Weird browser behavior: 10-second beachball with every click

[WritersBlock]

A couple of weeks ago I started noticing that every time I clicked a link or even just opened a blank tab, the browser would freeze and the beachball would spin for about 10 seconds. This first occurred in Safari and Camino, which I use almost exclusively for work. OmniWeb did the same thing. It happened on all sites - our secure company admin, our main internet-facing site, and various public message boards. Flock, which I use for Gmail, news, and of course, DU, wasn't affected. Neither was Firefox. Opera was fine, too, but it's too quirky to use for work. Sunrise was also okay, but I'm not keen on the interface.

So I thought, hmmm... must be something that Camino, Safari, and OmniWeb have in common that Flock, Firefox, and the others don't. Which didn't make sense, because I thought Camino was based on Firefox. I downloaded Leopard Cache Cleaner and ran it, but that didn't seem to help.

Anyway, it got to the point that it was slowing down work too much, so I started looking around for other browsers. iCab, SeaMonkey, and Sunrise all seemed to be okay.. sites would load virtually instantly on these. I began using a combination of these and Firefox for work, and remained with Flock for personal stuff.

As long as I didn't try to use OmniWeb, Camino or Safari, all was right in my little browser world again until last night, when I noticed a typing delay in Flock. This morning I'm seeing the same beachballing as the others had done. So far Sunrise, SeaMonkey, Opera, and Firefox are fine.

I wasn't too concerned until Flock started acting up. And if it only happened when I clicked on a link, I could maybe put it down to a slow 3rd-party site (adblockers aren't an option with the work browsers). But the fact that it occurs when I click on the New Tab button is worrying. I keep a blank home page, so nothing should be trying to load then.

Can someone with knowledge of browser technology shed some light on what might be causing this, please? Have I got a ::shudder:: virus?

I'm using 10.5.2 on a MacPro. Nothing else seems to be affected as far as I can tell; only these browsers. Other browsers, Skype, etc., are fine. It's not my internets connection (which is home broadband; I've connected to the router with both Airport and a LAN cable without any difference. All the other machines on our network are fine.)

To recap, the affected browsers seem to be Safari, Camino, OmniWeb, and now Flock. Those which are okay (so far) are Firefox, Sunrise, Opera, SeaMonkey, and iCab.

Any help would be appreciated - this is really puzzling me.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

1. clear out all caches.

then go to utilities, and repair disk permissions.

You can get Leopard Cache Clearer as shareware. It does great!

[WritersBlock]

2. Thanks for the response!

I did as you suggested; did a deep clean of all user caches in LCC, then verified & repaired disk permissions in Utilities. Things seem to be a little faster, but I still get the beachball when clicking on a link, trying to scroll the page, or clicking the "new tab" button.

I've downloaded LittleSnitch, and can't see any suspicious traffic going out. Also downloaded & ran MacScan in case it was malware of some sorts.

This is really bizarre.

[WritersBlock]

3. Ah HAH.

Okay, one of two things seems to have sorted it.

I looked in the Console and saw lots & lots & lots of the following error:
08/05/2008 00:43:59 org.apache.httpd<2388> (2)No such file or directory: httpd: could not open error log file /private/var/log/apache2/error_log.

A quick Googlage brought up some forum posts about Apache not working after a Time Machine restore because some log files don't get backed up. The apache2 directory isn't present in the restored drive, but if you're using Web Sharing, there'll be all those errors. The fix is to either recreate the directory or turn off web sharing. It's after 1am and I've been messing about with this for several hours. I'm too tired to be looking up Unix commands and trying to set the right permissions. I don't know why I had web sharing on in the first place anyway. So I took the easy way out and turned it off.

Another thing I did was disable the Anti-Phishing option in One Password (great app; love it!) I think that sending every URL to phishtank.com was not helping matters, although I've used this for several weeks without problems. Plus, this browser problem only started happening the day after the Time Machine restore, and has gotten progressively worse since

I just wonder if I've got acres of logged error messages somewhere in my hard drive now.

Anyway, I dunno what the exact cause was, but my browsers are back up to speed now - fingers crossed!

[ChairmanAgnostic]

4. always great to see an ahHAh.

[nadinbrzezinski]

5. May I suggest you also run a virus checker

that is CLASSIC behavior on a windows hijacked machine

[WritersBlock]

6. Yes, thanks... that definitely crossed my mind.

The problem appears to be resolved now, but I think I will still take your advice. :)

[Adelante]

7. I've had this behavior on my iMac with every browser out there

I tried all sorts of things, but what helped was turning off flash in browser preferences. FWIW.