Speed & beach-ball waiting...

Question

I initially posted this in the mac mini forum, but got no nibbles.
I'm a bit perplexed about something. I have a brand new mac mini for my home/desk system.... and I LOVE it. Basically I have no complaints. I do, however, have some mild curiosities...
Specifically, my mac mini is a 2.4Ghz intel core 2 duo machine with 2GB 1067 MHz DDR3 ram running OS 10.6.6. It was purchased brand new a couple of months ago.
Likewise, I also have a Macbook laptop that I purchased not quite 4 years ago. It is a 2GHz intel core 2 duo machine with 2GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM also running OS 10.6.6.
I am on both of these machines a LOT throughout the day, & I've really come to notice something. The *newer* mini is *slower* than my older macbook. Slower in that processes take longer, & it's just plain easier to bring it to its knees (you know, the spinning beach-ball of wait) when I've opened multiple browser windows & got multiple applications going.
My question is WHY is this???
UPDATE: I have since come upon a thread suggesting Safari slowness could be conquered by setting it to 32 bit mode. I've done that & seemingly have had some success. The only thing is, prior to this, both the mini & the macbook had their Safari set to 64 bit mode. IOW, it's not like the macbook had fewer safari crashes/slowdown cuz it was already operating in 32 bit. So the question remains...

Answer 1

Workaround and Solution!
In a nutshell: The long and short of it is that many websites today are very resource intensive. The workaround is to share the load among two to four different browsers. This workaround works every time. The browser-builders will have to make the final fixes.
I urge all of you to duplicate my results!
I've been troubleshooting this with Apple for well over 2 weeks and just discovered the root cause and workaround a couple of hours ago. Here's what I sent to Apple:
Subject:
Root Cause Identified for Case 20244XXXX!
Body:
Insufficient Stress Testing and No Load Shedding!
Hello Annette, Jim and Steve,
Please see the attached screenshots.
Engineering, especially test engineering, needs to look at this! When this is resolved Steve can go on stage and show another Safari feature that is superior to Camino, Chrome and Firefox, etc. (I was able to replicate part of this using several boxes at a local Apple Store about a week ago!)
Here’s the deal:
I was blaming Safari because I rarely use other browsers.
1. Open Activity Monitor to All Processes and order by %CPU descending.
2. Launch a browser and go to http://streamingradioguide.com/streaming-radio.php?format=1&radio-format=News/Ta lk&includeAM=on&includeFM=on&includeHD=&includeLPFM=
or http://radiotime.com/channel/c_57922/News.aspx, open a few streams and watch the %CPU skyrocket. (I often channel-flip between several streams.)
3. Document the results.
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 for a second, third and fourth browser.
5. Repeat steps as needed on other test boxes. Repeat everything as needed.
6. Send the documentation of these tests to engineering.
7. Engineering: Replicate results and review all documentation.
8. Make Safari much more resource efficient than any other browser.
Steve can then demo this to the world and everyone will have another insanely great day!
Thanks for another great demo today Steve.
John
The long and short of it is that many websites today are very resource intensive. The workaround is to share the load among two to four different browsers. This workaround works every time. The browser-builders will have to make the final fixes.
Thanks,
John