Member Avatar for romicf

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

  • 2 Contributors
  • 1 Reply
  • 277 Views
  • 1 Week Discussion Span
  • Latest Post Latest Post by Danarchy

Dani AI

Generated

Short, practical checklist tailored to the symptoms you described (slow typing, progressive RAM use between restarts, beach‑ball mostly in Safari) and to the replies above from and . Start by confirming whether macOS is actually swapping or whether a single process is growing without bound: open Activity Monitor (Applications → Utilities) and use the Memory and CPU tabs to sort by usage, watch the cumulative Page Outs / Swap and note which process names climb over time. That will tell whether the OS is running out of RAM or a particular app/plugin is leaking memory. (support.apple.com)

Focus next on Safari-specific causes before assuming hardware: test in a Private Window, disable all Safari extensions, and clear website data / caches (use the Develop menu’s Empty Caches after enabling it in Preferences). If that helps, re-enable extensions one at a time to find the culprit. If not, try a clean Safari profile by moving Safari caches/preferences out of ~/Library (so the system can rebuild them) or test the same websites from a newly created user account to separate user‑level corruption from system‑wide problems. Apple’s Safari troubleshooting guide summarizes these exact steps. (support.apple.com)

If the problem persists system‑wide, use Safe Mode to boot (this clears caches and disables login items), run First Aid in Disk Utility to check the filesystem, then run Apple Diagnostics / Apple Hardware Test to rule out bad RAM or other hardware faults. If diagnostics report nothing and Activity Monitor still points to a leaking process, consider reinstalling Safari (or the OS) as a last step — but first capture which process is growing so the underlying cause can be fixed rather than relying on restarts or memory utilities. (support.apple.com)

A short note on workarounds: using another browser or a “memory‑freeing” utility can reduce immediate pain (as others have tried) but they don’t replace the above root‑cause checks. The most useful outcome is identifying the leaking process in Activity Monitor, then removing or updating the offending plugin/extension or repairing corrupted files. (support.apple.com)

Member Avatar for Danarchy

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.