Bugger ... several problems with iMac Retina.

[ollie.x]

Hi there!

Love my Retina iMacs Display to pieces, but am suffering from several strange phenomenons where I cannot really pinpoint any causes ...

1) Massive Lag with expose. Takes several seconds to show, ultra-laggy animation that consist of maybe one or two steps and takes forever (well, 2-3 seconds sometimes)

2) Strange sound from external speakers on wake-up. Like four fuzzy beeps.

3) System volume changes by itself on wake-up from sleep

4) Menu bar shows pixelation when two screens are in use and whenever changing from active screen to inactive one.

5) Open-Save-Dialouge sometimes takes 10-15 seconds to work (beachball in between) and "Open with ..." context dialogue also takes 10-15 seconds to work. If I do it again in the next few minutes, it's much quicker. After a while, it'll take very long again.

Anyone with similar / same problems and any suggestions on how to solve any of this?

 

[monokakata]

I see the #5 issue regularly.

With the open/save dialog I figure it's because at least one item in my recent list was either on my NAS or an external spinning drive.

With the big lag in "open with" I've been putting up with it. But now it occurs to me that the system may be waiting for my external drives (two of which have system clones on them) to wake up.

So -- do you have externals? I'll see about dismounting my externals and testing "open with." That's the one that really annoys me.

 

[ollie.x]

I see the #5 issue regularly.

With the open/save dialog I figure it's because at least one item in my recent list was either on my NAS or an external spinning drive.

With the big lag in "open with" I've been putting up with it. But now it occurs to me that the system may be waiting for my external drives (two of which have system clones on them) to wake up.

So -- do you have externals? I'll see about dismounting my externals and testing "open with." That's the one that really annoys me.

Aloha monokakata,

thanks so much for your input. Yes - I've got several external devices hooked up to my iMac, some USB3-Drives (on a USB3-hub), one SSD drive via Thunderbolt hub, plus one Synology NAS via LAN.

I had the exact same set up on an external Thunderbolt hub with my 2011 MacBookPro, also running Yosemite, no problems there as far as I can remember ...

 

[monokakata]

Aloha. I didn't get to testing it today, but I'll try tomorrow.

With the application thing -- do you see "Fetching" while it's doing whatever it's doing? I do, and I've never seen that before, on any Mac I've had.

 

[jjd]

Wow

That is terrible. Is this a widespread issue? I had heard about the MC stutter, but 15 secs to Open With? I am about to order one of these but this would drive me nuts.

Ollie.x do you mind sharing your machine specs?

 

[joe-h2o]

That is terrible. Is this a widespread issue? I had heard about the MC stutter, but 15 secs to Open With? I am about to order one of these but this would drive me nuts.

Ollie.x do you mind sharing your machine specs?

It will depend on what you have connected. With a drive mounted but spun-down, the dialog box won't display until the Finder has spun the disk back up (or had a network response from a shared drive).

Thus, the delay is determined pretty much whatever the slowest drive to respond to a Finder command that you have mounted.

 

[steve62388]

On point three the boot up volume change I have seen other people report that here. Do a thread search, this might be a bug in Yosemite.

 

[driftless]

That is terrible. Is this a widespread issue? I had heard about the MC stutter, but 15 secs to Open With? I am about to order one of these but this would drive me nuts.

Ollie.x do you mind sharing your machine specs?

No, it is not a widespread issue. I suspect that with some sleuthing it will be specific to Ollie.x's configuration.

Ollie.x - did I read you right, you are running a second monitor off of the 5K iMac? If so, how do you have it configured? Do you have the same issues if the second monitor is disconnected. I will be interested to hear how adding more RAM effects your system.

 

[richard371]

Id like to see if you have these issues with the extra ram and no external devices plugged in.

 

[ollie.x]

Hi there!

Thanks for joining in.

First of all: I did a complete reinstall - from scratch. This helped somewhat with the lag, which is less severe - but still present.

Issue #5 somewhat resolved by disabling hard drive sleep in energy options. Much quicker now ... joe-h2o provided some good info here.

@monokakata - you might want to test this for yourself and see if it makes a difference. Another option might be to rebuild the launch services db. On 10.9, I was able to do this via terminal with the following code:

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain user;killall Finder

(Please check if this still applies to 10.10 before running.)

@jjd - here you go:
4.0GHz, 1TB SSD, 925X, 32GB RAM, 10.10.2

So - basically maxed out.

@steve23094: Sorry, that was misleading. I was actually referring to the sound volume. Wake up Mac from sleep, and it's a few notches down - actually even showing the icon as if I had just used the F11 key ...

@richard371: Extra RAM ... hard to cram in ... it's already maxed out. 32GB system RAM, 2GB gfx RAM ... But - yeah, lag persists with only one screen ...

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BTW, here's a video of some of the issues:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0Lo4JwGJBA

Lag, Menu Pixelation, "Open With" lag - and strange sound issue at the end ....