Why does my safari runs slow on my iMac (Snow Leopard)

I have the same problem often, especially after startup. Lots of disk churning and extremely sluggish response with spinning beachballs, stalling, and hesitation loading anything, sometimes going on for 3-5 minutes. I'm on an iMac 27" 2.93Ghz i7 with 12GB 1333MHz DDR3 with OS X 10.6.7.

From what I can tell my problem following startup occurs when mdworker starts doing it's thing for spotlight and brings everything to a halt by accessing the disk with >1000 IO/sec and reading >2GB from the disk over a few minutes. Why Safari won't run while this is going on given 12GB of memory is a mystery to me. I guess only a fast SSD bootdrive would solve this problem.

I still have problems with stalling and churning and beachballs during regular usage. I keep my caches and plug ins folder clean and block flash for most sites. I hoped that the top of the line iMac wouldn't struggle through browsing on Safari, but it does every day.

Does the same thing happen on another user account? If there is no other account, try creating one and see.

Odd as it sounds, iStat menus had a similar effect on my Mac making everything - especially Safari - bog down the entire system. I removed it and now all is smooth sailing.

Not saying that iStat menus was the culprit. There was probably a conflict with another program, but removing it fixed the issue for me. You may have a similar conflict.

Same here

Seems to be doing much more disk churning, most of the time with Safari. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

MBP 2.4Ghz core 2duo, 2 GB memory.

check your activity monitor to see how much ram you are using. 2GB is ok for safari but not with other applications open at the same time. When your ram is full the Mac will start using the HDD as ram which is much slower.

how much free ram do you have? and what does it say next to page ins/outs?
do this while safari and any other every day apps are open and in use.