Why do we see the colored spinning wheel

Question

Bill Maher quipped about seeing the colored spinning wheel on his Mac more and more often. I see it all the time on all my Macs. When I click a link the blue line progresses a while , then and only when I highlight the entire address window and hit enter does it sorta re-loads and takes me to the link.
I got rid of all my windows boxes 11 months ago and would never go back to windows.
Any Ideas?

Answer 1

In Virtual Box terminology, how many cpus (Core i7 threads) did you assign to Windows 7? Here is my rule of thumb: I will not assign more than half of my host cpu thread count to Virtual Box. If you exceed that, the Life Savers brand spinning beach ball will visit you.
If you are running Flash, visit the Flash panel in System Preferences Other. Select the Advanced tab. Under Browsing Data and Settings, select Delete All... This will get rid of all the Flash related detritus that the Flash plug-in may still be referencing. Also, empty your browser cache.
In ~/Library, drag the contents of the Cache folder to the Trash. Reboot while pressing and holding the shift key. When you see a progress bar appear, release the shift key. Before you click the arrow to complete the login, press and hold the shift key again until your desk top appears. Empty the Trash. Reboot normally.
The above process has cleaned out and/or rebuilt system caches and databases. It has bebuilt your font cache, and ran a disk check on your boot drive. You may notice a performance improvement.
I also periodically get the Safari URL loading delay and I have a 3MB/s pipe into the house. The rhetorical question is whether this is DNS lag, or one of the router hops on the Internet causing delays. Rebooting your local router can't hurt.