Restart the Flash plugin without quitting Safari
Sep 21, '10 07:30:01AM
Contributed by: glenbo
Safari will often get stalled out and need to be restarted. In many cases, this can be traced to the Flash plugin getting overloaded. You can quite simply restart just the Flash plugin and make Safari work properly again.
You will need to use the Terminal to quit the WebKitPluginHost process. Safari sees that this process has died and automatically restarts it. Refreshing a page that was using the Flash plugin will then reload the plugin.
I have had Safari doing the beach ball of death and used this trick and it fixes it immediately.
- Open the Terminal from the Utilities folder in /Applications
- Type ps -ax | grep WebKitPluginHost
- This will return something that looks like this:
16154 ?? 11:37.18 /System/Library/Frameworks/WebKit.framework/WebKitPluginHost.app/Contents/MacOS/WebKitPluginHost
- Take the PID (Process ID) and kill it. It will be different each time. In the example above it is 16154.
- Type kill -9 16154 (substituting the correct PID).
- Go back to Safari and refresh any pages that were using the Flash plugin.
- Try this whenever Safari gets slow or freezes with the beachball. Flash 10.1 does appear to have improved the situation somewhat, but hasn't eliminated it.
[crarko adds: I tested this, and it works as described. Killing the WebKitPluginHost task will terminate all Safari plugins, not just Flash, so be aware of that. Other plugins should also reload as required after the process restarts.]
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