Safari starts getting slower and slower loading pages

Question

Hi, i have always been a pc person, but recently made the switch to mac. i love it, but have an issue with safari. My internet speed is 17mbps so thats ok. Now after a few weeks of browsing the safari gets slow at loading pages, i have deleted history and emptied the cache. I had spoken with support during the 90 days free support. Now that has expired. They told me to get to the "verify permissions" then do "repair permissions" as there are a lot of error messages that are brought up. Once i have done this the internet is fine again - but obviously somethig is a miss as it starts slowing down over the weeks. Would upgrading to the latest version of snow leopard sort this? any ideas of other reasons. any help much appreciated

Answer 1

(First, if yours is an Intel Mac, check that Safari is not running in Rosetta, which is enough to slow it to a crawl. If you are running Snow Leopard, run Safari in 32 bit not 64 bit.)
Do you have enough RAM? Less than 1GB can cause slowness. Is your hard drive too full? Less than 15%, or 15GB, of free space can also cause slowness.
Adding DNS codes to your Network Preferences, should give good results in terms of speed-up as well as added security:
If you are using a single computer: Open System Preferences/Network. Double click on your connection type, or select it in the drop-down menu, and in the box marked 'DNS Servers' add the following two numbers:
208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220
(You can also enter them if you click on Advanced and then DNS)
If your computer is part of a network: please refer to this page: http://www.opendns.com/start/bestpractices/#yournetwork and follow the advice given.
(An explanation of why using Open DNS 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/ )
Wikipedia also has an interesting article about Open DNS:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDNS
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.
More useful information here:
http://guides.macrumors.com/SpeedupSafari