Reason for High disk/cpu Activity

Update - I've still got Safari and Apple Application Support folders excluded in AVG9. This morning Safari had a long period of about five minutes when there was no cpu, then it started the fluctuating low % cpu and the hard drive noise again.

I noticed that IE was also using frequent % cpu when Safari was quiet, but IE7 wasn't slow and didn't cause the hard drive noise. Now IE is quiet and Safari has taken over and opening new pages in IE7 takes five seconds or more where it's usually instant.

After another ten minutes Safari has gone quiet again with no cpu and IE is still showing cpu in the 6% to 14% range but no hard drive noise and I am using IE7 to type this. Safari has now been quiet for a few minites.

Just seen your post, haven't done those suggestions yet.

Message was edited by: Wickham43

I done those exclusions so AVG9 now has Safari, Apple and your last three folders excluded but Safari was quiet for about 30 seconds before starting to use 2% to 12% cpu again. Safari is open at a page with nothing dynamic on it and I'm using Firefox to type this.

Firefox was slow to log in and open the reply box.

The point is, IE7 and Firefox also use intermittent cpu but don't cause a hard drive noise and don't slow down the PC at only 2% to 10% cpu, but Safari does.

Safari just showed 23% cpu when It's only minimised in the system tray.

Six minutes later Safari now using only 2% and 0% cpu alternately and is quiet. Firefox doing much the same (except when I type this).

Message was edited by: Wickham43

Safari just showed 23% cpu when It's only minimised in the system tray.

(Sigh) Not the AVG (or antivirus scanning in general), then. If anything, we've just managed to provoke it. It should be fine to get rid of the exclusions.

The oddest things in some ways is the way the CPU usage *goes down* for a while. Why doesn't it just get worse and worse, or stay constantly high?

Thank you kindly for all your experimentation, Wickham! I wish we could have fixed it for you, but the negative result is certainly of some assistance. (We know something not to check on now.)

I'm having a similar problem here. Windows XP, SP3, All MS updates in place as of 14-Dec-09. This is an older Gateway Select box. I tried Safari when it first came out but it kept crashing. More recently I had to wipe this box and reinstall Windows so this is a fresh install and all updated to latest specs.

I'm running Safari 4.0.4.

I have a 2-disk system and installed Safari on the secondary disk (Disk 'F').

I followed some suggestions for Windows users elsewhere with some preferences settings but I still get the disk activity.

I am also running AVG as the AV program (latest version 9 and also up to date as of today)

It seems that Safari has a spate of disk activity that is suspect but I watched to see if there was any inordinate DSL activity and I could not detect any.

AVG does have a first-run option that will scan objects and files and label them as OK so the program does not check them a second time. If the files are changed, it will recheck them.

After a period of disk activity with Safari opened I was close to canning it but this time around while I was reading this forum and listening to the disk thrash it suddenly stopped and has been quiet for several minutes now. Very odd.

I'm evaluating Safari right now along with Google Chrome. Cannot say that I am impressed with either. I also have IE8, FF3.5 and Opera 10 installed and like each for what they offer. I lay out web pages so I need to bump those against multiple browsers to see what things look like sometimes.

I'm going to leave it idling on this machine for a while to see what happens.

I actually have a G3 running OS 9.2.2. here that is still a work horse by the way. Can't do much web surfing with it but I hate to put it down.

After a period of disk activity with Safari opened I was close to canning it but this time around while I was reading this forum and listening to the disk thrash it suddenly stopped and has been quiet for several minutes now. Very odd.

... So two people getting the same "it stops" effect ...

Would you mind keeping an eye on something for us, Dennis?

Bring up Task Manager to the processes tab, and click the CPU heading until the processes using the most CPU are showing at the top of the tab.

If Safari starts thrashing again, check the processes again. Is there some other process there using unexpectedly high levels of CPU?

If Safari then stops thrashing again, has that other process gone away too?

Is your Chrome also using excessive amounts of CPU at times? (Thinking that if this is a WebKit issue, we might expect both WebKit-based browsers to be misbehaving on the affected systems.)

Would you mind keeping an eye on something for us, Dennis?

Bring up Task Manager to the processes tab, and click the CPU heading until the processes using the most CPU are showing at the top of the tab.

If Safari starts thrashing again, check the processes again. Is there some other process there using unexpectedly high levels of CPU?

If Safari then stops thrashing again, has that other process gone away too?

Is your Chrome also using excessive amounts of CPU at times? (Thinking that if this is a WebKit issue, we might expect both WebKit-based browsers to be misbehaving on the affected systems.)

I took a break for some work and lunch and left Safari idling in a minimalized window. When I returned it was still idle while holding this forum page open. Disk was relatively silent, and this old timer system has a noisy disk. It remains silent as I type this response.

Task Manager is showing Safari essentially idle and using 37,456K of RAM.

I wonder how many people are using AVG? As noted that has a system of scanning files and declaring them virus free and then skipping those files unless they have changed. I wonder if in my case AVG finished and is not required to do this again? Just a thought.

I have to go out now and won't be back for some hours but will watch this and return with details in 24-48 hrs. The most activity seems to be a minute or two after browser launch, then continuing for a period, then stopping - at least in my case.

DMK

I wonder how many people are using AVG? As noted that has a system of scanning files and declaring them virus free and then skipping those files unless they have changed. I wonder if in my case AVG finished and is not required to do this again? Just a thought.

You're not alone in that thought, Dennis. That's initially what I thought might be going on with Wickham with his AVG. It certainly seems like something is starting and then stopping, and the dodgy Safari behavior maps onto that start and stop.

🙂 Many thanks for the assistance with the experimentation, by the way.

Following that comment about AVG I did another test just now. I had Windows Explorer and Firefox opened and minimised to the system tray. I then opened Task Manager and Safari and minimised Safari to the system tray. Safari and AVG showed cpu while Safari opened up but after that I was just looking at the desktop and Task Manager.

Safari was then quiet at 0% and all other process were 0% for two minutes, then Safari started using low cpu between 0% and 10% with occasional bursts up to 27% but all other processes including the three AVG exe files were at 0% all the time.

I haven't installed AVG link scanner.

Firefox showed one burst at 14% cpu, probably because it was open at a page with dynamic content.

After 13 minutes Safari started alternating between 0% and 2% and there was no hard drive noise. Now after 23 minutes Safari is always at 0%.

The problem for me is that I usually only use Safari for a short time to check web page coding, so It's always during the time it uses cpu and it slows down anything else I'm doing on my PC.

Now that I've maximised Safari and opened another page without any dynamic content it's started using 0% and 2% alternately without hard drive noise. After another two minutes Safari is using various higher cpu and the hard drive noise has started again, but AVG is always 0%.

Message was edited by: Wickham43

🙂 Thank you again for your experimentation, Wickham.

So if there is an interaction, it's not something that we can easily check on using Task Manager to just check on the processes.

There was a hint in a different thread yesterday that such interactions could be happening on a very low level indeed with Safari. I was working with SexyGeeky on an odd launch freeze/hang. We'd narrowed it down to a user-account-specific issue, probably related to the preference files. And in the course of swapping out individual plist files, we provoked a "Safari has encountered an error message". On further investigation, the faulting module turned out to be ntdll.dll:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2265392

... which is about as fundamental a dll as you can get on the XP OS (or any Windows OS). Rather startling to see ntdll.dll implicated in an error message under those circumstances. (Hence my quick check in that thread to see if Safari was still launching in the other user account for Sexy ... I was wondering if perhaps *something different* had started to go wrong for her in the middle of the troubleshoot.)

Unfortunately, there's a sense in which the possibility that some effect could ramify through ntdll.dll to Safari *opens up the field a bit much* for us. That dll is fundamental enough that the interaction could be related to:

drivers
hardware devices
software devices
cabling and connections
OS components
disk damage

Perhaps the folks running Process Monitor (in this thread) might be able to give us a heads up on whether it is possible to track performance of such items at the same time as watching the CPU behavior (and drive behavior) on the affected systems while Safari is running.

Following Up - 15-Dec-2009 at 10:42:17 PM Eastern USA Time (Standard)

Well... the disk activity has stopped it seems - at least in my case. I was launching Safari along with the windows XP Task manager together for the last couple of days. However after the initial disk activity, I have not seen any. I have used Safari for some incidental web browsing and also left it open and active while working on another system (just 2 ft away) to see if any disk activity started again.

There was nothing remarkable.

The only disk activity I did get was when AVG ran its auto-update this morning which clearly showed in the Task Manager.

I guess no news is good news?

The only other thing I could think of is whether Safari may be pre-fetching some web pages and caching them?

That might fly if it were attempting to update at each launch but I have been to numerous web sites with it that change with some frequency so there has been no evidence of that.

So I guess the next question is whether this activity dies down and ends after a period of time, minutes, hours, days? In my case it was minutes... quite a few admittedly and enough to make me take notice. Of course I was also watching the modem to see if there was any net traffic to assure that I was not infected with something.

So for me... this is a non-issue for the moment. It was. It's stopped.

DMK

The only other thing I could think of is whether Safari may be pre-fetching some web pages and caching them?

Apparently Safari does do something a bit like that, Dennis. From the Safari features:

+*Speculative Loading*+
+Safari loads the documents, scripts, and style information required to view a web page ahead of time, so they’re ready when you need them.+

http://www.apple.com/safari/features.html

Whether that's at the base of the CPU/disk issue folks are seeing isn't all that clear, though. I use Safari pretty savagely and heavily during the course of a day, but I'm not getting the excessive disk-use or CPU usage.

🙂 At any rate, I'm hoping that no news is good news for you too. Thanks for your help with this one, Dennis!

Well I guess it is nice to read other people are having the same issue as me. Just been reading through the thread.

This might have been post already but has anyone tried this yet regarding Safari Preview Webpage fetcher:

http://imnotbruce.blogspot.com/2009/06/safari-40-stealing-cpu-cycles.html

I have only just come across it.

Mine sometimes can rocket to 52% CPU use just for this with Safari use on top of that.

Just checking, Stewart. Are you getting this on a Safari for Windows version or Safari for Mac? (We're discussing the Windows issue, but your link seemed to be for a Mac issue.)