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Early 2011 MBP becoming slow, beachballs alot

T

troop231

macrumors 603
Original poster
Jan 20, 2010
5,827
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I have a early 2011 MBP 2.3 GHz 15" and I can't believe how many beachballs I get and unresponsive it is doing even mundane tasks every day. I have 8GB of RAM installed. I'm also using Lion 10.7.5

Is there anything you recommend to speed up my system or do I need to do a total reinstall?

Thanks for the help!
 
Open Activity Monitor and go to the System Memory* tab and look for Page Outs and Swap used and report back.

Do you have an SSD or HDD? If it is the latter, you can use the following applications to benchmark the speed of your HDD, to see, if it is the culprit and report back the random and sequential read and write speeds:

If you want to enhance the performance of your Mac, be sure to check these two articles, do not just use applications, that promise to do it for you.
 
At a time when you're experiencing slow performance, follow every step of the following instructions precisely. Do not skip any steps.
  1. Launch Activity Monitor
  2. Change "My Processes" at the top to "All Processes"
  3. Click on the "% CPU" column heading once or twice, so the arrow points downward (highest values on top).
    (If that column isn't visible, right-click on the column headings and check it, NOT "CPU Time")
  4. Click on the System Memory tab at the bottom.
  5. Take a screen shot of the entire Activity Monitor window, then scroll down to see the rest of the list, take another screen shot
  6. Post your screenshots.

If you're having performance issues, this may help:
 
GGJstudios said:
At a time when you're experiencing slow performance, follow every step of the following instructions precisely. Do not skip any steps.
  1. Launch Activity Monitor
  2. Change "My Processes" at the top to "All Processes"
  3. Click on the "% CPU" column heading once or twice, so the arrow points downward (highest values on top).
    (If that column isn't visible, right-click on the column headings and check it, NOT "CPU Time")
  4. Click on the System Memory tab at the bottom.
  5. Take a screen shot of the entire Activity Monitor window, then scroll down to see the rest of the list, take another screen shot
  6. Post your screenshots.

If you're having performance issues, this may help:
Click to expand...

w8Q9MJg.png
 
troop231 said:
Image
Click to expand...
You have significant page outs. When is the last time you restarted your Mac?

To determine if you can benefit from more RAM, launch Activity Monitor and click the System Memory tab at the bottom to check your page outs. 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.

Using Activity Monitor to read System Memory and determine how much RAM is being used
 
GGJstudios said:
You have significant page outs. When is the last time you restarted your Mac?

To determine if you can benefit from more RAM, launch Activity Monitor and click the System Memory tab at the bottom to check your page outs. 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.

Using Activity Monitor to read System Memory and determine how much RAM is being used
Click to expand...

I haven't restarted in a few weeks at least I think. Thank you for the helpful tips and information, I will restart and report back later.
 
troop231 said:
I haven't restarted in a few weeks at least I think. Thank you for the helpful tips and information, I will restart and report back later.
Click to expand...

No need to restart, just open terminal and type in purge, wait for the process to finish and voila, free RAM.
 
Upgrade RAM and maybe wipe your drive and restore from backup that way you eliminate fragmentation (yes it exists in OS X). Buying an SSD is also another option.
 
A full day after restarting, and all is well and speedy again. 0 bytes of page outs. :)

Thanks for the help!
 
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