Windowserver Activity

johnsmolowe

Registered
i am trying to minimize the spinning beach ball time on safari. i have followed all the suggestions i can find in forums (uncheck auto-fill forms, delete cache, delete safari icons, checked for .plist corruption) i just went to activity monitor to see if something was hogging my cpu (g5 1.8 dual c 1.5 gb ram) and found low to moderate #s for everything except process id 421, process name "(null)," which shows a %cpu varying from 88% to 102.4%, threads 14, real memory 47.6, virtual memory 1.16.

when i click on (null) (421), it says parent process "windowserver."

what the heck is windowserver? is it a problem that it seems to be using so much of my cpu? could this be the source of my safari slowdown? and if so can i do anything about this?
 
windowsever is a process that draws all of the 3d looking lines and adds the colors and shadows to all of your windows, well... anything in mac really. So when you have too many windows open, then itll spend more and more of the cpu doing all of this crap to make everything look so nice. Newer desktops, and probably laptops by now include Quartz Extreme and Core images, which is related to the graphics card. Although if you see windowserver running then sadly you dont have this feature. Although dont worry, it doesnt really matter. All you need to do is add more RAM to your mac and itll speed up DRASTICALLY! And if your thinking about it, and if you havent already, it may be time to try a new Pro laptop or new G4 or G5 desktop with added features, these computers are literally designed for intense graphics work and intense application (including all 3d apps, photoshop, illustrator, and stupidly enough microsoft word? probably because its by microsoft)

EDIT: And yes, this is a major reason for your safari slowdown, but thats excluding the fact that safari already sucks up allot of cpu to again try and look all 3d like. Try getting a 3rd party browser like firefox, chrome, or wyzo (firefox based but with added extensions). They will go a little faster, and maybe, just maybe, fast enough to be noticeable.
 
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