I recently got sick of the Safari spinning ball, and decided to conduct some research to speed up my favorite web browser. After reading numerous posts on the Apple discussion board, I made the following changes to significantly boost page rendering time:
1. Add Mike's Ad Blocking Hosts file to /etc/hosts and restart lookupd
2. Purge the Safari cache from Safari -> Clear Cache
3. Remove old RSS articles by clicking Preferences -> RSS -> Remove Now
Once these three actions were complete, Safari was back to post install speeds! Nice!