Josh Babetski : Quixotic Bravado

Safari Flipping Out? Try Clearing the Cache

Over the past few weeks Safari started chewing up the CPU and causing my MacBook Pro to sound like it’s going to take flight. This of course chews up the battery as well.

At first, I thought there was Flash running in one of the pages I load regularly since Flash has a number of issues running well on a Mac. My other thought was that one of the sites I visit regularly has some weird JavaScript bug. The CPU usage would just start climbing at some point; I couldn’t pin down what the cause was or the exact steps to recreate it.

So today I fire it up and Safari immediately starts to devour system resources. Fed up, I do all of the usual things: disabled plug-ins, moved the contents out of ~/Library/Safari, watched the Console for odd messages. Nothing seemed to do it.

Then in occurred to me to try something as a web developer I do all the time: Empty the Browser Cache. (Safari > Empty Cache…)

Disco! It seems once the cache gets to a certain point in Safari, it begins to struggle.

Sometimes the answer is simple.

Hope this helps.