Macbook running slow - is Safari the culprit?

On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 5:39 PM, chmoor <chmoorgmail.com> wrote:
> I know this has likely been discussed before but the TidBITS search tool and I just aren't getting along...I have a Macbook running Mac OS X 10.4.11. Over the past few months, I have noticed my system running slower (I see the spinning thing on a longer and more regular basis as the days go by)...this mostly happens while Safari is running.

Check Activity Monitor (sort by CPU) to see what's slowing things down.

> Being new to the world of Mac, is there a list of good practices (habits) that will help your system run at peak performance? I found a list on TidBITS about the relationship between fewer things on the desktop and better system performance and that seems to have helped. However, I cannot find that list anymore (and thus my disenchantment with the TidBITS search tool...)

Sounds like you could use a copy of "Take Control of Maintaining Your
Mac" by our own Joe Kissell. :-)

http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/maintaining-mac

cheers... -Adam

On Jun 4, 2009, at 5:39 PM, chmoor wrote:

> Over the past few months, I have noticed my system running slower (I
> see the spinning thing on a longer and more regular basis as the
> days go by)...this mostly happens while Safari is running.

Two things.

1. Confirm that it's Safari by looking in Applications/Utilities for
"Activity Monitor" firing it up, sorting by "CPU" and see what's
hogging the processor.

2. If it is, in fact, Mail instead of Safari, try this command in
Terminal:

   sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index vacuum

That Hoovers (:-)) a bunch of database cruft out of Mail's Envelope
database. It'll take a while. You might wanna go take a walk or
something.

If you've used Mail a lot, and have done bunch of deletes and
archives, etc., it'll scare you how much faster it'll make your Mail.

Diminishing returns, however. The first time you do it, you're
cleaning out bunches of gunk. The next time there won't be so much
gunk, so the improvement will be, um, marginal.


3. One thing you can do that speeds up Safari appreciably is to just
clean out your caches; even things like website icons can create major
horkage.

Any utility program'll do it. I use Yasu, 'cause I've used it for a
long time, now. Might as well do everything -->but<-- kill logs,
cookies, and launch services; take another walk, and see how much
better things run in general after your machine automatically reboots.

Cheers,
RAH

On Jun 4, 2009, at 5:39 PM, chmoor wrote:

> I have around 8GB of space left on my 80GB hard drive.

That's actually on the edge of not enough. IMHO that may be one of
the things you need to attend to.

Regards,

Howard

On Jun 4, 2009, at 11:39 PM, chmoor wrote:

> I have around 8GB of space left on my 80GB hard drive.


I would suspect that this bit right here has a lot to do with it.
Modern OSes need lots of hard disk space to breathe freely (They use
it for virtual memory, logs, caches, and all sorts of temporary stuff,
and OSX likes to try to defrag files in the background, which also
requires space). The minimum available space I would recommend is 20%.
In my experience, this has helped keep the spinning ball away.

In Safari, there is also the issue of a huge cache, and a hugely
populated history file. If you are hitting hundreds of pages a day
(think gmail), and have your history set to save the past 10 days or
more, your poor Safari has to work hard to keep all that remembered.
So, if you can live without the history, try emptying that and the
cache. There are options for both, I believe. (I don't really know how
or where, because I use Omniweb.) BTW, this is true regardless of what
web browser you use--they all tend to run slower over time, trying to
keep track of it all. For myself. I set my cache as low as I can get
it. With our internet as fast as it is, I don't see the need for a
huge cache.

One last point. Do you shut your computer down in the evenings and
weekends? If so, you may not be allowing your System to run its
periodic maintenance schedules. The Mac has utilities that run
nightly, weekly and monthly. Some of the things it does is delete
cache and temporary files. Shutting your computer down keeps these
from running. You might consider finding a tool that will allow you to
run these at will. I'm not conversant on these things, and I hope
someone else will speak up. :-)

Again, this is just my experience. I'm sure others will have even
better ideas.

--

-Jon Glass

On Jun 5, 2009, at 2:13 AM, Howard Kaufman wrote:

> On Jun 4, 2009, at 5:39 PM, chmoor wrote:
>
>> I have around 8GB of space left on my 80GB hard drive.
>
> That's actually on the edge of not enough. IMHO that may be one of
> the things you need to attend to.

Agreed.

OSX, as a Unix variant, uses a little bit of virtual memory, paging
stuff to the hard drive, even when it has enough hardware memory, plus
all the various caches I talked about before. Killing caches will
help, but deleting stuff you don't need, and archiving whole glops of
the rest to another hard drive somewhere is definitely a good idea here.

10% of your hard drive capacity isn't the safe-buffer-bottom-of-the-
barrel that it used to be, but I reckon like Howard does that it's
close.

In the old days before Mac OSX, when 10 megabytes was a whopper of a
hard drive, I more than once overran my hard drive capacity, though
more often than not it was a floppy: you basically nuked whatever it
was you were working on, especially if you were working on someplace
with dodgy power, like, heh, using the vacuum cleaner outlet on an
electric Amtrak train rattling through Connecticut somewhere with an
SE/30 on the fold-down table and the keyboard in your lap. :-).

Frankly, OSX, being again Unix underneath, won't let you kill things
too badly just because it has no more hard disk headroom. It's more
graceful than that. It just slows down a bunch and finally tells you
enough's enough.

I still think that the whirling-pizza-of-slowness-if-not-death over
Safari, or wherever, speaks more to your problem, as from the sound of
it you don't get it over open windows of other applications. Again
Activity Monitor will provide data to supersede all my loquacious
hypothecation, here.

Cheers,
RAH
Who's just discovered, if you haven't noticed, :-), the joys of a
second read of the Jack Aubrey books using Stanza on his iPhone.
Desolation Island, Book 5 of 20 and counting...

chmoor wrote:
> I know this has likely been discussed before but the TidBITS search
> tool and I just aren't getting along...I have a Macbook running Mac
> OS X 10.4.11. Over the past few months, I have noticed my system
> running slower (I see the spinning thing on a longer and more regular
> basis as the days go by)...this mostly happens while Safari is
> running.

One thing that might be it is that more and more web sites have more and more JavaScripts running. And they get slower and slower over time as they try and do more and more "cute" things. CNet's <news.com> is one of these. So it may just be that the web sites you visit are slower today than in the past.

But there can be other things. Try clearing the Cache file in the Safari preferences.

And a big one I see a lot of is folks who rarely restart their computer. All software has bugs. So over time if you never quit any programs or never restart your computer "crud" builds up internally that gradually slows things down. I recommend that folks restart their computer at least once every day or two. Weekly at a minimum.

David

Flash ads in multiple tabs can bring Safari close to a halt, sometimes the entire machine. The fans go wild.

ClickToFlash cures this.
http://db.tidbits.com/article/10303

As Matt Neuburg put it in the article: Why didn't someone tell me about this sooner?

Johan Solve on 6/5/09 wrote something to the effect of:

>Flash ads in multiple tabs can bring Safari close to a
>halt, sometimes the entire machine. The fans go wild.

Totally. I had been having tons of problems with Safari soaking up obscene amounts of
RAM and processing (like more than 50% of CPU when it Safari was "idle") and about a
year ago I started turning off the Flash plugin (disabling all plugins via Safari's
Preferences). This made a *giant* difference (Safari now uses 400MB of RAM versus
1.9GB) and I just turn on Flash when I need it (rarely). (Keep it mind it's not
unusual for me to have hundreds of tabs open in several windows. I'm a multitasker.)


>ClickToFlash cures this.
>http://db.tidbits.com/article/10303

Even better! I shall definitely try this. I have a similar extension in Firefox, but I
prefer Safari for most of my browsing so this will be easier than disabling all
plugins.

-- Marc

On 6/4/09 2:39 PM, "chmoor" <chmoorgmail.com> wrote:

> Being new to the world of Mac,

I'll bet the low disk space as others have mentioned to be a big issue, but
tons of files on your desktop can really slow you down too. If you have lots
of files, create one folder on your desktop and drag all the files into it.
Does it help?

--
Diane

On 5-Jun-2009, at 00:13, R.A. Hettinga wrote:
> 2. If it is, in fact, Mail instead of Safari, try this command in
> Terminal:
>
> sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index vacuum
>
> That Hoovers (:-))

Hoovers is a perfectly acceptable verb for the vacuuming process, if
you're in the UK. I doubt it's capitalized though.

> a bunch of database cruft out of Mail's Envelope
> database. It'll take a while. You might wanna go take a walk or
> something.


Just to be clear, this command can be helpful in 10.4, but it is not
at all needed in 10.5. The OP is running 10.4.11, and I don't know if
the Mail.app in that version cleans its indexes or not (if you do not
see a DRAMATIC decrease in the envelope size, like at least 50% and up
to 90%, then you needn't run it), but Mail in 10.5 does. So this is
not a 'generic' instruction that anyone on the current OS should do as
it is a waste of time.

--On June 5, 2009 8:39:04 AM -0700 Johan Solve <inbox_jssolve.se> wrote:

> Flash ads in multiple tabs can bring Safari close to a halt, sometimes
> the entire machine. The fans go wild.

and people actually want flash on the iphone/ipod touch. NO THANKS!

On Jun 6, 2009, at 3:24 AM, LuKreme wrote:

> So this is
> not a 'generic' instruction that anyone on the current OS should do as
> it is a waste of time.

I beg to differ.

I did it in 10.5, and the results, for me at least, were nothing short
of amazing.

Cheers,
RAH

On Jun 6, 2009, at 4:25 PM, Kevin van Haaren <kevinvanhaaren.net>
wrote:

> --On June 5, 2009 8:39:04 AM -0700 Johan Solve <inbox_jssolve.se>
> wrote:
>
>> Flash ads in multiple tabs can bring Safari close to a halt,
>> sometimes
>> the entire machine. The fans go wild.
>
> and people actually want flash on the iphone/ipod touch. NO THANKS!

Seconded, thirded and fourthed! Flash is NOT something I want to see
on the iTouch platform. I just picked up my Nokia 800 for the first
time in months to test this; yes, Flash does work on it, but at a
glacial pace; trying to run a non-action Flash game (i.e., not reflex-
oriented) brought it to a virtual standstill. No Thank You.

Travis Butler

As a friend once said

Flash itself is not evil. People just do evil things with Flash.

It was good in its day. I want it nowhere near my iPhone.

Scott Wyant

At 12:18 PM -0700 6/8/09, Scott Wyant wrote:
>As a friend once said
>
>Flash itself is not evil. People just do evil things with Flash.

I often listen to Little Steven's Underground Garage via a Flash
streaming app on the web site.
        http://www.undergroundgarage.com/

Until recently, I was careful to only do it when I didn't need CPU
for other things, as the web page with the app would suck amazing
amounts of CPU. Then I noticed that if I have it in a hidden browser
tab, the CPU consumption declines considerably.

Freakin' Flash.

--
Andrew Laurence
atlaurenuci.edu