Safari "time out" has been shortened... a fix?

I have never heard of a 'time out' initiated by Safari. This is usually something fixed by your ISP.

However, you might like to try the following (as it's free!)

Download the free utility Tinkertool from:

http://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html

Under 'Safari' one of the options is 'Reduce delay time for display of loading pages'.

Another is 'disable database of website icons' i.e. those 'favicons' that do much to slow down Safari and waste hard cache space.

Moreover, MacFixit have published a very detailed (very!) article on speeding up a slow Safari, here:

http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20070416000657464

which may contain something of use to you.

I also see the exact same symptoms and am convinced it it tied to Safari3 in 10.4.11 when on a dial-up connection.

The problem does not appear with Safari 2.X under 10.4.9, nor with Firefox under 10.4.11. I use two different ISPs. I've tried dial-up via Airport Extreme and Apple USB modem. My system is vanilla (No Input Managers, no application enhancer, no contextual menu items). Using a pristine different user account does not change the symptom. I've tried the suggestions re Tinkertool, and those in the MacFixit tutorial.

I've also reinstalled Safari 3 and even 10.4.11.

The problem appears even on several of Apple's sites.

The problem does not occur if I use a broadband connection.

I'm hoping that some ace will discover how to adjust what I'm guessing to be 'watch-dog' timers in Safari 3.

I do not have any other problems with Safari 3; e.g. crashing, slow launching, slow loading. Only the problem that frequently several images don't load. The images that fail to load are in different formats.

I'm using QuickTime 7.3, but have not installed the 2007-009 security updates.

have not installed the 2007-009 security updates

You should install security update 2007-009 v.1.1 (you don't need the older one).

Among other things it fixes certain QT issues.

Hello Klaus1,
Thanks for your reply and advice. At your suggestion, I have now applied ALL updates available for my MBP-SR. Haven't done so with my iMac G5 iSight yet, but will tomorrow.

The symptoms persist with Safari 3 on my MBP. For example, if I go to the main Apple page, then click on 'Store' I get over a dozen 'Timed Out' errors. Granted, the Apple site isn't the most dial-up friendly site, but I cannot associate the problem with 'rich' versus 'lean' sites. Some simple pages generate timed out errors, and some other very complex pages load perfectly.

I'm considering trying one of the Webkit 'nightly builds', but don't know if I could back out of any problems easily. And, as I said, everything else on my system works perfectly.

Any other ideas?

I have seen this as well. It doesn't happen often on my cable modem connection, but it happens often on my friend's DSL.

Is there no simple terminal command to set the httpd timeout?

I am posting to confirm that I am experiencing the same behavior as described in this thread. I am a long time Macintosh user and a fan of Apple. I use my system mainly as an internet appliance and Safari has always been my browser of choice. More to the point I use a dial up connection through Earthlink and I noticed a change also as to how Safari handles the loading of images contained in any given web-page selected. Certain blogs for example that feature many images of interest do not complete, which can be verified by viewing the "Activity" drop down menu. Oh yes, I have tried to "Refresh" several times over. I can not say with certainty when this change was implemented within the Safari framework but it used to work like the "Little Engine that Could" if you were willing to wait, it would just churn away and work down the list of images giving you most, if not all, that were there to be viewed. Not any more However. "Timed Out" is the familiar result that appears after a relatively short duration, as in 60 - 90 secs. This is the greatest vexation for me and I have found no remedy for it nor any description of the real underlying cause. I post only to keep this topic current and will continue searching for information related to this frustrating syndrome.

Message was edited by: Fu1canelli

Hi

I'm not Terminal savvy, so I can't help you with Terminal commands. However, 3rd party (shareware) add-on SAFT has a "Set HTTP timeout" feature, where you can establish specific timing for page loads. SAFT also has a number of other very useful Safari features. I have used it for 3 years without issue.

I am plagued by the pervasive timeout issue as well since Safari 3 was launched. The problem persists with version 3.1 (4525.13) for Tiger. I can also verify that SAFT fixes it.

There are two timeouts in play here. There is a timeout after the connection is established; Safari/Webkit handles this just fine. But there is also a request timeout, where Safari tries to establish a connection in the first place. Every individual image or downloadable thing on a web page gets its own HTTP request. On dialup the delays are enormous for complex web pages. 60 seconds of request timeout will simply not cover it. This results in blue question marks for some images and various page loading errors.

This is likely only a problem for dialup users, and I am guessing Apple wants to get people into broadband. But broadband is still not available in all areas yet, including mine. Satellite is not an option because of my location (trees, hills).

Try this page on dialup:
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/

If you can mouse over the Drought Monitor and actually see it then you are not getting bit by the issue. I can only see the Drought Monitor if I run SAFT. Or buy a PC! (nahhh...)

Yes, SAFT is an excellent workaround, but I dislike paying twelve bucks just to be able to surf the web. That is money I could put toward a new Mac. How much trouble would it really be for Apple to put in a new preference: 'Long Timeouts for Slow Links'?

Regards,
Steve

I have the latest Safari update 3.1 and have had a very frustrating experience with it. I tried to order theatre tickets and Safari timed me out. I therefore lost the ticket order. I then switched to Firefox and tried the same ticket order on the same site and it worked first time. I have had this happen before with on-line order timing out utilizing Safari--Apple you really need to fix this problem.

Message was edited by: TheBrit
I am on broadband and utilizing Leopard 5.2

Yes, this is a pretty serious problem. It isn't just a problem with dial-up. I have a 384K DSL connection and see it all the time. It can also happen when loading from slow servers regardless of your Internet connection. I see it on pages with lots of image thumbnails coming from slow servers. I also see it when I load several pages at once (such as command-clicking on several links to open pages or full size images in separate tabs).

Under Safari 2.x, pages would load as best they could and either finish loading, or the images that failed to complete would still be partially visible. Under Safari 3.x, any image that doesn't load by a certain "time out" changes to a ? icon. Plus, in Safari 3.x, images that are partially loaded are displayed while trying to load, but then when it times out, the image is cleared and replaced with a ? icon. This is frustrating because often the image has loaded, but it's waiting for some "completion" flag to say the image was loaded, or maybe it's still loading a better quality version of the image, but the lower quality image is completely visible - until Safari 3.x erases it and replaces it with a ? icon.

Again, this isn't just a dial-up problem. It's a problem with loading any web page that takes too long - no matter what your connection. For example, this web site is a perfect example:

http://www.pixolator.com/zbc/featured2col.php

Another example are forum pages with lots of avatars and images in the messages. Because the images come from so many different sites, fast and slow, I often see only half the images. This link is a good example:

http://www.stickboyracing.com/stickforum/viewtopic.php?t=154&postdays=0&postorde r=asc&start=0

This is a pretty inexcusable error in Safari, and it has existed for over a year (ever since Safari 3.x was first released I believe). It has made Safari unusable for reading many forum pages, and accessing any web page with a large number of images or thumbnails.

The only solutions I've found are to use a different browser, or click on a link a couple times to reload the page without doing the equivalent of a "refresh" on the page so it loads images out of the cache the 2nd time I click on the link, and reloads those images that didn't work the first time.

We are seeing the same issue (not using dial up), we called Apple support and while on the phone with the tech guy he had the same issue.

all they could give us was go to google and search for free third party software.

Issue is we are supporting our customers and we cannot tell them to all go load unsupported third party software.

apple we really need a real fix for this.

According to Apple:

Safari on pre Mac OS X 10.3.6 systems will time out if it does not receive a response to an HTTP request or if server data transmission stops for 60 seconds. Safari on Mac OS X 10.3.6 and above effectively removes the 60 second limitation by setting the response timeout value to one year.

So, this would appear to be a problem with your DNS server. You might try using a different DNS service, such as OpenDNS, which is free and typically faster than your ISPs DNS servers.

Mulder

I have this problem too.

I tried the MTU (setting to 1300), turning off IPV6, and adding different DNS servers
(though did not try all possible combinations of these).

Nothing fixes it, though adding the dns server helps... i think.

Any fixes on this yet? I have a number of scripts that take longer to run than 60 seconds... this is quite annoying!