Speed Up Safari!!
This was a hint posted over at macosxhints.com and it's impact is tremendous.
It did exactly what it claims to do. I was running into the beachball phenomenon repeatedly, but this solves it. You can add a rolling crontab to remove old favicons, too.
Quote:
Anyone else notice that Safari has been getting slower and slower over time? In my case the most striking example was that I became unable to open a page in a new tab without getting a beach ball until it finished loading. This was happening on 2 machines since I upgraded to Panther (both clean installs) and I even got so frustrated I completely reinstalled Panther on one of the machines. It appears that Safari's declining performance isn't attributable to poor engine performance, so much as a lack of proper garbage collection.
Over time, Safari stores more and more info in your user's Library/Safari folder. Even though you can "reset" Safari, this doesn't clean up everything. In my case, the offending garbage was the "Icons" folder that stores every favicon you have ever come across. I manually deleted this folder, which removed hundreds of files and folders from my machine and Safari. Once they were trashed, Safari was back to it's old speedy self.
It would be nice if Apple could add some garbage collection to clean this up, but until then you can manually delete it or write an AppleScript to do it for you
Anyone else notice that Safari has been getting slower and slower over time? In my case the most striking example was that I became unable to open a page in a new tab without getting a beach ball until it finished loading. This was happening on 2 machines since I upgraded to Panther (both clean installs) and I even got so frustrated I completely reinstalled Panther on one of the machines. It appears that Safari's declining performance isn't attributable to poor engine performance, so much as a lack of proper garbage collection.
Over time, Safari stores more and more info in your user's Library/Safari folder. Even though you can "reset" Safari, this doesn't clean up everything. In my case, the offending garbage was the "Icons" folder that stores every favicon you have ever come across. I manually deleted this folder, which removed hundreds of files and folders from my machine and Safari. Once they were trashed, Safari was back to it's old speedy self.
It would be nice if Apple could add some garbage collection to clean this up, but until then you can manually delete it or write an AppleScript to do it for you
It did exactly what it claims to do. I was running into the beachball phenomenon repeatedly, but this solves it. You can add a rolling crontab to remove old favicons, too.
Comments
Originally posted by Cam'ron
what is a favicon? is it that icon in the address bar?
Yep, that's what it is.
excellent!
Originally posted by fiddler
Thanks! I was getting really annoyed at Safari's slowness lately, this seemed to do the trick! All my favicons are gone though. Let's hope this bug is fixed in the next update..
Yeah, I expected the icons to return as I visited sights, but that doesn't seem to be happening. What gives?
$ cd ~Library/Safari
$ mv Icons Icons.ORIG
$ ln -sf /dev/null ./Icons
I haven't tried this yet, but if deleting the Icons folder works, this should too. And it'll prevent Safari from ever rebuilding it. I proposed moving the existing Icons directory to a backup (Icons.ORIG) just in case the logical link thing in step 3 didn't work. If it doesn't, delete the link and move the directory back.
jas
Safari does indeed perform better.
Better yet... i discovered that it was caching old versions of the favicons.
AI's now looks like a square with ai on the inside. Before, it was a badly aliased monochrome apple.
Originally posted by dfiler
Better yet... i discovered that it was caching old versions of the favicons.
AI's now looks like a square with ai on the inside. Before, it was a badly aliased monochrome apple.
Wow! You've been using a cached icon for months!!
That said, this "fix" only fixes some slow-downs. Safari still chews up 100% CPU and slows to a crawl when there are multiple animations on a page (ala the Smilies on the reply page here).
*pats OmniWeb* Good boy.