At long last, hard drive usage problem figured out.

I was stuck with Safari 3 on my PowerBook G3 running Tiger 10.4.11 because Safari 4 always thrashed the heck out of my hard drive after minutes of use. It was not caused by virtual memory. See my old thread here:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2133932&tstart=0

Well, I don't know what all happened, but Safari 3 began to act up about a year ago, locking up periodically, and progressively got worse until this week when it froze so often that it was no longer usable. The freezing clears itself after 5-30 minutes or so, and until allowing it to "unfreeze", surely it would refreeze shortly after a force quit + relaunch. Firefox is too slow and hogs too much memory on this 400MHz beast but I decided there wasn't anything to lose by loading up Safari 4.1.3. Immediately, the thrashing returned. It has survived through a brand new hard drive with a fresh install of OS X 10.4.11. It must be a G3 thing.

BUT now I have a nifty app called "Little Snitch", and it showed that Safari made a short network connection to safebrowsing.clients.google.com, right when all the noise started. So I blocked this domain and turned off "warn when visiting a fraudulent website". Safari is now running perfectly.

So anyone googling for Safari excessive hard drive activity, maybe you'll find this post since I can't add to the original one.

PowerBook G3 Pismo 400 MHz, Mac OS X (10.4.11), 512 MB RAM, AirPort

Posted on Dec 8, 2010 10:24 PM

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2 replies

Dec 9, 2010 12:53 AM in response to Ben Boldt1

If doing so improved the situation, this confirms that one of Safari's database files has become corrupt and is causing the crashing, and this shows up in your crash log as Thread 3 having crashed.

The blacklists from Google’s Safe Browsing Initiative (where Safari checks for 'fraudulent websites') are contained in a database cache file called SafeBrowsing.db - the file was created when you first launched Safari, and if you have the browser open, the file is modified approximately every 30 minutes.

In other words it is part of Safari's (version 3.2 onwards) anti-phishing security feature.

As an alternative to turning off 'Warn when visiting a fraudulent website', which will lose you that important security feature, you should delete that database file, (but first close Safari):

In Tiger:

Home/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari (this is a folder)/SafeBrowsing.db

You can get to the Private/Var folder by using Go To in the Finder menu.

It will be recreated next time you open Safari, and will then start again collecting details of dodgy websites.

If you are interested:

How the Anti-Phishing feature of Safari 3 and 4 works:

http://www.macworld.com/article/137094/2008/11/safarisafebrowsing.html

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At long last, hard drive usage problem figured out.

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