Safari 6 on Lion slow

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Level 1

8 points

Safari 6 on Lion slow

I've installed Safari 6 on Lion (work machine so I cannot upgrade to Mountain Lion just yet)

Now Safari Web Content constantly and consistently pegs my processor at 60-98%

Add in the Safari process itself using 5-10% and Safari 6 is rendering my computer borderline unusable. (unless I close Safari, of course)

I have tried uninstalling, reinstalling Flash, I have tried turning off all extensions, I have tried resetting Safari, quitting, restarting it, restarting my computer.

This issue happens if I have 1 or 10 pages open, (though the % goes up with more pages)

Closing Gmail/Google Reader mitigates it slightly and bring is down to a steady 50-60% between the two processes.

What is going on?

Safari 6 on Mountain Lion on a similar iMac at home is flawless.

This is extremely irritating.

iMac 2.5Ghz Core i5

Lion 10.7.4 (COmbo updater installed)
8GB RAM

Posted on Jul 31, 2012 10:46 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Carolyn Samit

Level 10

165,673 points

Jul 31, 2012 2:00 PM in response to fightattack

Start up in Safe Mode

That deletes system caches that may help. Keep in mind, a Safe Mode boot takes much longer than a normal boot so be patient.

Once you see the Desktop, click the Apple menu icon top left corner of your screen. From the drop down menu click Restart.

Then try Safari.

If that didn't help, from your Safari menu bar click Safari > Preferences then selct the Security tab.

Deselect: Enable plug-ins. Quit then relaunch Safari to test.

If that made a difference then follow the troubleshooting help here.

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Answer 2

fightattack Author

Level 1

8 points

Jul 31, 2012 2:59 PM in response to Carolyn Samit

Thank you Carolyn.

This seems to have solved my issue.

Any idea what 'system cache' it was that can cause things to go so crazy?

I've never experienced that in my 14 years as a Mac user.

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Answer 3

Jul 31, 2012 3:07 PM in response to fightattack

Here's what a Safe Mode boot does > Mac OS X: What is Safe Boot, Safe Mode?

May have been a font cache. Safari is picky when it comes to fonts.

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Answer 4

fightattack Author

Level 1

8 points

Aug 10, 2012 11:34 AM in response to Carolyn Samit

Unfortunately, the problem has returned.

Booting in safe mode worked for a few days, but then Safari started acting up again taking 20-40-80-120% processor time even with only a few tabs open and very light content.

I'm going to try to re-install Safari 6 with a stand alone installer and see how that goes.

However, I really do think there is a bug that's rearing it's head here. This doesnt' seem like a botched install - it seems like a memory/process leak.

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Answer 5

fightattack Author

Level 1

8 points

Aug 27, 2012 7:17 PM in response to fightattack

Today this was solved when I restarted Safari and it told me that it had disabled the Flash plugin as a critical update was available.

I updated via Adobe's auto-updater and after the upgrade Safari was back to normal and has yet to misbehave.

I want to be clear here: Flash CONTENT itself was not sucking up the CPU, but merely the Flash PLUGIN BEING INSTALLED was what sucked up the CPU time.

I recommend anyone with Lion and Safari 6 CPU issues try to uninstall Flash or upgrade to this latest version and see if that doesn't fix things.

I will update if this changes, but today Safari was flawless even with tons of tabs and windows open.

Either way, the culprit seems to be ADOBE.

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Answer 6

Sep 17, 2012 1:05 PM in response to fightattack

What is this hapening?

Now a days every new update, OSX, Safari, iPhoto, Mail etc. Apple add tons of new feautures. Do we need them? No, maybee a fraction of them. What we need is bugfixes and normal upgrades.

And like now when we also got new problems, old features are gone as:

Mail from iPhoto must reenter ALL accounts.

Safari Search bar gone

Safari very slow with 6.0

TextEdit "Save as" is gone. So stupid!!!

Be proud Apple guys, it was goos as it was. Now it start to *****.

Best regars

OT

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