Going on a Safari, Playing With Beachballs

[fivepoint]

Ok, I wish it were that fun...

I am currently running a 2.8Ghz Core 2 Duo, 24" iMac, with 4gig of RAM. The speed of this machine has been phenomenal, and I am very happy with it to say the least. However, I have always had a problem with Safari (perhaps more recently) where even the most basic of 'clicks' on the web using Safari will cause the ever-feared beachball to show up on my iMac and everything grinds to a hault for 5-6 seconds while the machine recovers.

The strange part? I originally thought it only happend when I was doing VERY processor heavy tasks in other programs behind Safari, but what I have found since then is that the problem persists even when I am not running any other program! I wil lhave iStat Pro running so I can see the processor and memory use, and both are virtually ZERO when the beachball occurs. It is zero when the beachball comes, and it never goes up during the beachball.

Has anyone else experienced this problem? Is it just a Safari problem? If not, what IS the cause? Is there anythign I can do to improve the situation?

 

[richard.mac]

i get this when mpegs open in Safari's QuickTime plugin. does this happen to you too? weirdly enough it doesnt happen with wmvs in the Flip4Mac Safari plugin.

 

[mreg376]

Ok, I wish it were that fun...

I am currently running a 2.8Ghz Core 2 Duo, 24" iMac, with 4gig of RAM. The speed of this machine has been phenomenal, and I am very happy with it to say the least. However, I have always had a problem with Safari (perhaps more recently) where even the most basic of 'clicks' on the web using Safari will cause the ever-feared beachball to show up on my iMac and everything grinds to a hault for 5-6 seconds while the machine recovers.

The strange part? I originally thought it only happend when I was doing VERY processor heavy tasks in other programs behind Safari, but what I have found since then is that the problem persists even when I am not running any other program! I wil lhave iStat Pro running so I can see the processor and memory use, and both are virtually ZERO when the beachball occurs. It is zero when the beachball comes, and it never goes up during the beachball.

Has anyone else experienced this problem? Is it just a Safari problem? If not, what IS the cause? Is there anythign I can do to improve the situation?

Try Webkit, which is the guts of Safari that's constantly being updated in development. Check out: http://nightly.webkit.org/

Do a search here for the advantages of using Webkit.

 

[9007938]

Try Firefox.

 

[nout72]

Flash is mostly the cause of it.
Use an adblocker like PithHelmet to get rid of the annoying banners and stuff like that.
Another cause could be a temporarily slow 'indexing' (or whatever you may call it) of googlessyndicate.com at the background.

And of course the huge memory leak of safari.
It is mostly better to close Safari when you're not using it for a while, restarting Safari does the trick in most cases.
Safari starts up under 1 second on my computer so there's no real need to keep it open when I'm not using it.

 

[fivepoint]

Just so I'm clear... you guys are of the position that it is not my machine, or my software that is causing the problem. You are saying that the problem is wide-spread and affects mac users even with the fastest processors? The problem is with Safari itself?

 

[mastershakess]

Just try using Firefox and see if you get the same problems

I have heard of people having problems with safari but I love it

I was playing WoW, burning a DVD, listening to music and downloading some stuff for work while surfing on Safari no beachballs for me so I duno

 

[fivepoint]

Just try using Firefox and see if you get the same problems

I have heard of people having problems with safari but I love it

I was playing WoW, burning a DVD, listening to music and downloading some stuff for work while surfing on Safari no beachballs for me so I duno

That's just the thing though... 95% of the time it is perfect, and it seems to have nothing to do with what else is running on my computer. It seems to be it's own issue... and it doesn't spin up the processors or use tons of memory.

I figured those two things would be the only thing to lead to a 'beachball' but apparently not. I don't k now why... but the 'memory leak' thing sounds like a good lead.

 

[nout72]

Just so I'm clear... you guys are of the position that it is not my machine, or my software that is causing the problem. You are saying that the problem is wide-spread and affects mac users even with the fastest processors? The problem is with Safari itself?

It depends on the sites I am visiting (note: when I'm not using the ad-blocker PithHelmet)
If I for instance leave 'heavy' game sites like Gamespot.com or IGN.com open while doing some other stuff and I return to Safari and click a new link the beachball is very likely to appear.
Not with an ad-blocker installed though.

And yes te memory leak is a common problem with Safari.

You may want to try resetting Safari, see if that works.
Also get rid of the preference file.