Slow Safari and "cprefsd" using CPU

[Woochoo]

When I installed Yosemite (clean install, then restoring with Time Maschine) Safari was smooth like silk. But recently every webpage I go (clicking links or going to search bar to type an URL) makes Safari go really slow. First I thought it was a Safari problem because Firefox is running smooth, but then I realised that every time I go to a website (the first 5-10 seconds) the "cprefsd" process appears and uses up to 65-70% of the CPU, making the whole Mac go slow or freeze for a few seconds.

What's about Safari and that process? I thought that cprefsd was a daemon of preferences, but I wouldn't ever imagine that it has something to do with webs (it doesn't trigger with Firefox, only with Safari). I've been looking on the preferences folder of my system and user but nothing anormal (like a big amount of plists to check or something like that), so I don't know what's going on but it's quite frustrating to use Safari.

Any idea?

 

[Weaselboy]

Yeah... that's very odd. That daemon does cache pref files. You can read a bit about it here.

I wonder if the Safari plist is corrupted and that daemon is trying to replace it with a cached version.

Try this. Quit Safari then run the command below in Terminal to delete the Safari plist files then restart the computer. Now try Safari again and see if that helped. This should delete the existing and cached Safari plist and a new one will be generated when you launch Safari after the reboot.

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safari.pl*

 

[Woochoo]

Hi Weaselboy, thanks for the reply!
This might be weird but it says "the command is not found" (tried on sudo), so searching for Safari.plist manually, I've realised that it doesn't exist in the main Library/Preferences/ folder.
Did the same on the User/Library/Preferences folder (there it does exist) deleted manually the Safari preferences and Safari extensions preferences, so after restarting Safari they are generated again.
Nothing, cfprefsd still triggers. Also repaired permissions just in case but nothing again :/

 

[Weaselboy]

Hi Weaselboy, thanks for the reply!
This might be weird but it says "the command is not found" (tried on sudo), so searching for Safari.plist manually, I've realised that it doesn't exist in the main Library/Preferences/ folder.
Did the same on the User/Library/Preferences folder (there it does exist) deleted manually the Safari preferences and Safari extensions preferences, so after restarting Safari they are generated again.
Nothing, cfprefsd still triggers. Also repaired permissions just in case but nothing again :/

rm -rf ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safari.pl*

Whoops... sorry. I left out the command itself and just gave you the path the plist. Sorry about that. If you deleted the one in the users library pref folder, that would be the same one at this path.

The though is you need to reboot after you delete the plists and before you restart Safari. Did you do that?

 

[RedRaven571]

Thanks Weaselboy! It seemed to me that Safari has been sluggish to load pages since I updated to Yosemite; I just did as you suggested and it seems much 'snappier'.

 

[Woochoo]

rm -rf ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safari.pl*

Whoops... sorry. I left out the command itself and just gave you the path the plist. Sorry about that. If you deleted the one in the users library pref folder, that would be the same one at this path.

The though is you need to reboot after you delete the plists and before you restart Safari. Did you do that?

Well... In a rage attack, I acted like a beast and erased the whole Safari, just to install it again from the Yosemite USB stick :$
Now it works like charm, but I'll save this post because I don't see Safari working like silk for a long long time, so it will be useful. Thanks anyway! =)