The one thing I did that made my Mac five times faster!

April 17, 2009  (Jeffrey Kabbe)

No, this isn’t an infomercial. And, yes, I did pull the number five out of the air. But it’s true that my iMac is much faster now after doing just one simple thing. Lately my iMac seemed really sluggish. I would beachball frequently and the entire system would just hang for what seemed like ages. I had a sneaking suspicion that the Safari 4 Beta had something to do with it because Safari seemed to be bearing the brunt of the slowdowns. I couldn’t be sure, though, because the system was often slow when Safari wasn’t even running.

So two days ago I uninstalled the Safari 4 Beta. The improvement was immediate and noticeable. After the restart (required by the install/uninstall), I could tell things were faster. I have been using Safari 3 for a couple days now and haven’t had a single issue with beachballing or experienced any slowness. I liked some of the new features of Safari 4, but I don’t care how much faster the Javascript performance is if it brings my whole system to its knees.

Comments

  1. What happened is that you had a corrupted cache file. Simply quitting safari, deleting your safari cache, and restarting safari would have fixed the problem. Or you could use a free utility called Onyx. Actually Safari 4 is faster than Safari 3. I guess the point is moot now, but if your slowdowns occur again, remember to delete the Safari caches. Actually it is good to clear out all your caches every once in a while.

  2. Thanks for the tip. I had used the Safari empty cache option, but I wasn’t aware that there was a difference between that and deleting the cache.

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