Speeding up Safari follow-up: More tips

Yesterday we published a guide to increasing performance in Safari on several fronts. The piece drew significant reader feedback, with some users offering interesting suggestions.

Just quit and relaunch One of the quickest, albeit impermanent solutions for slowness in Safari (as noted by a number of readers) is to simply close then relaunch the browser. The causes for slowdown after extended operation are varied, but may include lingering, unnecessarily excessive memory usage.

Monitoring resource usage MacFixIt reader Craig Collins suggests using a utility like MenuMeters to keep tabs on Safari's usage of memory, processor time and other system resources when visiting specific sites.

Craig writes:

"It's useful to have (as it is for almost everything on the computer) MenuMeters running in the menubar to indicate processor usage. Safari often maxes out the processor, especially: when visiting sites with extensive or poorly-crafted flash content; when visiting certain sites that consume mass quantities of processor for non-obvious reasons (for example: visit huffingtonpost.com); after a large number of sites have been visited, regardless of current windows open; when a large number of windows are concurrently active."

If usage inexplicably spikes to inordinate levels, you may want to try quitting and relaunching Safari as aforementioned.

The importance of clearing favicons Several readers reported that the procedure for clearing out favicons -- noted in yesterday's guide -- had the most noticeable effect on page load speed and application launch times.

MacFixIt reader Rayner Cheung writes:

"Because I had previously not been aware of 'favicon drag,' my favicon folder had ballooned to between 1.0 and 1.5 MB over a year of heavy usage, and opening a new window or tab in Safari would sometimes take 30 seconds or longer, while a fresh launch of the application would take almost one minute."

Again, to delete the current favicons cache, drag the following folder to the trash:

• ~/Library/Safari/Icons

then relaunch Safari.

Feedback? Late-breakers@macfixit.com.

[For full coverage, see the original guide]

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