I have problems, usually in Safari, with the pinwheel/beach ball - I'll call it the pinwheel - It seems that I have to restart my computer ocassionally to get rid of all the 'stuff' on my RAM, otherwise I have very slow keyboard response, a pinwheel jumps in and I have problems getting sites to open. I upgraded my RAM to 2GB thinking that would help, but it doesn't. I think somethings wrong with Safari - because that's always where I have the pinwheel problem, otherwise, everything is OK. I watch the amount of RAM being used through Activity Monitor, and it always shows that, progressively, more and more RAM is eaten up as I remain on the 'new' restart. After a while, I have so little open RAM, I just do another 'restart' and have tons of open RAM.

Please help

romicf

I've always had that issue with Safari. I've tried other browsers and settled with Camino. Little memory usage, depending on sites I visit, but less RAM usage than Firefox and Opera. Opera is my second choice. I just don't like dealing with the increasing memory usage, beach ball spinning and the slowness of Safari. I have to use it for certain sites right now as I need a fresh installation of Camino because something has gotten corrupted. Verified by a free app called Troubleshoot Camino. I also have a paid app called iFreeMem that frees up RAM without rebooting. Works great for me.
I've also been using a free (donations accepted) app called Memory Monitor for years. It uses less memory than Activity monitor. Bernard Baher made it.
http://www.bernhard-baehr.de/
I used to use Mac Janitor to clean up things & release memory. It won't work properly on Leopard, but it may still work with Tiger. It's free also. It worked better than iFreeMem. Both take a miniscule amount of time to work.
Hope this helps you. These apps did help me tremendously.

Be a part of the DaniWeb community

We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.