Sorry, and maybe it's just me (somehow), but Cyberduck is slow. I'd been using it for years and had been putting up with the 10-second spinning beach ball every time I started it or tried to initiate a file transfer because I assumed that it was my old Macbook at fault. But earlier this year I bought a brand new MBP and the problem persisted, so I tried Transmit. Super fast, no issues. I won't be using Cyberduck again.
I get beach balls all the time on pretty much everything I do on my mac - terminal, macvim, ical, itunes, mail, firefox, safari, chrome, pages, keynote, screenflow, eclipse, numbers, openoffice and more. They all get slow, lock up, freeze, etc. at some point or another, and it's almost always related to the fact that I'm multitasking. (true, yeah, i'm lame, and it's only a core 2 duo 2.1ghz with 2.5 gigs of RAM - I don't know why I expect to be able to run 3 programs at the same time).
If you have the developer tools installed, in /Developer/Applications/Perfomance Tools there's an app called Spin Control that helps diagnose why apps are spinning.
By default it just sits there waiting for an app to spin for 5 seconds, at which point it starts sampling the app's activity (as in sample(1)). You can set preferences to make it watch a particular named app, and can set the minimum spin time required for it to notice and start sampling the spinning app. The app produces a text report of the output so you can see what functions it's spending its time in.
Might be useful. It seems like you shouldn't be spinning that much, even if you're multitasking.
I was really surprised at how much of a bump I got from a 1.8ghz Core 2 Duo with 2GB of memory to a 2.53ghz i5 with 4GB. My poor Macbook used to choke if I was running more than a handful of programs, or if I was running Flash with anything. Now I can run a bunch of fairly processor-intensive programs (video, VOIP, Flash games, browser with 2 dozen tabs, etc) simultaneously and it rarely chokes.
Since I got such a big productivity gain from this change, I'm looking for other things I can do. I'll be due for an upgrade in another 4-6 months and I think I'll get an SSD.
What's so bizarre with this approach is that 2 years ago the specs on this were near 'top of line', and the software hasn't changed all that much over 2-3 years. I'm not saying it beach balls more now than 2 years ago - it's always been the same. I may do one more mac laptop - a higher end one next time - but I suspect my workstyle - doing multiple things all the time - is always going to end with beach balls, regardless of the mac. :/
I'll bet you'll find whatever versions of Flash you've had have steadily required more and more CPU. I read the crash dumps when my Safari becomes unresponsive and I have to force quit it, and it's always Flash.
I experienced something similar when I upgraded my semi-ancicent MacBook up to 4gb of RAM and a faster hard drive, which had amazing (positive) effects on its performance. I suspect that a lot of OSX's performance problems result from slow IO or limited RAM (leading to paging, and slow I/O again, etc.).
As much as I love Safari, Safari is the worst offender in terms of performance on my Mac. It probably doesn't help that I have a bad habit of leaving more than 50 tabs open at a time.
I almost have to admit that the 9 window limit on the iPad's Safari isn't a bad thing. Forces me to instapaper stuff right away and close the window.
You hit the nail on the head. And "Reopen all windows from last session" feeds the addiction, since you can recover from a flash-crash without losing all your tabs.
Friends and family literally have literally made a novelty of exposing safari when they come by to wonder at how many multi-tabbed windows I have open at once. :)
