Re: Beach Ball Time

On Apr 18, 2007, at 04/18, 3:00 PM, "Dr. Andrew J. Malton"  
<[email protected]> wrote:

> Lately I've been experiencing a lot more beach-ball time using OG  
> 5.5.3.  When pulling tabs off a page of links, each one (despite  
> not actually being displayed) seems to occasions several (10, 15,  
> 20) seconds of beach ball.  Which kinda defeats the purpose of  
> firing off a collection of interesting tabs and looking at them in  
> the order they arrive.  Or a new page will hang for a few seconds. . .

My experience is that the more stuff you have OmniWeb hanging onto as  
resources the more likely this is to happen. When I install OW  
totally clean on a machine, with of course my massive bookmark  
collection, the thing runs just fine. But with time it gets more and  
more likely to go into 'beach ball' or what I call 'sit and spin'  
mode. I suspect OW is getting bogged down with too many things to  
keep track of. There are articles about how Safari gets bogged down  
with resources, one of which is from last week on MacFixIt. I bet the  
same thing is happening to OW.

The first thing I do is hit 'Flush Cache'. This can in and of itself  
lead to a considerable sit and spin session, but it helps a lot. It  
is incredible the amount of cache crap web browsers collect.

The second thing I do is shut down tabs and windows, simplifying what  
OW has to handle as much as possible.

The third thing I do is to get off whatever websites I am currently  
on in case they are CPU or thread hogs. It amazes me that in this day  
and age the state of programming is still so piss poor that a simple  
web page is capable of hogging your entire CPU. Badly coded pages are  
guaranteed to set OW spinning. I find this problem extremely common  
with massive Flash encoded pages. And you can bet that Adobe aren't  
going to do a thing about it, if they even know how.

Here is one of my favorite websites, which sadly is a massive CPU hog:

<http://www.thekillersmusic.com/site.html>

As long as I don't have a lot of other OW windows open I don't have  
any problems with it, other than having it start my MacBook's fans  
whirring.

OW has actually gotten a bit better at the sit and spin problem. But  
obviously there is more code optimization that can be done. You also  
have to blame Mac OS X itself. It's threading system is unfortunately  
not yet state-of-the art. Steve Jobs himself has promised better  
threading in 10.5 Leopard, especially in the newly rebuilt Finder.

:-Derek



===================
:-Derek Currie
[email protected]
===================
"Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single  
day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken  
over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows  
machine."
-- Bill Gates talking to NewsWeek January 2007, gone senile, out of  
his frickin' mind. ;-D