OS X a bit slow

To see if you have actually quit an application, just look at the Dock and see if it has a glowing dot under the application symbol. If that dot is there, the application is still running.

Also by pressing CMD + TAB you can switch between open applications, even if they don't have a window open right now.

To quit most applications you have to CMD+Q or go to Menu Bar > Safari (example, it can also be iPhoto, just click on the bold name of the application) > Quit.

Activity Monitor shows all running processes (if you choose to)
and their current CPU and RAM (your memory) uses.


The memory you speak of is not your hard drive space but the memory also know as RAM (Random Access Memory) where open applications are stored for quicker access.

To have a better understanding of the Activity Monitor:
http://www.ehow.com/about_5374100_activity-monitor-explained.html

and Mac OS X: http://www.apple.com/findouthow/mac/


You could repair permissions to maybe speed up your Mac: http://kb.iu.edu/data/aoxn.html

If I were you I wouldn't worry about the activity monitor at all. I VERY rarely look at it myself, and there are many things in there that should not be quit. You might try downloading iStat Pro:

http://www.islayer.com/apps/istatpro/

It will show you how much of your CPU is being used and many other useful things. It shows the 5 processes that are taking up the most CPU and how much each is using. Note that the percents are out of 200% total, since you have a dual core machine.

You might also try going into Disk Utility and repairing disk permissions, that often fixes many slowdowns that people have.

I find that running the command 'sudo periodic daily weekly monthly' does lead to faster machine....There is no visual feedback while the scripts execute. You will know they are completed when the Terminal prompt returns....I do this because my Mac is on all the time...I shut it down only once in a month...

of course...if your issue is lack of RAM memory..you need to cleanup...maybe there are few programs which start up along with your machine....to check this out, goto the 'Accounts' tab in System Prefs and click on the 'Login Items' tab...

You can also try out the tool 'Onyx'

For the original poster - be very careful about forcing processes to quit via Activity Monitor. In general, anything listed there without a mini-icon is a background process that is necessary to the healthy operation of Mac OS X. Kill those at your own risk!

For example, you mention mdworker - that is the process that indexes files for Spotlight. While killing it probably won't corrupt the Spotlight database, you're better off leaving it around. Besides, it's setup to automatically come back in a short time to finish its work. If it didn't, then Spotlight wouldn't work properly.

macjunk(ie) said:

I find that running the command 'sudo periodic daily weekly monthly' does lead to faster machine....There is no visual feedback while the scripts execute. You will know they are completed when the Terminal prompt returns....

Click to expand...

I guarantee this is purely psychological. The periodic scripts only clean up logs and temporary files - most of which are normally never generated in the first place on a typical OS X system. And the few that are relevant to a typical OS X system would not possibly cause any slowdown. Here's a list of what the periodic scripts do in Snow Leopard:

• Remove files in /Library/Logs/CrashReporter older than 60 days. If this is never done, you might eventually get a number of files sitting around here (only if you have a lot of application crashes) but it certainly won't affect the speed of anything whatsoever.
• Remove files in /tmp older than 3 days. Again, leaving these around forever won't slow anything down.
• Remove old unix-style system messages. These are never used in regular OS X.
• Remove old unix "rwho" files older than 7 days. This is never, ever used in modern OS X, so these files are never created in the first place. Like the one above, it's just an unused leftover from the unix days of old.
• Remove scratch fax files older than 7 days.
• Rotate system accounting log files. System accounting is always turned off in client OS X, thus there is never anything to do here.
• Print a summary of disk usage. No maintenance is done at all.
• Print a summary of network status, no maintenance.
• Print the machine uptime and load average, no maintenance.
• Rebuild the unix man page database (weekly). If you don't use the unix 'man' command, this does not affect you.
• Rotate fax log files (monthly).

Like I said, none of the above will affect the speed of a system one iota, and nothing bad will happen if it never gets run at all. For the curious, the results of these maintenance commands are stored in /var/log/daily.out, /var/log/weekly.out, and /var/log/monthly.out. You can view them in Console (/Applications/Utilities) or in Terminal if you're handy with a unix command line.

I do this because my Mac is on all the time...I shut it down only once in a month...

Click to expand...

In that case, there's even more reason not to bother running the command directly. As the name suggests, the periodic commands are automatically run by the system - on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. No need to do it yourself.

Honestly, running the periodic scripts is in the same class of Mac voodoo as repairing permissions or insisting that everything should be Cocoa and/or 64-bit without really understanding why or whether it even makes a positive difference.

If you experience slight delays even while typing and a hotter case, some process might take up a lot of your CPU (Central Processing Unit, the one with the two cores and 2.0 to 2.4 GHz).

You might check out the Activity Monitor again, select Show all Processes and sort by CPU usage (click on the column header) and see if any process might use more than 50% for a longer period.

My old iBook with 1GHz (only a quarter or less as fast as older MacBooks) doesn't give me any lag while typing this.

And the post of macjunkie and especially Bankshot are more detailed descriptions of the inner workings of Mac OS X, which might not be important for you as a more normal user than some of us posters are.


Please report back your results of looking at Activity Monitor, as that might be showing what's eating your CPU.

Turning the Mac off on a daily basis will be the same as putting it to sleep every night. You cannot burn your computer's life out so easily, unless you use it all the time, with the CPU at a full 100/200%.

knew2mack said:

Bankshot, I barely understand anything you wrote.....it's all like a foreign language to me and that sucks, cause I'm sure it's all important. Please rephrase if possible.

Click to expand...

No worries, the majority of my post was in response to macjunk(ie)'s comment, and is just a sidenote to the main topic here. For your situation, you don't need to worry about any of that stuff.

Unfortunately a case like yours can be difficult to diagnose for someone who's not sitting in front of the computer. There are a million different things that could slow a computer down, and many of them may not be very obvious without some serious investigation.

The suggestion to check Activity Monitor is a often good place to start - but you do need to know what you're looking at to make any sense of it.

One thing you can do there is click on the column labeled % CPU so that the arrow next to the word "CPU" points down. This puts the programs using the most CPU time up at the top of the list. The order at the top will change frequently, as some programs will use a little CPU for a few seconds and then go back to sleep. If one or two programs are using a lot of CPU (near 100%) and staying at the top of the list for a long time, this may be a clue that those programs are causing your problems. If you find any suspicious programs this way, just ask here on the forum about them. Oftentimes a program that uses a lot of CPU is perfectly normal, but at least this is somewhere to start.

The other big thing that can slow down a computer is excessive disk accesses. This is more difficult to find a likely culprit, but you can get some idea of what's going on by clicking on "Disk Activity" down in the bottom area of the Activity Monitor window. The thing to look at here is "Data read/sec" and "Data written/sec". On my computer, with not much going on, these numbers are often in the KB (kilobytes) range, sometimes down to 0, and sometimes spiking up in the MB (megabytes) range. That's pretty typical. If it's staying in the MB range, that may indicate something is reading or writing to the disk too much. Unfortunately figuring out just what is the culprit can be more difficult.

Hope this helps!

bankshot said:

For the original poster - be very careful about forcing processes to quit via Activity Monitor. In general, anything listed there without a mini-icon is a background process that is necessary to the healthy operation of Mac OS X. Kill those at your own risk!

For example, you mention mdworker - that is the process that indexes files for Spotlight. While killing it probably won't corrupt the Spotlight database, you're better off leaving it around. Besides, it's setup to automatically come back in a short time to finish its work. If it didn't, then Spotlight wouldn't work properly.



I guarantee this is purely psychological. The periodic scripts only clean up logs and temporary files - most of which are normally never generated in the first place on a typical OS X system. And the few that are relevant to a typical OS X system would not possibly cause any slowdown. Here's a list of what the periodic scripts do in Snow Leopard:

• Remove files in /Library/Logs/CrashReporter older than 60 days. If this is never done, you might eventually get a number of files sitting around here (only if you have a lot of application crashes) but it certainly won't affect the speed of anything whatsoever.
• Remove files in /tmp older than 3 days. Again, leaving these around forever won't slow anything down.
• Remove old unix-style system messages. These are never used in regular OS X.
• Remove old unix "rwho" files older than 7 days. This is never, ever used in modern OS X, so these files are never created in the first place. Like the one above, it's just an unused leftover from the unix days of old.
• Remove scratch fax files older than 7 days.
• Rotate system accounting log files. System accounting is always turned off in client OS X, thus there is never anything to do here.
• Print a summary of disk usage. No maintenance is done at all.
• Print a summary of network status, no maintenance.
• Print the machine uptime and load average, no maintenance.
• Rebuild the unix man page database (weekly). If you don't use the unix 'man' command, this does not affect you.
• Rotate fax log files (monthly).

Like I said, none of the above will affect the speed of a system one iota, and nothing bad will happen if it never gets run at all. For the curious, the results of these maintenance commands are stored in /var/log/daily.out, /var/log/weekly.out, and /var/log/monthly.out. You can view them in Console (/Applications/Utilities) or in Terminal if you're handy with a unix command line.



In that case, there's even more reason not to bother running the command directly. As the name suggests, the periodic commands are automatically run by the system - on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. No need to do it yourself.

Honestly, running the periodic scripts is in the same class of Mac voodoo as repairing permissions or insisting that everything should be Cocoa and/or 64-bit without really understanding why or whether it even makes a positive difference.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the heads up!

I read about those scripts too...I was mostly reacting to this article :
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/maintscripts.html

It does say that there is a possibility of these scripts never running because of your usage patterns...
However, I am sure that after I run these scripts, my Mac does start up considerably faster....just a personal observation...

...tell us a little about the machine you bought?

Is it new or used?

What type is it (mini, macbook, macbook pro, iMac, etc)?

Did you get the base model of machine?

J&JPolangin said:

...tell us a little about the machine you bought?

Is it new or used?

What type is it (mini, macbook, macbook pro, iMac, etc)?

Did you get the base model of machine?

Click to expand...

...and how much ram.

knew2mack said:

Hi everyone.....still uncertain of many things, now I"m wondering if I have enough RAM, (this is memory correct~I have lots of pics and music) For the pics, should I organize them and zip?? will that open up any space for me??

I went ahead and attached my info from iStat and the specs for my macbook. Running scripts?? Disc permissions??

Still don't know what I'm doing....sorrry if that makes it more difficult to help me!!

thanks again everyone
dawn

Click to expand...

You have 2GB of RAM, which is a temporary memory, where only open applications and documents are stored.
You have 81.55GB used on your HDD, and have 67.18GB free, thus there is no need to zip your files to open up storage capacity, as you have enough.



There is a difference between HDD and RAM (storage capacity and memory).

What is Computer Memory? RAM vs Hard Drive

I think the main things that could make your macbook slower are:


Hard Disk Usage

Yours is about 40% empty so no problem (below 15% empty space and the computer will start to slow down). Open a Finder window, and at the bottom it will tell you how much empty space there is on your Hard Disk. 15% of your Hard Disk is about 22 GB.


Memory (RAM) Usage

A basic description of the numbers that appear in the iStat/Activity Monitor for memory usage:

Wired: Being used by the OS (not free)
Active: Being used by apps/software (not free)
Inactive: Used recently (free)
Free: Not being used (free)

Wired + Active = usage
Inactive + Free = free memory

You iStat image shows over 500 MB (25%) total free memory. You should see no kind of slowdown with this value (unless you open a big piece of software).
Note: the memory usage of some applications will tend to creep above what it should over time - Safari, and MSOffice apps tend to do this. You can check "System Memory" on Activity Monitor to see if this is happening. If it is, just quit and restart the offending application (Warning: Don't quit anything from System Preferences you don't know the name of!)

If you are simply running out of memory - your open applications are taking up all available memory during normal running - there are some "hidden" but nonessential applications you can quit.
1. Dashboard apps.
Open dashboard from the dock. Each little application that comes up runs in the background 100% of the time. Press (X) in the bottom left and delete the ones you don't need.
2. Go to "System Preferences" > "Accounts" > "Login Items". This is the list of applications that start every time you login. The ones you know you don't need can be removed.


CPU Usage

If you run CPU-intensive processes in parallel you will see the computer slow down.
Try installing MenuMeters. It shows CPU usage and Memory usage with time in your menu bar at the top of the screen. It is pretty unobtrusive, but gives a good idea of how much of CPU/Memory is being used at any one time, and may point to when the computer will slow down.

knew2mack said:

...

If someone else, admin, or something comes across this, please post in correct thread???? As I mentioned, I posted last night and now it's just gone!
...

Click to expand...

Here is your thread: Uninstalling/Reinstalling Firefox found via clicking on your username (knew2mack) and selecting "Find More Posts by knew2mack":