After installing Tiger, my Mac has gotten really slow. It has been taking me several minutes just for me to log on. Greta recently said how her account is incredibly slow as well.
I took a look, and found she had RSS feeds automatically set up in Safari, that she never used. The "news" feed had over 1000 articles in it! I figured this may be causing Safari to eat huge amounts of memory, which would cause the slowdown. I deleted all her RSS stuff. It seemed to work, and things are zippy once again. And evidently her Safari was affecting my account, because she always is logged on with Safari running, and I use user switching to switch to my account while hers is still active.
Kind of scary. I wonder how many Mac users don't understand their Safari RSS features, and are suffering from a huge slowdown now because of it.
Posted by ahyatt at July 19, 2005 04:46 AMRSS is horribly unscalable. If everyone used Safari's RSS reader, it'd probably kill a lot of servers. By default, Safari checks for updates to every RSS feed you've bookmarked every hour. If those feeds include image tags, I think it downloads the images too. I noticed that 39% of the traffic (22,136 out of 56,678 requests over the course of a week) to one of the blogs I host was coming from one guy who was using Safari RSS.
Posted by: Brian Marston on September 10, 2005 10:40 AM