Safari 5, Lion and the spinning beach ball of death

Sad Professor

Has anyone else been experiencing problems with Safari 5 on Lion? When I first upgraded to Lion I was experiencing frequent spinning beach ball crashes that were freezing the whole system. I later removed a third-party kernel extension belonging to VMWare which I believed was the cause of the crashes. I also stopped using Safari around the same time, but I dismissed that as the cause of the problem as I couldn't find any widespread reports of it.

Well, I recently started using Safari again and the crashes have started again. In the meantime I've done a clean install and created a new user account, neither of which have solved the problem. There's definitely something up with Safari, but no evidence (that I can find) of it is being left in the logs. It's not a kernel panic and it's not Flash (it's not installed) related. And I did not experience this problem while using Chrome for the last few weeks.

Has anyone else been experiencing issues like this with Safari? If not, can you please indicate whether you usually shutdown/sleep your Mac and/or quit Safari from time to time. I tend to leave my Mac running most of the time and it's possible Safari 5's memory leak is bringing the whole system down.

Talisman

As a matter of interest did you do an upgrade or clean install?

I initially did an upgrade and it was a disaster area. Firefox, Safari and Parallels crashed/hung regularly. The Parallels issue was definitely due to upgrading so I assumed the other issues were too so I wiped the system and did a clean install - no crashes since then.

Sad Professor

Initially I did an upgrade. Then I did a clean install and migrated my applications and user account over. Then I created a new user account. Problem has remained throughout. I may do another clean install and manually copy my data over.

Colonel Panic

I restart Safari every couple of days to deal with the memory leak issue but haven't had problems with Lion beyond that.

I've got VMWare installed and haven't had issues with crashes either. Until last week I was looking at a 50 day uptime.

Talisman

Sad Professor wrote: »

Initially I did an upgrade. Then I did a clean install and migrated my applications and user account over. Then I created a new user account. Problem has remained throughout. I may do another clean install and manually copy my data over.

When I did the clean install, I also installed all of the applications manually. The only thing that was migrated using the Migration Assistant was one user account. It was a longer process but it's a functioning system now.

Sad Professor

Just to follow up on this: I did a clean install shortly after my last post and no crashes since. I'm at a loss to explain what the problem was though. I went through absolutely everything. I'm pretty good at narrowing down problems on Macs. In the classic days I would go through multiple restarts until I found the extension that was causing a conflict (things were simpler then). But the cause of this issue eluded me.

Rulmeq

Safari has been re-architected in Lion into 2 separate processes, one is a sandboxed process which is designed to prevent the likes of Flash and Java plug-in exploits from gaining privileged access to your system, however it would appear that they have introduced quite a few regressions.

One possible solution to attempt to fix it is outlined here, but if you have extensions they will likely not work:
http://stormchild.tumblr.com/post/10414883514/how-to-stop-safari-5-from-unexpectedly-reloading-pages

Tim Bray covers most of the problems I've been seeing:
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2011/09/18/Safari

Ultimately this will be a good thing, but until they fix it, I've been using Firefox more and more.

huggs2

+1 for firefox but i use firefox 7 beta with no problems whatsoever.Its very fast and displays better.Wish it had mouse gestures like in Safari.Add on Default zoom level works well also for me.

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/user/84420/?src=api

Sad Professor

I tried the single process mode in Safari 5 a while ago. It seemed less CPU intensive, but extensions and other things don't work. I currently use it in 32 bit mode which is faster and less RAM heavy.

Sad Professor

Still experiencing this, though not as frequently. I've kinda ruled out Safari at this point as I've managed to get weeks of uptime while using it only to have one or two crashes within a short time period. There's obviously something up with my particular set-up, be it software or hardware.

ashleey

Do you run VMware fusion? I don't have a safari problem per se but I finally sorted an auto wifi sync problem with my iphone4. If fusion was running then iTunes would display an unknown error if the phone tried to sync at night when my mac was asleep. Closing fusion seems to free up memory etc even if the virtual machine is asleep.

Sad Professor

I did have an outdated version of Fusion installed at one point, but I never reinstalled it after doing a clean install.

And just to be clear, my problem is with the whole system beach balling and requiring a forced restart, not just Safari. In fact, I'm fairly satisfied now that Safari isn't the problem.

In terms of software, the only other consistent element in all these crashes has been Transmission. And it would appear that it has caused some major issues in the past. Though my problems have only started since Lion.

LH2011

Sad Professor wrote: »

I did have an outdated version of Fusion installed at one point, but I never reinstalled it after doing a clean install.

And just to be clear, my problem is with the whole system beach balling and requiring a forced restart, not just Safari. In fact, I'm fairly satisfied now that Safari isn't the problem.

In terms of software, the only other consistent element in all these crashes has been Transmission. And it would appear that it has caused some major issues in the past. Though my problems have only started since Lion.

lion running here fine on two MBP's using safari a lot, no spinning beach ball,
8gb ram, on other MBP i ocasionaly get the spinning beach ball, the odd time but i use firefox on that machine, along with parallels , office etc.

ashleey

Ive got 8gb ram and rarely have a problem but got it yesterday when crucial website invoked flash. Memory usage still showed 3gb free despite having a virtual win 7 open in VMware fusion. It cleared itself but I hate flash.

Thinking of swapping my SuperDrive for an ssd using optibay for the lion partition to help.

muggyog

Sad Prof, are the system logs not of any assistance?

Sad Professor

Nope. I've scrutinised every bit of the logs. Whatever the problem is it leaves no trace in them.

I'm pretty sure now that Transmission was the problem. Even though I never experienced it before Lion, it seems it's a very common issue and has been for years. It's known as the "slow death". Basically what happens is Transmission halts all disk access (which is why there's nothing in the logs) causing the rest of the system to gradually lock up and beach ball as well.

Transmission developers are bit defensive about it and tend to blame it on other factors, like certain hardware combinations or just the high bandwidth that bittorent involves. Reducing the number of connections seems to help.