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Really slow MBP

cosmo811

cosmo811

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 27, 2011
63
56
Cambridge, UK
I bought this MBP (13" 2.7ghz) back in August and it was great for a while but it's gotten slower and slower and at this point it takes 20 seconds to load a finder window, 5 seconds to open a chrome tab, 2+ minutes to boot up.
It's getting ridiculous. One of my friends recommended I post a screenshot of my activity monitor if I wanted help so here it is.

Anyone got any tips to offer? At this rate I'm going to end up breaking it against the wall.
 
2012_02_11_pC1_ActMon_resized.png
Click to expand...
You have an excessive amount of page outs, you need more RAM.



Further reading:

 
cosmo811 said:
I have 4GB, how can that not be enough?
Click to expand...

Depends on your usage.
I have 4 GB in my 2007 iMac and under less than normal use (browsing, watching and listening), I don't have page outs or only minimal ones (1 MB currently). When under heavy use (editing video, composing video, ...), the 4 GB is not enough.
I have 8 GB on my 2009 MBP and it is used for the heavy stuff, and I still have no page outs with it.

8 GB currently cost 50 USD.

Read the "Further reading" links I provided, to learn about page outs.

You can also monitor your RAM usage via Activity Monitor after a restart., though the 2 minute boot up (why not use SLEEP) is a bit much, even for HDDs. Do you have enough free HDD capacity? Do you backup regularly?
 
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cosmo811 said:
I have 4GB, how can that not be enough?
Click to expand...

4GB is the minimum these days. You need to analyze your usage to determine why 4GB isn't enough.

The good news, 8GB is really cheap at about ~$40-$50.

That said, RAM may not be the issue. You should take a look at what is happening when you experience slowness. Take a look at activity monitor and watch for processes that are taking up excessive resources.
 
With a page in/page out ratio of 5:1 I don't think it's necessarily a lack of RAM that is the problem here.

I would first try to reboot the machine. It's probably been running for a month or more without reboot.

Also, check your login items - maybe you are launching 20 different services at startup, and that slows you down immediately.

2 minutes to boot and 20 seconds for a finder window is not normal, and shouldn't be caused by a simple lack of RAM. The hard drive might be on it's way out. Have you tried to repair disc permissions? A fresh install of OSX Lion (did you upgrade from SL?) can also help.
 
thundersteele is right: you should restart your computer as a first step. Page outs are cumulative since your last restart, so the best way to check is to restart your computer and track page outs under your normal workload (the apps, browser pages and documents you normally would have open). If your page outs are significant (say 1GB or more) under normal use, you may benefit from more RAM. If your page outs are zero or very low during normal use, you probably won't see any performance improvement from adding RAM.

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor

For performance issues, this may help: Performance Tips For Mac OS X
 
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