Sunday, 12 April 2009

Safari uses CPU 100% - corrupt SafeBrowsing.db

On 2 of my OSX (10.4 and 10.5) machines, Safari started consuming 100% CPU. After a bit of research it seemed that it was the new Safe Browsing feature introduced in 3.2(?). Basically with the feature "Warn when visiting a fraudulent website" after 2 minutes Safari would ramp the CPU to 100% and it would stay there, for ever if you left it. Then when you tried to quit it would crash.


I tried a different account, and found that other accounts on the same machine didn't have this problem.

Then I used Activity Monitor while Safari ramped to 100% to see what Safari was doing. In Activity Monitor, click on Safari, then get-info, click on 'Open Files and Ports'


and copy and paste into a text file. Reading through I see

    /Users/name/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/SafeBrowsing.db


so the next step was to force quit Safari, and rename this file

    cd /Users/name/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari

    mv SafeBrowsing.db SafeBrowsing.db.old

restart Safari, and this file gets recreated. Safari does ramp the CPU but after a minute or so its back to normal.

BTW this file is created by Safari downloading from safebrowsing.clients.google.com, so you should ensure access to that hostname.
Posted by at 15:21
Labels: ,

8 comments:

  1. Anonymous13 April 2009 at 17:33

    Thanks! This solved my problem.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Steve Mansfield14 April 2009 at 04:57

    glad it helped!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Doug Clinton28 May 2009 at 03:55

    Thanks very much, that solved the problem for me, too.

    BTW, the SafeBrowsing.db wasn't in the Library folder shown in your post on my machine. Instead I tracked it down to /private/var/folders/Uu/UuJyAhmfFcOpPvLzlS+BpE+++TI/-Caches-/com.apple.Safari which will obviously vary from system to system so if you're having this problem and can't find the file, it may be under /private/var/folders instead.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Steve Mansfield28 May 2009 at 06:23

    Interesting.... what version of Safari do you have?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous22 October 2009 at 16:06

    wow thanks!
    This solved my problem.
    The same has happend to me, with Opera 4.0.3 running on MS Windows.
    Must be some SQLite Error I guess.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Anonymous24 November 2009 at 19:44

    Wow 35 mins of searching forums for answers and you FINALLY solved my problem. Thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  7. THATGuyEd14 June 2011 at 02:31

    To all...

    /private/var/folders/JF/JFO03PYjEPW4bgiq4jxwm++++TI/-Caches-/com.apple.Safari was the path on my system and SafeBrowsing.db(.old) was the culprit.

    Thanks to all (^_^)

    ReplyDelete
  8. DSF14 September 2011 at 05:11

    My computer has been frequently entering into sleep mode and the only thing I can see is that my CPU is always at 100% (mainly due to Safari). I've adjusted the file as you've said and it has certainly brought the level down. hopefully this has sorted out the issue

    thanks :)

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)