Many of you have probably experienced glacial Safari performance right after booting your Mac. This is due to a flurry of hard drive activity. A simple solution to this problem is to clear Safari’s cache on a regular basis. This can be done via the Safari->Empty Cache menu.
Since installing a solid state drive in my Mac Pro, application launches have been incredibly fast. However, since my home directory is too large to fit on the SSD, I was a victim of the dreaded Slow Safari issue. (If your home directory is on a SSD, chances are your performance is just fine.) There is a solution, however, if you’re comfortable on the command line. The following solution assumes you have a setup similar to mine – an SSD for your boot drive, but your home directory is on a regular HDD.
1. Quit Safari
2. Copy ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/ to your SSD.
3. Copy ~/Library/Safari/ to your SSD.
4. Rename these directories on the HDD. (Don’t delete them, in case something goes wrong during this exercise.)
5. Create symbolic links for these directories from the HDD to the SDD, with the same names as the original directories.
6. You now should have super fast Safari performance, even after booting!