Safari gets stuck loading pages and cycles indefinitely

Question

I am new to Macs. I am using Safari to trade stocks and many of the pages I use must be refreshed every few minutes. These pages are located in etrade.com, ameritrade.com, google finance and yahoo finance. At any single point, I may have up to ten or so tabs open in my window and refresh each as I need. However, Safari will have a tough time refreshing the pages most of the time and will get through about half of one, then get stuck and start cycling indefinitely. At that point, I need to stop loading, reload/refresh the page a couple more times, each time Safari getting further along and getting stuck again, until the page properly refreshes completely. I understand that I am using a lot of pages at once. But that should be no problem and should have no affect on the browser and other pages. I have a 2.93 GHz processor, 4 GB RAM, and 256 GB SSD hard drive. The computer has no software on it so far. No music, nothing so far. I've never had this problem with Mozilla or Explorer on PCs. Even this Apple page had to be reloaded, now that the problem has spread to all pages I browse online. I have no other problems with the notebook. Does anyone know what's going on with my browser and do I need a software update or need to get the computer flushed and everything reinstalled? Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

Welcome to the forums!
Try this:
(First, if yours is an Intel Mac, check that Safari is not running in Rosetta, which is enough to slow it to a crawl.)
Adding DNS codes to your Network Settings, should gives good results in terms of speed-up:
Open System Preferences/Network. Double click on your connection type, or select it in the drop-down menu. Click on TCP/IP and in the box marked 'DNS Servers' enter the following two numbers:
208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220
(An explanation of why that is both safe and a good idea can be read here: http://www.labnol.org/internet/tools/opendsn-what-is-opendns-why-required-2/2587 /
Open DNS also provides an anti-phishing feature: http://www.opendns.com/solutions/homenetwork/anti-phishing/ )
Whilst in System Preferences/Network you should also turn off 'IPv6' in your preference pane, as otherwise you may not get the full speed benefit (the DNS resolver will default to making SRV queries). If you want to know what IPv6 is:
This is Apple's guidance on iPv6:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.5/en/8708.html
Click on Apply Now and close the window.
Restart Safari, and repair permissions.
If that didn't do it, then try this as well:
Empty Safari's cache (from the Safari menu), then close Safari.
Go to Home/Library/Safari and delete the following files:
form values
download.plist
Then go to Home/Library/Preferences and delete
com.apple.Safari.plist
Repair permissions (in Disk Utility).
Start up Safari again, and things should have improved.