Safari intermittently slow

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Level 1

6 points

Safari intermittently slow

Hi,

I was helping someone this afternoon and was unable to find a fix so figured I'd ask here.

Computer is a 11 inch Core2Duo Macbook Air with 2GB RAM, not sure which year, it didn't say, it has OS X 10.6.8 aka Mountain Lion.

The only problem it has is Safari is really slow. What's weird is that if I went to google.com, it would hang for 5-10 minutes before slowly opening the site. Other random sites had this problem as well. Some sites work though, if I go to bing.com, it comes right up every time.

I installed Chrome (which took forever to get to the site since it's Google) and once installed, every site opened up quickly so it seems the problem is limited to Safari.

I looked at many sites for guidance, I deleted the history, cache, went under Library, com.apple.safari and removed the files, checked and there were no extenstions, removed the plugins from the directory, everything I tried made no difference.

I told them the only thing I can think to do is backup, factory reload Mountain Lion, restore or upgrade to Yosemite and see if that magically fixes the issue. I was unsure though if Yosemite would cause overall slowness since it's a Core2Duo with 2GB of RAM.

Thoughts?

MacBook Air, Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on Mar 29, 2015 5:15 PM

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Answer 1

Eric Root

Level 10

684,039 points

Mar 30, 2015 7:36 AM in response to texas pete

10.6 is Snow Leopard not Mountain Lion. Which OS is running?  menu/About This Mac.

With 2 GB of RAM, I don't recommend upgrading to Yosemite. It takes about 4 GB of RAM minimum to perform well.

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Answer 2

texas pete Author

Level 1

6 points

Mar 30, 2015 7:55 AM in response to Eric Root

Oops you are correct it's Snow Leopard.

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Answer 3

Klaus1

Level 9

52,749 points

Mar 30, 2015 10:15 AM in response to texas pete

If Safari is getting very slow:

(Presumably you regularly empty your Safari cache by deleting the following file:

Home/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/cache.db

and clear your History)

Adding Open DNS codes to your Network Preferences, should give good results in terms of speed-up* as well as added security, (including anti-phishing and redirects) (Full information about Open DNS is here:
http://www.opendns.com/home-solutions and here: http://www.opendns.com/technology/opendns-vs-google-public-dns/ )

and further independent information can be read here:

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-57338784-263/free-dnscrypt-tool-enhances-ma c-web-security/?tag=mncol;txt

and here:

http://www.macworld.com/article/1146064/troubleshootdns.html?t=234

* as confirmed by: http://lifehacker.com/5835775/google-dns-and-opendns-users-are-getting-a-web-spe ed-boost

and Apple:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3408?viewlocale=en_US

but results may vary depending on where you are located.

If you are using a single computer: Open System Preferences/Network. Double click on your connection type, or select it in the drop-down menu, and in the box marked 'DNS Servers' add the following two numbers:

208.67.222.222

208.67.220.220

(You can also enter them if you click on Advanced and then DNS)

Sometimes reversing the order of the DNS numbers can be beneficial in cases where there is a long delay before web pages start to load, and then suddenly load at normal speed:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2296

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