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Troubleshooting Safari Beachball Issues: How? Help Needed?

The Sand Trap, a forum I own but which also runs on a platform that I can't tweak myself, has been having some weird issues lately.

As few as two or three web pages will beachball Safari. Scrolling via any method (keyboard shortcuts, clicking in the scroll bar, two-finger scrolling) often fails, pages won't load graphics outside of their original viewing size when you can scroll, the app will repeatedly ask to reload all available tabs even when there are two or three tabs open and you simply click "reload" in one of them, etc.

If I su to root and run fs_usage | grep PAGE you can see that something in the pages is causing

I've tried disabling plugins. I've tried disabling extensions. The latter didn't work at all, and the former seemed to work ((Though I was already nervous and thus opening fewer pages at a time.)) before it became obvious that it did not. So it doesn't appear to be a Flash issue, though it may boost the odds slightly.

This only happens, seemingly, to administrators. It seems to behave normally for others (moderators, regular users, guests).

So my question: how do I troubleshoot this? How can I find out what script or whatever is causing the problem? Giving what seems to be a memory explosion, is it possible to find out what's causing Safari to beachball with often very few web pages open?

4 Responses to "Troubleshooting Safari Beachball Issues: How? Help Needed?"

  1. Have you tried using the Timeline option in the Developer tools within Safari to see what is happening when the beachballing happens?

    1. [quote comment="76883"]Have you tried using the Timeline option in the Developer tools within Safari to see what is happening when the beachballing happens?[/quote]
      Thanks for the suggestion. How's this look? 🙂

      http://cl.ly/0m1O453w3O2O

      (A video showing the result of loading - and then closing - about ten pages.)

  2. BTW, a picture of a partially rendered page that I scrolled down (before Safari beachballed) looks like this: http://f.cl.ly/items/3D0F3x0l0o2n2i463F22/Screen%20Shot%202013-03-31%20at%207.54.56%20PM.PNG .

  3. Any reasons for the site not to be available over ipv6 ?