Many tabs and windows causing freezing

[Shortsord]

I use Safari and Firefox(not the new 2) and I tend to have quite a few tabs in quite a few windows opened at once. Generally around a dozen or two tabs each in half a dozen windows, but sometimes a lot more. Not with images or videos, nothing taking up a bunch of space, just lots of pages. And no other apps running.

The problem is, after a while the browsers will freeze sometimes, or worse, OSX will freeze. When OSX freezes, it's especially weird, because on the right hand corner freezes, with the volume, wifi, user switching, time, and spotlight, and on the left only the apple symbol becomes frozen. Meaning the beach ball forever is there. When I relaunch finder, it's exactly the same, time frozen at the exact same time.

This happens on two computers. The very last version of the G5 17" imac, and the very last version of 17" G5 powerbook. Both have 1.5GB ram, both have at least 15GB free on hard-drive. All the latest updates I know of.

Any ideas of how to avoid this?
Clean up utilities, better browser or plugins, more ram, just need a faster computer, or unavoidable in general?

I don't know if there's a "no duh" component I'm missing here, but I'd appreciate any help.

 

[apfhex]

Sounds like some important process is not responding, but I wouldn't rule out bad RAM. It's definitely avoidable and it's not the speed of the computer.

Since it's Firefox and Safari I would rule out plugins, but I would make sure you have the latest versions of both as well as the latest OS X updates.

 

[Shortsord]

Newest version of Safari, os 10.4.9 by the way, and newest update of firefox while not upgrading to firefox 2 yet.
The ram in both is 512 stock and 1gb from datamem. I assumed that would be safe.

 

[clevin]

are u using two browsers at the same time?

 

[mkrishnan]

You have more than a hundred web pages open at the same time?

Can you recreate the freeze you describe while activity monitor is running? This could help you determine what process is causing trouble, for instance, why the system cannot recover from the freeze in some cases.

 

[Shortsord]

I'll try running activity monitor with everything later tonight.
Is it really so odd to have so many windows open?

are u using two browsers at the same time?

No. I might occasionally, but what I'm talking about happens regularly with only one of those browsers open, and nothing else.

 

[Shortsord]

Safari only open with 5 browser windows and about 15 tabs per window. Open for over 24 hours, with lots of browsing.

I'm not sure exactly what I'm looking for on Activity Monitor, so I'll post what looks interesting.
Safari's using about 10% of cpu, sometimes flaring to 20 or dropping to 6.
Memory breakdown is as such: Wired 160, Active 880, Inactive 420, Free 65, and 7.7GB of Virtual Memory.
Safari's using 840 of the memory, and 12 threads, and 1.28GB virtual memory(is that kind of high?).
Page ins/outs are 121203/34596.

Does any of that explain anything?

This on an iMac G5 1.9. The fan comes on every once in a while when browsing, but the computer hasn't slowed yet. Also, the amount of windows open is actually a bit less than my usual full load, but it's still enough to crash it in the past.

 

[Shortsord]

OK, I got it to crash while I was using it. There was no change in memory usage, page ins/outs didn't jump, the only thing that was hugely different was the cpu usage. Cpu use went from 15% to 95% and stayed around there until I ended everything.

Any ideas, please?
I have Saft and Session Saver, so I'm not losing anything, but it's annoying and troublesome when I'm trying to work.

Thanks a lot.