Safari is now painfully slow??

Question

I keep my MacPro updated every week. But recently my Safari surfing experience has been PAINFULLY slow -- I mean really really really slow.
Anyone else having this problem?
Also notice boot time with my MacPro has increased significantly with a ton a disk activity for the first 3 minutes.
I run Boot Camp on my MacPro and under Vista x64 surfing the web under IE7 is considerably faster. I also ran a speedtest (www.speakeasy.net) to several different locations and I'm getting good down speed at 10686 kbps and good up speed at 1170 kbps.
So it appears to be specific to Safari -- it's as if something seriously slowed down how it reads and displays the html. Are there any Safari specific settings that might help speed things up?
Thanks, Rob.

Answer 1

The following usually works on both Tiger and Leopard:
(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 / )
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.