Fixing Beach-Balling Safari
At last I’ve resolved the problem I had with Safari frequently beach balling. I had read various suggestions about wiping out either the web page cache or the cached favicons, but this didn’t help. Eventually I wiped out everything – preferences, caches, bookmarks, form values, and so on. This helped.
My suspicion is it had to do with the form values. I felt the beach balls appeared whenever I did repeated searches at sites I frequently visit, such as Google, Amazon.com, the Swedish Yellow Pages, and the Swedish National Encyclopedia. So perhaps there’s something intensive going on when the form values for the visited web page are pulled from the archive? From what I remember there were about a thousand entries stored.
If you have this problem, try quitting Safari and launching it again after having moved ~/Library/Safari/Form Values to the desktop or something.