Spinning Beach Ball in Safari

G4 iMac/10.3.5/latest Safari.

Lately I've been experiencing the spinning beach ball for perhaps 5-10
seconds after a web page finishes loading and also after clicking in a
form field. What's up? TIA!

Davoud

 

Don't know. But every once in a while I clean out the Safari icon
directory (Library/Safari/Icons under your home directory) and restart
Safari, and that seems to help. It's where Safari keeps the favicons
(the little icons that appear in the address bar). For some reason this
directory gets clogged up, and clearing it out seems to help performance
a bit.

 

I noticed Safari seems to have trouble with favicons. I was trying
various icons out on a web page, uploading new ones, and it would
sometimes require restarting Safari before it would display the
new icon correctly.

 

I've seen what the OP was talking about; I'll try flushing those
library entries.

I had problems with help crashing on my Mac. When I went down to the
genius bar, they flushed the entries in
Library/Caches/com.apple.helpui. The crashes went away.

I'm getting slightly annoyed by behavior that gets fixed by deleting
cache files. This is silly.

--phil

<Who likes Agent enough that I run it under VirtualPC on my Mac.>

 

Davoud:

Ah, but you _do_ know, and I am grateful that you took time to tell me.

Many thanks,

Davoud

 

Spinning Beachballs in general:

If you have the Developer tools installed there is a neat little app
called 'Spin Control' that gives a lot of information about spinning
beachballs. It is intended to be a debugging tool and will collect data
about how much time is being spent in a function or process. While one
would need the source code to understand what is happening, often the
names of the functions called will offer a good clue, for example, if a
function named 'readPlist' gets hung, the plist file for the application
in question would be a good place to start looking.

Developer -> Applications -> Performance Tools -> Spin Control

Just start 'Spin Control' and as long as it is running it will collect
data about any application that hangs.

--
-Ernie-

"There are only two kinds of computer users -- those who have
suffered a catastrophic hard drive failure, and those who will."

Have you done your backup today?