23/08/04
45Safari grinds to a halt - culprit found
Hmm. It looks as if Zlog had this problem and I’d like to know if anyone else has too. Safari seems to have a problem with usage over time. The more I use it, the slower and unresponsive it becomes. Resizing the window takes the patient of a saint. Clicking on toolbar bookmarks has a 4 second delay, and it really has to think hard about showing you a menu item. Whats that all about? Does Safari need a sit down with a cup of tea the same as I do? The simple fix is the quit out, and relaunch. Everything is back to normal, until later in the day when I start to notice it slow down again. Grrr. Not so bad when you’ve got Saft reopening your last used tabs for you, but I still shouldn’t be having to do it. I have wondered whether this has anything to do with the various plug-ins for Safari that I’ve installed, so I’d particularly like to hear from anyone who runs Safari in its clean, naked form. update – It seems that after a length of time Safari will slow down, until you relaunch it, but that it was Saft that made this a little worse. Fiddling with caches of pages/history/favicons made no difference, but removing Saft from the input managers folder did. Its a bit of an arse using Safari without Saft, but the speed difference was incredible!
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Drew McLellan said 1598 days ago:
I run Safari scantily clad and experience slow-down, but at a lesser rate. I find it can get bogged down after a week or so.Apart from quitting and relaunching, I find that clearing the cache and history offers a big performance boost too.
Rupak Das said 1598 days ago:
Howdy Jon,I run Safari in its ‘clean, naked’ form. And I haven’t experienced this sort of sluggish behaviour. I have toyed with the idea of using Saft to save last used tabs, but haven’t got around to it yet.
Andy said 1598 days ago:
Hi Jon – I thought Todd Dominey had covered this one but couldn’t find it on a look at his site.I think the solution was that Safari just keeps building up its cache of favicons to the point that it eventually slows down to a halt.
If you find where the favicons are stored, trash the lot and start up again, it should sort the problem.
Jon Hicks said 1598 days ago:
Favicons aren’t dumped when restarting, so I’m not sure that it would help, but I’ll certainly give it a go.I also use Safari Enhancer to disable the cache completely, so nothing should be stored away. I'll try clearing the history too - thanks.
Hmm…
Mark said 1598 days ago:
I find I have the same problem with Firefox. True, I do use it for hours on end without restarting, but I get all sorts of rendering problems after a while as well as resizing windows, unresposive keys when trying to close windows and tabs.Everything resolves itself with a restart however.
Strangeness.
christiaan said 1598 days ago:
Funny, I was just about to recommend Firefox (the lastest nightlies have convinced me to finally switch) as I too was getting tired of Safari… It’s been nothing short of spectacular recently. It’s now got a good ‘look’ about (and let’s face it – that counts when you’re looking at it all day!) and the speed is far ahead of Safari.I must admit, ‘pipelining’ and the ‘nglayout.initialpaint.delay’ hacks(?) (see hints and tips on the firefox site) also make a pleasant experience.
All I had to give up were the gorgeous drop-shadows I became so used to. :)
Eric said 1598 days ago:
I run safari with no add-ons. I have done the following:empty and then disable cache (change permissions of folder to read only to keep it permanently empty)
then do the same for icons folder
empty and disable other forms in autofill
keep the names of sites short in the bookmarks menu
discussions on all of these can be found at macosxhints.com
Lea de Groot said 1598 days ago:
yes, I have exactly this behvaiour, and in a naked version of Safari – I havent installed any extensions (well, none that I remember any – I’m certainly not using any!)I attribute it to a memory leak.
I tried the cron job deleting aged favicons, but it seemed to make no difference.
The upgrade to 10.3.5 made a great difference, but not enough.
I changed to Firefox as my default app a little while ago.
Of course, I manage to crash Firefox on a regular basis, but frankly, I find that better than the death-of-a-1000-cuts of constant whirly ball.
Restarting safari has always fixed it, but when I have far too many tabs and pages open (yes, I realise that could be contributing!) I cant bear to close it.
(BTW, Jon, I attempted to load this page from my RSS feed – which gave http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/560/ and it didnt load – it appeared to be stuck on something called takebacktheweb.org)
Andy said 1598 days ago:
Jon, found the thing about favicons:http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20040323144305318
– hope this helps
Andy
Dave S. said 1598 days ago:
Oh good, I’m glad I’m not alone.I used IE/Win for a few minutes earlier this week. I was freshly blown away by how fast it was. It seems to me all my Mac browsers have nothing on it, and Safari is the worst offender.
Depressing, really.
Morgan said 1598 days ago:
I have always run my browsers as naked as possible, I really like the cleanliness. I have noticed a slowdown in Safari after a week or more of running (and I keep a lot of windows open with tons of tabs). I’m running a 400MHz PowerMac G4 w/1.25GB of RAM and really only see a slowdown in areas such as clicking UI widgets and such once it slows down (no problems with resizing, moving, etc., once a page has loaded). I think it’s really just a memory leak.giz404 said 1598 days ago:
I have been using a Mac for three months. I have been surfing the web with Firefox most of the time. It never became sluggish or something …So, why not getting rid of these bugs by switching to firefox ??? :)
i’m french, please excuse my poor english)
Greg said 1598 days ago:
Where is the cache folder for Safari? I searched and came up blank.Jon Hicks said 1598 days ago:
Greg, you can find it in:username>Library>Caches>Safari
Eric S said 1598 days ago:
I love Safari – I wish it would work for me. I tend to have at least 11 tabs open at a time and will keep running “thoughts” in each tab that I revisit throughout the day (banking transactions, stock trades, stock info, weblogs, Google searches, Google AdWords, Google AdSense, Gmail, etc).Safari is fast and looks great.
But I can’t use it.
The damn thing crashes after about a day of use and upon crashes it kills all of its cookies and I lose all of my current “thoughts” that I had open in the tabs (pages to read later when I have more time, etc).
This became so intolerable that I switched to FireFox. I use it on Win XP at work and it is wonderful.
Unfortunately FireFox on Mac OS X sucks. It is slow and so ill fits with the Mac OS X way of doing things that it frustrates me to no end (trying to do only keyboard navigation of forms in Safari… always works – in FireFox, hardly ever).
I would love for Safari not to suck (crash every day) so that I could stop using FireFox, but alas, until Safari does in fact not suck, I am going to use FireFox.
I ran an entirely virgin Safari and had the crashes. I added PithHelmet, and saw no change in behavior (other than the lack of ads), and it still crashed.
That said – I never really saw slow downs. It was either total beauty and enjoyment, or all out crash with total data loss.
Jon Hicks said 1598 days ago:
Dave – I see the same thing on my PC. Lightning fast compared to Safari. Camino and Shiira are the closest thing to PC speed that I’ve found.Lex said 1598 days ago:
In addition to clearing out your favicons in Safari’s cache, set the folder for favicons to read-only. Safari appears to cache favicons regardless of your caching settings, but if it doesn’t have permission to write the folder where it tries to store favicons… it won’t.Then, make your you go to Preferences, to the AutoFill section, and verify that “Other Forms” is unchecked. Otherwise you’ll get that dreaded slowdown whenever you click in a form like Google’s search field.
Jon Hicks said 1598 days ago:
No favicons or autofill? :o(Mike said 1598 days ago:
I don’t use Saft… it was giving me problems. I actually don’t use any plug-ins besides a PDF reader and don’t ever have any problems with Safari (or rather once in blue moon, not noticeable). I use plug-ins and advanced features in Firefox for dev work, when I want to just browse I still use a clean Safari. It’s quick and renders the best IMHO. I am running a Dual 2 G5 – 1.5 G RAM & I also leave it open for days/week at a time without restarting the browser.Everyone that is complaining about Safari is baffling me, if you repair your permisssions on a weekly/bi-weekly basis you shouldn’t be having issues. There have been caching issues documented but they usually get squashed in the latest release.
As far as the speed of IE 6 on a PC, most of the percieved speed is because it starts displaying elements sooner than Safari. It makes the page display ugly IMHO and this setting is explained and adjustable – http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/archives/2004_05.html
I love Firefox, but on OS X it does not hold a candle to Safari yet… It is slow and buggy and the plug-ins only work about 60% on the time. On the PC side it is the only choice for me and runs beautiful.
That is all.
Josh said 1598 days ago:
About the IE being faster thing, does IE close when you close the last window or is it still running as explorere.exe in the background? Maybe if it does close it clears everything out so that it seem faster every it starts up – just like when Safari feels faster after a restart.Kevin LaCoste said 1598 days ago:
Hey Jon, I run Safari naked and see the same thing.The answer seems to be running two browsers. OmniWeb and something else. I like to keep my unorganized cluster of tabs in OmniWeb for the safety it provides. No worries about crashing there. I load pages into a second browser when I’m curious about layout or want to hide all the clutter. If OmniWeb were faster and using the latest rendering engine it might do the job on it’s own.
PS: I’ve only been doing this for about a week but it seems workable.
Joseph Scott said 1597 days ago:
Just as another data point, I use Safari for weeks without closing it, opening tabs all over the place and don’t notice the problems that you are describing. The only plug in that I have is Stand.vanderwal said 1597 days ago:
I have been experiencing this in Safari for some time. Having multiple tabs will cause this to slowdown more quickly. I always have the system monitor (not sure of of actual name as I am not on Mac at work as secure operating systems are discouraged) running and in view I I watch my Gig of memory fill in the pie chart in my doc.I do know that sites with ads that use Flash cause this slowdown very quickly. The Wall Street Journal, ESPN, and Major League Baseball sites are the ones that drew my attention to the Flash problems as other tabs would not load until the Flash movie finished its loop (at times I had to leave the page with Flash to get functionality back). This did get better with the most recent update that Apple offered for Panther, which included a few Safari tweaks. I do not know if there is a memory leak in the Flash player for Mac or in Safari when Flash is running, but I do see a strong correlation to the slowdown and cache build-up and Safari’s noticible performance problems.
Clearing the Safari cache from the Safari dropdown menu will help clear the cache, but that does not always cure the performance issue. The closing Safari does solve the problem.
Caleb Jaffa said 1597 days ago:
After using Safari from the first betas to today I am running the 1.3 preview (though if I had the time/patience/knowledge to get me back to 1.2 and its web core I would there are rendering problems with 1.3 preview) I never noticed any problems using Safari for extended periods of time doing web development. Then I installed one of the add-ons that you had pointed out on your site, I don’t recall the name now, but its the one that the site you get it from is in Japanese. I noticed that Safari would be unusable after a few hours of work. Quitting and relaunching helped. I then removed the Safari add-on. I also made it so my forms are only auto-filled with username and password. (This really increased the speed in which I could use phpMyAdmin)scott said 1597 days ago:
I use Firefox and Safari at work on Mac OS 10.3.5 and have noticed slow downs in each after a few hours of browsing. I usually go through about 3 “sessions” on Firefox per day. I belive Flash has something to do with it. A fresh browser restart clears it up.Open up a new Firefox browser and make note of how much memory is being used. Then start opening pages with Flash content and see how quickly it gobbles up resources. I usually go from around 20MB – 80MB after loading a few tabs. The ad banners that Yahoo serves up tend to spike memory usage quite a bit.
Sidenote:
I wish Firefox and Safari had a way of remembering your open tabs, and giving you the choice of reopening them like Opera does when you relaunch.
BTW:
Please make it known that you require all fields BEFORE submitting the form. I just had a pretty lengthy write up disappear because I didn’t fill in my email address.
Stereo said 1597 days ago:
I’m running Safari with PithHelmet and Stand (thanks for the tip). I find that clearing out the cache (Debug -> show caches window) and autofill info (Preferences -> Autofill ), especially for ‘other sites’, helps speed things up.Jon Hicks said 1597 days ago:
Scott, sorry about the loss of your comment. If you need session saving then either get Saft for Safari, or the Session Saver extension for Firefox. Both work great.Caleb – I think you’re referring to Stand, although I’ve been getting this slowness for a long time – before Stand certainly. I'd never used the caches window in the debug menu before - thanks for that Stereo
Corey said 1597 days ago:
I mostly use Firefox but Safari is number two. I run all my browsers naked and have experienced minor problems with Safari like that, having it slow down after a little while.I also have a problem with Firefox on tabbed browsing that if I switch to a new tab, the previous tab URI will stay in the address bar. It doesn’t bother me too much, and after a reload or typing in a new address will make it right again.
John Athayde said 1597 days ago:
I have a similar problem with a no-plugin install of Safari on 10.3.5. I usually notice it when I get up to about 10 tabs after a lot of use on various windows. I could have created 10 tabs running numerous times before, but at some point, when a lot of tabs or windows are open. It stops responding. Sometimes it (and mail as well) start freaking out and the cursor turns into a flashing tool tip (the little yellow box from mouse overs).Fun with code… Hope the engineers figure it out soon.
Brad Froehle said 1597 days ago:
I’ve got the same problem—after a few days Safari becomes extremely unresponsive, even on my Dual 2.0ghz G5. It seems to slow down the most on pages with forms, but it’s hard to say.A good lean browser shouldn’t cause a spinning beach ball, especially on an essentially top of the line PowerMac.
Foster said 1597 days ago:
Just chiming in to say that Safari does get annoyingly sluggish over the course of the day. I’m in the habbit of closing all apps. for the night & re-launching in the AM, so it’s been manageable.I’m running it naked with no add-ons. I use Safari as my main browser (due simply because I like the way it looks) and switch to IE for sites that seem to hate Safari (i.e. weather.com’s satellite view).
With the good things said here, I’ll try Firefox.
Veerle Pieters said 1597 days ago:
I personally don’t have this slowdown in Safari (naked) not on my PowerBook nor desktop. Those machines are always running we just close all programs at night and put the machine to sleep.A good way to check if there is something going on that’s not right is to use “activity monitor” or “memory usage getter”. You find activity monitor in the “Utilities” folder. If it is a memory leak you’ll notice it right away. Mine was using 92MB real memory and 242,40MB virtual memory and 7% processor usage with 20 tabs open after running for several hours. The machine is a dual G4/1GHz with 1,5GB ram.
padawan said 1597 days ago:
I’m using Safari with Stand, and about 20 tabs open on average. I almost never quit it, and haven’t experienced exactly the same problems you described. However, Safari does crash once in a while (usually after opening a page that sports an elephantesque blob that requires a plugin or Java), and when I’ve noticed a slow down, I suspect a conflict of ressources between two apps using Web Kit at the same time (e.g. NetNewsWire when refreshing is not very friendly to other web apps).k said 1597 days ago:
Running Safari and Firefox together causes sluggishness in my Jaguar. I’ve disabled icons and cache as described above. That really helps too.bradyj said 1597 days ago:
Just in agreement—Safari on Panther drags to a slow ride usually as my day moves on. I often do the same things as everyone else has stated—give it a clean shut down or clear out the cache and I’m usually up and running smooth again. This usually happens to as I’m launching all these RSS feeds in multiple tabs… but even after all of them load, a new tab still seems low in comparison to opening without multple tabs. My love for the text-shadow CSS and my extreme abuse for it keeps bringing me back though—and I haven’t had any extensions installed, but SAFT looks excellent, I may give that a shot.Paul D said 1596 days ago:
Also just in agreement, fully up-to-date Safari on my new iMac with no plugins steadily gets slower over time. Everything from page rendering to UI response gets sluggish. I usually shut down and restart it once a day. It’s always lightning-fast after a restart.Opening and closing lots of tabs (as I do when searching Google Images or stock photo sites) seems to hasten the sluggishness. This is not really acceptable on a 1.25 GHz machine.
I’m scared to try Pith Helmet and other add-ons, because even though they look neat, I’ve heard they slow down Safari more.
Jon Hicks said 1596 days ago:
Bizarre. Since writing this entry, it seems to have got worse! Absolutely unbearable! I’m not sure if I can bear to run Safari without extensions, but at the moment I’m using Omniweb and Firefox more.I guess I’m just going to have to try and remove the extensions for a while
Jason said 1596 days ago:
I’ve been using Safari (mainly) and a little Firefox. But I’ve just been reading about Omni. Seems like a lot of good features.What’s everyone’s opinion. Are Safari & Firefox better? Is it the #3 choice? Or #2?
thx
Jon Hicks said 1595 days ago:
Jason,Don’t ask me – I can’t decide!
For me, no one browser is perfect. If I could have Omniweb or Firefox with the interface slickness of Safari, that would be it!
dzd said 1595 days ago:
though if I had the time/patience/knowledge to get me back to 1.2 and its web core I would there are rendering problems with 1.3 previewI did this the other night. You need the Safari 1.2 package (download from Apple), the 10.3.5 combo update (same), and Pacifist. Use Pacifist to reinstall Safari 1.2. Note which files are in the package; use Pacifist to reinstall those same files from the 10.3.5 combo package. (It works out to Safari.app, WebKit, and two other frameworks whose names I don’t remember at this time.)
i&ta said 1595 days ago:
Ahh, it wasn’t just me. Safari is slow. At work is a new iMac with OS X Panther. From the get go Safari could not compare in speed to the PC/Intel box (486 chip/233 mhz running Win98 and IE6).BTW, iexplore.exe is IE6 and closes down in Windows Task Manager > Processes when IE6 is closed. EXPLORER.EXE (as capped by WinXP) is like Finder on the Mac, running all the time.
On my Sony/XP box, Opera 7.5 is by far the fastest browser, but I use Firefox since it is close enough in speed.
– 2bits
bradyj said 1595 days ago:
I love the way omniweb looks, but I still can’t get over paying 35+ dollars for a web browser that uses the same engine as the OLD safari, that frustrates me. I agree, though, if omniweb had safari’s interface with Firefox’s speed, we’d have a perfect browser… but I personally find myself in Safari more and more just because it looks rad. Hopefully Tiger will have some cool Safari options other than RSS, though it’s welcomed.Jon Hicks said 1595 days ago:
Hmm, Trying Safari without extensions makes it look like Saft might be the culprit – drat!Mark Boszko said 1593 days ago:
I run it naked too, and I’ve been noticing this for some time. It seems to be especially prevalent in pages with forms… I dont’ know if it’s slowing down trying to find things to autofill or what, but once I get past the form, things seem to return to semi-normal.Andy Budd said 1590 days ago:
Hi Jon,I don’t have Saft installed but am finding the same problem as you, on my home copy of Safari at least. With me the slowdown usually seems to be related to the number of tabs I have open at any one time. If I have only a couple it’s fine, but sometimes I’ll have 20+ tabs open (don’t ask!) and Safari grinds to an almost halt.