Common reasons for lag on MacBook Pros/Leopard?

[jbischke]

Hi all. I have a MacBook Pro that's a couple of years old. I'm running 10.5.6 on a 2.16 GHz Core 2 with 2 GB of RAM. As of late I've been noticed some very poor performance, specifically a lot of lag and sluggishness.

This manifests itself in a few ways. I notice when I'm playing music through iTunes or streaming sites that it gets very choppy. My mouse tends to lag at times and I also notice it when using Expose (the windows don't move smoothly). I've also had a couple of system crashes lately which I rarely had previous to the last couple of months.

I've searched some forums and tried some of the fixes (e.g., repairing disk permissions) but these things haven't helped. It's possible that I just need to up my hardware although when I check Activity Monitor I sometimes, but don't always, see the CPU spiked when I'm noticing problems.

Are there any steps I can take to diagnose what's going on here and potentially fix this?

 

[DJ567]

It is unlikely that this is your problem but its a problem i had when i bought my new macbook pro everything was sluggish from new in much the same way u described.

Oddly i fixed it by changing the sleep mode

see this site for more info

http://www.macworld.com/article/53471/2006/10/sleepmode.html

i changed mine from option 3 to option 1, as well as making my mac go to sleep and wake much faster. it also significantly improved the performance. I can only imagine it was issue caused by writing the ram to the hard disk where it didnt write back to the ram and thus causing poor performance

 

[neonblue2]

I can only imagine it was issue caused by writing the ram to the hard disk where it didnt write back to the ram and thus causing poor performance

That wouldn't be it. The RAM is always specifically copied to one location under the name sleepimage. If your system wasn't using it right then you'd have a problem.

What you should check out, jbischke, is if you have any PowerPC processes or applications running, or just anything that's been chewing up a lot of RAM and/or virtual memory. Even a small PPC process can cause hiccups and anything that likes to eat resources if probably paging to the disk more than it should be.

It also doesn't hurt to turn off your computer every once in a while if you don't already.

 

[jbischke]

Yeah, I reboot a lot. At first the rebooting seemed to be helping but now even after I've just rebooted I am often noticing problems. I can't pin it down to anything. Firefox seems to be hogging a lot of resources but it occurs even when Firefox isn't launched so that likely isn't the whole story.

 

[jbischke]

I think I figured this out. I noticed in Activity Monitor that Firefox was spiking every few seconds and that this spike correlated perfectly with my mouse lag/freeze. I switched to Camino and the problem has not returned. It's a bit of a bummer because there are some things I like about Firefox that Camino doesn't have. However Camino is a much faster browser and that plus curing my system of the freezes and choppiness is well worth it.