari CPU load issues until Apple releases the next version of Safari.
I can confirm that this does seem to mostly be a WebKit bug in that I can remove instances of calc to lower the CPU usage. On the Bitbucket home page, for example, I can disable the height on .bZuPrG ([1], [2]) and .idKGDF which use calc() for their values. Thanks for linking to that issue and I'll happily await an updated Safari.
I looked into jQuery, and while it is true we are on an older version of jQuery, it is not the cause of the layout thrashing you're seeing in the Web Inspector.
I think you maybe meant "it is not the cause of the CPU usage", which, as you revealed, it isn't the main cause of. I do think the layout thrashing is caused by an older (buggy) version of jQuery because that's how the Web Inspector works. Removing {{calc}}s from the page still sees Bitbucket sitting at around 5% CPU usage (sometimes up to 11% in my quick tests) which isn't good (though, admittedly, I may not have noticed until this WebKit bug caused it to spike up). Furthermore behaviour similar to the that in the animation I linked above (intentionally causing a lot of mouse events and thus layout thrashing) causes the site's CPU usage to jump up to anywhere around 20% to 30% which is also not good.
Attachment 3976716861-bitbucket-cpu.jpg has been added with description: Originally embedded in Bitbucket issue #15237 in site/master