Another Mac OX problem (apparently) solved!
April 24, 2012My desktop (well, under the desk) Mac Pro has been giving me fits for the last three or four months. I am running Mac OS X Lion 10.7.3. Everything else was fine – including email access using Thunderbird - but I was experiencing incredibly long load times for web pages.They were so slow that Google Chrome (yes, I was that desperate) gave me dialogs that said the page was stalled, even when it wasn’t. I did a lot of troubleshooting and research. It wasn’t an internet connection issue, or a DNS issue, or a firewall issue, or another of the dozen other things I thought it might be – I tried all of the fixes for those things. It was…caches.
Apparently caches can be cleaned, and also can be “deep cleaned.” Too much inside-baseball for me. I thought I had cleared every cache I could find, but it looks like it wasn’t enough. I can’t seem to return to the forum where I found this tool, but once I ran Lion Cache Cleaner my problems went away. It does a bunch of other stuff as well, including repairing permissions, optimizing a bunch of stuff, and even checks for rogue rootkits.
Thanks to whoever suggested this – and I recommend this little app. It’s $ 10 (shareware). I was to the point where I was using the laptop for web work and the desktop for other stuff; (It’s the one with the two big monitors, and I didn’t want to change that if possible.)
Update: I still have to wait for Firefox sometimes, but not nearly as often. Usually when I first open it I have to wait. I’ve not used Safari as much and so I don’t know yet how much it has been effected. I also started using Chrome for some things. It definitely is faster manipulating the data that is passed to it. It seems to have less of the stall-out problem. (It also can’t be used with some plug-ins and applications, like Sibelius Scorch, so I can’t move exclusively to it.)