Slow Safari

K1LLSW1TCH · 8 Sep 2009 at 23:44

Hello there!
I've used Safari for ages now, currently using version 4.0.3 and the past few days it seems to be incessantly slow. Webpages will take a while to load and usually I'll get the spinning pinwheel and Safari will just close, giving me the option to ignore or to send an error report to Apple. The reason I believe that this is a problem with Safari is because I don't get the pinwheel in any other programs that I use and I've also got Firefox too, Firefox seems to be fine, however I like Safari's integration and I'm used to using it.

Is there any kind of maintaining I could do to Safari to make it run any quicker and hopefully stop the slowdowns and random quitting? I've had the Mac for a while now but I've never really needed to do any problem solving because it's always worked perfectly so I'm a bit of a noob to be honest. Any helpful suggestions will be much appreciated.

Cheers in advance.

mr.sly · 8 Sep 2009 at 23:46

When was the last time you restarted your Mac? I kept getting the beach ball and random quits today that I couldn't work out. Restarted and it hasn't happened since (touch wood).

K1LLSW1TCH · 8 Sep 2009 at 23:49

mr.sly said:
When was the last time you restarted your Mac? I kept getting the beach ball and random quits today that I couldn't work out. Restarted and it hasn't happened since (touch wood).

I restarted today actually. It didn't seem to solve the problem unfortunately. I also tried a shut down but still the same slowness.

mr.sly · 8 Sep 2009 at 23:58

Does Activity Monitor show anything strange happening?

Spyhop · 9 Sep 2009 at 00:00

Try nuking its caches (Safari > Reset Safari.. > Tick everything except saved names/passwords)

K1LLSW1TCH · 9 Sep 2009 at 00:05

mr.sly said:
Does Activity Monitor show anything strange happening?

Hmm I've just had a look and my CPU is 91% idle and there is 1.7GB RAM free out of 2GB in total. So it doesn't look like something is hogging the resources. At the moment I have Firefox open and iTunes. I might download Onyx and run the cleaning scripts on there. Maybe that will fix the problem although I don't really know what I'm doing, I'll have to have a read first.

wush said:
Try nuking its caches (Safari > Reset Safari.. > Tick everything except saved names/passwords)

I'll give that a try, although I won't know if it's solved the problem without trying a few hours of web browsing so if it has fixed the issue then thanks in advance.