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Bryan T
10-01-2009, 01:16 PM
Youtube, animated gifs, and other video sites bring my old computer (G4 iBook) to a standstill. All of these things worked fine a few months ago, but things have slowed to a crawl, often giving me the 'spinning beach ball.' It doesn't seem to matter what web browser I use.

Any ideas what I can do to speed things up again? It sucks to click on a thread that has a few animated gifs and have my browser lock up for a minute or two.

Thanks!
RGB
10-01-2009, 01:20 PM
Is your hard drive getting filled up, Bryan? Have you optimized the drive regularly? Do videos that are on your hard drive do the same thing or is it just streaming and online stuff?

Sounds like your connection, but it could be something else. Maybe try swapping out your ethernet cable between the computer and the modem/router?
Doug H
10-01-2009, 01:21 PM
Try defragging the hard drive.
yellowecho
10-01-2009, 01:23 PM
Youtube, animated gifs, and other video sites bring my old computer (G4 iBook) to a standstill. All of these things worked fine a few months ago, but things have slowed to a crawl, often giving me the 'spinning beach ball.' It doesn't seem to matter what web browser I use.

Any ideas what I can do to speed things up again? It sucks to click on a thread that has a few animated gifs and have my browser lock up for a minute or two.

Thanks!

Because videos and animated gifs can be memory heavy if other processes are running, it could possibly be a problem with allocating your RAM.
Open the Activity Monitor and check it out.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1342
Bryan T
10-01-2009, 01:36 PM
Because videos and animated gifs can be memory heavy if other processes are running, it could possibly be a problem with allocating your RAM.
Open the Activity Monitor and check it out.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1342

There is still free RAM when I watch a Youtube vid. My CPU does go to 100% user when I watch a Youtube vid.
Bryan T
10-01-2009, 01:38 PM
Is your hard drive getting filled up, Bryan? Have you optimized the drive regularly? Do videos that are on your hard drive do the same thing or is it just streaming and online stuff?

I've done a lot of hard drive maintenance in an effort to speed things up. I freed up several gigs and repaired permissions. I don't have any vids on my hard drive; everything is online.

Sounds like your connection, but it could be something else. Maybe try swapping out your ethernet cable between the computer and the modem/router?

None of the other computers have issues streaming. We have another computer that is dedicated to Hulu/Netflix/iTunes.

Thanks!
yellowecho
10-01-2009, 01:44 PM
There is still free RAM when I watch a Youtube vid. My CPU does go to 100% user when I watch a Youtube vid.

Do you have any other applications/processes that are using up a lot of your CPU? Sort by CPU usage and try killing anything that's heavy.
Bryan T
10-01-2009, 01:50 PM
Do you have any other applications/processes that are using up a lot of your CPU? Sort by CPU usage and try killing anything that's heavy.

It really is the web browser that is hogging the CPU. CPU usage goes to 90+% for Safari when I load a youtube vid.

Opera is nearly as bad. I saw 88% in CPU usage for a youtube vid. I saw Firefox hit 89%, too.

What's crazy is that little animated gifs can do the same thing.
-Analog-
10-01-2009, 01:51 PM
http://www.nortoncable.com/tgp/HelloComputer.gif

:)
Bryan T
10-01-2009, 01:59 PM
http://www.nortoncable.com/tgp/HelloComputer.gif

:)

Jerk! :roll

That's exactly the sort of animation that brings things to a crawl.
RGB
10-01-2009, 02:34 PM
Which OS?

...and what I meant by my question was, if you download a video to your hard drive and play it from the drive, does it do the same thing? Must not be cabling if these little GIFs cause the CPU to jump to 100%. Weird stuff.

If you drag that Scotty GIF to your desktop and then drop it on your browser icon so it opens in the browser, does it do the same thing?

On my G5, Safari runs about 68% CPU consistently doing this...Firefox initially jumps to about 57%, but then drops to about 15% after it's loaded. What happens if you empty your cache on the browser?
Bryan T
10-01-2009, 02:40 PM
Which OS?

10.5.8

If you drag that Scotty GIF to your desktop and then drop it on your browser icon so it opens in the browser, does it do the same thing?

Loaded that way, Scotty makes Safari use 84% of the CPU. Ridiculous, no?

Emptying the cache didn't make a difference.
RGB
10-01-2009, 03:00 PM
Well, considering that you have a G4 and that my G5 goes to 68% with Safari running that GIF, it seems about in line.

Have you been running 10.5 without problems or did this start after upgrading from 10.4?

Leopard is pretty CPU intensive for a G4 processor, but you'd think it should handle it.

Sorry I couldn't be of more help!
Bryan T
10-01-2009, 03:03 PM
Have you been running 10.5 without problems or did this start after upgrading from 10.4?

As far as I can remember, 10.5 was working fine until about a month ago.

Leopard is pretty CPU intensive for a G4 processor, but you'd think it should handle it.

Most things run great. It really is just the animated gifs and youtube videos that crawl. With youtube, for example, I only get a few frames per second on playback.

Sorry I couldn't be of more help!

I really appreciate that you tried.


I think it is time for a new compy . . .