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Slowdowns in Safari & Shiira

terriyaki

terriyaki

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Aug 4, 2005
641
11
Vancouver
I posted this in someone else's iBook help thread but wasn't getting much help so I'll post it here, too.

I have a 12" 1.33Ghz iBook G4 with 1.5GB of RAM and a 60GB HDD. She can easily run tonnes of apps without even hiccupping and yet I experience crazy slowdowns in Safari and Shiira.

Most of the time it'll happen when I have 15+ tabs open but every now and then I experience the same problems with only two tabs open. The webbrowser I'm using will become unresponsive to clicks and keystrokes and whenever I have the cursor over it I'll just get beachballs. The rest of the system is fine, it's just Safari or Shiira that gets boggy.

So.. why is this? I mean I know it takes time for tabs to load.. but shouldn't webbrowsers still be responsive when tabs are loading? I don't think this is a connection thing since I never experience this sort of thing on my PC desktop. Is it a software thing? A hardware thing?

Comments and suggestions are welcome. Thanks.
 
Crap, I should have mentioned that I went through the Speed up Safari guide already. Sorry guys. Anyways, yeah, I've done all the things in the guide and still experience slowness.

Any other suggestions?

Also, is there any way to adjust Shiira's rendering time?
 
Well in that case maybe it's just Webkit (think of it as the underlying engine in both these two browsers) struggling with the site's you're visiting. I know it slows down significantly on Flash-based sites. Does Firefox have the same problems?

Also, is Activity Monitor picking up on these slow downs? Is it recording an excessively high CPU cycle count or RAM usage? :)
 
I find Firefox much, much slower than Shiira and Safari altogether.

Anyways, I've monitored CPU usage, memory usage, and disk activity and of the three it's definitely the CPU usage that spikes during these slowdowns.

So.. now that I know that.. what does that mean? The iBook still plays .mp3s in iTunes and .avis in Xineplayer while the pages struggle to load in Safari/Shiira so it's not like the CPU can't keep up. I guess this means these webbrowsers just aren't up to my standards? :confused: :(
 
As in the # of bookmarks you have? Hmm.. really? I have ~130 bookmarks in Shiira but only have about 30 in Safari but I still experience times of slowness with both browsers.

And Mad Jew, no luck with making a new user account.

This sucks. :(
 
It usually happens when I visit forums and open a bunch of subforums up.

Take for instance MR, I usually open the following subforums in new tabs: MacRumors.com News Discussion, Mac Basics and Help, Buying Tips, Advice and Discussion, Macintosh Computers, Marketplace, Mac OS X, Mac Applications, Music Discussion, Community Discussion, and Picture Gallery.

The slowness lasts for about half a minute as the tabs load after one another. Keyboard shortcuts are delayed by a second or so and so is mousewheel scrolling. During these times the cursor icon also sometimes freezes. Sometimes it will freeze as the finger link thing, sometimes it'll freeze as the normal black arrow, sometimes it'll freeze as the text indicator, etc.

Thanks for all of your help, Mad Jew. I really appreciate it. :)
 
Weird. My 800MHz G4 iBook with only 640MB of RAM handles the forums just fine so I've got no idea why yours isn't playing nicely. The fact it's not working well in the new user account really has me stumped too. I mean, your machine is better than mine, so it should be fine.

You don't have any crazy plug ins, do you?
 
So when you opened up all of those subforums (by middle clicking them in the forums main page) you didn't experience any slight slow downs at all? Short instances of scrolling and keysroke lag?

No I don't have any plug-ins installed for either Safari or Shiira. Well.. wait, actually I have one installed. SA Last Read (An extension for the SomethingAwful forums).

Hmm. That may be what's causing this. I'll try to see if things are different without it (but if it comes down to it I think I'd rather live with the slowdowns and keep the extension).

One more question.. could OnyX be responsible for this? I've heard that system optimzers can reduce performance in some instances.
 
Yeah, I had no problems with the multiple tabs on the sub-forums. :confused:

As for Onyx, that can be a problem if not handled well. What exactly do you do in Onyx? I don't have it installed because I don't think it's necessary.
 
Wow, no slowdowns at all? You don't experience any scrolling lag, not even for half of a second, while all of the tabs are loading? Yikes... I wonder what's causing this. I really don't want to reinstall OS X again to see if that will solve the problem. I've never archived and installed before. If I do that will all of my applications and applicatoin preferences be saved?

Umm I use OnyX to repair permissions, optimize the system (i don't even know what that entails), excecute maintenance scripts, clean internet caches, clean user caches, clean system caches, and clean font caches. I only run it once a month or so.
 
Okay, I don't think Onyx is your problem, they're all pretty standard maintenance tasks. Having said that, I don't think they're necessary, it's just that they're probably not doing any harm either.

An Archive & Install will keep everything for you, albeit it will use a new version of the system (OSX) to boot from so you'll have to either manually move everything across to your new system (from a Previous System Folder) or you can use the inbuilt Migration Assistant which can be found in the Utilities folder.

I don't notice much of a slow down on the forums. I mean, if I'm opening lots of tabs simultaneously then it might start to chug a little but it's never a matter of half a minute. Admittedly, I do have an excellent internet connection. I've noticed that Safari prefers fast connections to slow ones. Even though the network speed should be unrelated to general browser responsiveness, that's not always the case. Hopefully this isn't the problem though, because there's not much that can be done about it apart from upgrading the connection.

I'd only do the reinstall if you've got a bit of spare time. It's not that it'll take long, it's just that it'll be a bit of a hassle and I'm not sure how successful it'll be considering the new user account had the same sluggishness. I'll have a look 'round the Apple Support forums for you to see if there's something I'm overlooking and hopefully we'll get Safari up to speed in no time. In the meantime, good luck with whatever measures you take. :)
 
I'll look into doing an Archive & Install when I have time. Hopefully that'll speed things up. I don't think it's my connection because I have a high speed one as well. Eh, hopefully I'll be able to solve the problem without having to Archive & Install, though.

Thanks again for all of your help. :)
 
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