I use the top sites feature a lot, not because it’s particularly useful but just mainly because its there. It never occurred to me that all those realtime webpage previews could be taking up a lot of disk space and precious RAM! Here’s a possible fix, which may or may not work for you, depending on the actual cause of the slowness (e.g. you may just not have enough RAM).

1. Close down Safari completely by using the CMD+Q keyboard shortcut or via the dock (it’s a good idea to paste these instructions somewhere first.)
2. Open up a Finder window (if you didn’t know already this can easily be brought up by click on the desktop and using the keyboard shortcut CMD+N)
3. Head over to your home area and go into the Library folder located there (e.g. Macintosh HD→Users→Matt).
4. Next, navigate to Caches → com.apple.Safari →Webpage Previews
5. Now in this folder your going to notice a lot of files, a lot of webpages and ultimately a lot of wasted disk space (for me it was 575MB). Go ahead and select all these files and delete them.
6. Restart Safari, open up a few tabs and see if this has worked.

You Mac Pro owners out there might not notice a differences, but I imagine with a machine without a good spec, this could be an answer. When you usually empty the cache using the ‘Empty Cache’ menu item, the Top Sites images do not get deleted and end up costing you a lot of speed. Hopefully this will issue be resolved in a later version of Safari, I’m using Safari version 4.0.2, for reference.

I’ll leave you guys with a nice little image which was stored in my top sites cache folder.

Sensible Advice