MacOS – How to debug Safari CPU utilization and spinning beach ball

macosperformancesafari

I have been plagued by performance problems in my late 2010 MacBook Air for several months now. Most of it seems centred around Safari. I regularly get very high fan speeds (loud to the point of very annoying), very warm laptop, high load average, and spinning BBOD (beach ball of death), especially on Safari.

I consistently have a single window, 8-10 tabs, none of them heavy dynamic apps (Gmail and Calendar running in Chrome).

I regularly have CPU spikes from Safari and WebContent (and at times soagent). They rarely last very long, but when they do, I see the BBOD and Safari is completely unusable, then the rest of the laptop slows down to a crawl.

I have taken a spindump of Safari – it takes a very long time – but I do not actually know how to interpret it to see where it is stuck.

I have almost no extensions installed. Just 1Password, AdBlock and ClickToPlugin (which was installed specifically to prevent Flash and others from bogging it down).

What can I do to narrow down the issue?

Best Answer

Adblock runs against every frame in the page. This is probably not all of your problem, but it is significant, at least it was for me. Switch to ublock and you should see a difference. Read the advanced docs and graduate to the the firewall style usage of this tool, and you will be very pleased.

Related Solutions

Do about frequent beach ball Safari and other apps

Once I got something similar after a Snow Leopard upgrade: spinning bechball when starting Safari and making Safari inoperable. Turned out it was an incomaptible SIMBL plugin from before the OS upgrade.

If you already replaced the motherboard and hard drive, there's really not much "hardware" left that can be eliminated.

If you already have done a clean install as well, there is really no other "software" eliminated either. Make sure you've done a total clean install though: format HDD, install the base OS without iLife, etc, DO NOT restore anything from you backup afterwards, DO NOT use your regular username and DO NOT enter your Apple ID at first boot. Do not restore and data from your backup, especially not /Library and /Users//Library

I guess I'd also try to install a different version of OSX (downgrade or upgrade, doesn't matter) and see if the problem persists. Also try booting a different OS (Windows, Linux, boot from a Linux live CD/usb would be the easiest option). Booting in a different OS is the best way to find out if it's a hardware issue or software.

Generally a spinning beachball are caused by CPU/memory/disk access spikes, but it can also be some other kind of blocking I/O (e.g. network, USB). Maybe it's compatibility issues with your home network? Use it on a different network, try connecting to the network with an external USB ethernet adapter.

Hope that helps.

MacOS – Any way to use ssh to recover a Mac from spinning beach ball of death

To reply to your question: no there isn't such a function accessible at the window manager level. It is a good suggestion to forward to Apple MacOS X feedback

Is your Mac still up?

Try:

ping IP_of_my_mac

Can you access it with ssh?

Can you provide us a copy of the output of a:

top -o cpu

and:

tail -20 /var/log/system.log

If the problem appears once more, could you try to kill the loginwindow like this: connect on your mad Mac with ssh

/usr/bin/sudo /bin/kill `ps ax | grep '[/]loginwindow' | awk '{print $1}'`

This uggly command:

ps ax | grep '[/]loginwindow' | awk '{print $1}'

is a trick to give you the process ID of the loginwindow process with no risk to kill the wrong guy. I'm not sure this will be enough to force a total free and reset of the GPU. Please tell me if this doesn't work so I could remove a useless and dangerous workaround.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Do about frequent beach ball Safari and other apps

MacOS – Any way to use ssh to recover a Mac from spinning beach ball of death

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