Safari 4 slower loading with RSS feeds

Question

Don't know what happened in Safari 4 (4.0.2), but now it is much slower loading initially because of the way RSS feeds in the bookmarks bar are now being handled. I can not use the browser until all the RSS feeds have been checked. Even when clicking on an RSS item within a particular page such as CNN, the time to open that feed is significantly slower.
There has always been occasional problems with the bookmark bar for RSS feeds showing there are unread feeds, yet nothing shows unread beside the individual feeds. The problem now happens almost every day. The only solution is to choose the view all RSS feeds and find the unread items.
I am also noticing that web page loading is also much slower than it was in 3.x. Get tired of that spinning loading at the right of the address entry bar. The beach ball is more interesting because it is in color.
I have 18 Mbps broadband, so that isn't the problem, as all the slowdowns happened as soon as I started using Safari 4.
So much for snappier loading

Answer 1

I don't understand why you're using Safari for your RSS feeds; it's not an ideal solution compared to a dedicated RSS reader like Vienna, NetNewsWire, or Newsfire; I'd use one of those and turn off RSS feeds in Safari's preferences pane.
But Safari 4 is faster than Safari 3; it isn't for you because of a variety of factors, so let's change them and see if we can't speed things up. Here's what you can do:
Try changing your Network settings to use OpenDNS
Go to ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari and delete the contents of that folder, then use the Get Info panel to Lock the folder.
Go to ~/Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari and delete the contents of that folder, then use the Get Info panel to Lock the folder.
Go to ~/Library/Safari and delete these files:
Downloads.plist
History.plist
LastSession.plist
TopSites.plist (if you don't want to use Top Sites, Lock that file right after you restart.)
WebpageIcons.db
Restart Safari and see if your problem is solved.