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iMac Painfully Slow Since Lion Upgrade

E

effectivepull

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 22, 2011
25
0
Greetings,

I recently upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion and my iMac is now painfully slow. Sometimes it takes Photoshop CS5 multiple minutes (spinning beach ball) to process things that took seconds before the upgrade. It's not only isolated to Photoshop. I'm also having difficulties with Firefox (ver. 5.0.1), Aperture 3 (ver. 3.1.3) and other programs.

I've tried repairing disk permissions but I didn't see a speed boost.

Here are the specs for my iMac: Processor: 2.66 GHZ Intel Core i5
Memory: 8GB 1067 MHz DDR3.

Anyone have any new suggestions? Or is this something I should expect for a iMac that is a few years old?

Thanks!
 
My guess is that something went wrong during your upgrade. Not sure how you can do a reinstall without a clean install (erase everything and fresh install lion) though.
 
Have you rebooted since the upgrade completed? My Macbook was painfully slow when it first booted after the upgrade. Once I rebooted, with the restore programs option unchecked, it returned to normal.
 
@Abazigal - I feared the whole reinstall via Snow Leopard then to Lion. I'm hoping there was something that I was missing as I have only been using Macs for a few years.

@velictyg4 - I've rebooted many times since upgrade and no luck.

Any other suggestions or input would be greatly appreciated.
 
effectivepull said:
@Abazigal - I feared the whole reinstall via Snow Leopard then to Lion. I'm hoping there was something that I was missing as I have only been using Macs for a few years.

@velictyg4 - I've rebooted many times since upgrade and no luck.

Any other suggestions or input would be greatly appreciated.
Click to expand...

I would suggest creating a Lion USB and do a clean install of Lion. When I upgraded from Snow Leopard it wasn't slow, however now after a clean install of everything it's extremely fast. Was worth the couple of hours it took to get everything back the way it was. I didn't want to restore from a Time Machine backup.
 
Before you go the clean install route, try booting into the restore partition and do a Lion restore. This will just do a overwrite of the system as it is. If that does not work then I suggest you do a clean install after you do a backup.

EDIT: Also open the console app and see if there are any crash logs. Maybe you have a third party app which is causing the slow down due to being incompatible with Lion.
 
Could it be that the Spotlight Index is still rebuilding? When the Lion upgraded is completed, it rebuilds the index. You can see if there is a dot in the magnifying glass. The rebuilding can cause slowness.
 
MrMoore said:
Could it be that the Spotlight Index is still rebuilding? When the Lion upgraded is completed, it rebuilds the index. You can see if there is a dot in the magnifying glass. The rebuilding can cause slowness.
Click to expand...

This is definitely something to consider and rule out. This is a well documented cause of performance degradation following an install of Lion. Once that is complete, I would not expect you to notice any performance change (good or bad) versus Snow Leopard.

As you state that the performance drop is across the board, have you checked Activity Monitor to ascertain if any other applications are hogging CPU time?
 
Thank you all so much for your thoughtful responses. This forum is awesome and a wealth of information.

I've ruled out Spotlight rebuilding, there does not appear to be any resources suck by any app in the Activity Monitor, and the console app does not reveal any crashes - that I can see anyway.

I will continue to monitor this string for the next few days and if the problem doesn't resolve, I'll to do a Lion restore via restore partition. If that doesn't work, then it will be a complete wipe and reinstall (I'm dreading having to re-reference all my photos in Aperture!).

Thanks again and please keep any suggestions you have coming!
 
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