Yosemite was running incredibly laggy and jaggy on my 2012 13". Also terrible battery performance, about 2-3 hours on average. I had done a completely fresh install and no recovery. I reset my SMC and PRAM, fixed the problem for me. Smooth as butter now. Hopefully it also helps the battery probs, but will know that after couple of days.
Hello there,
I did a clean install of Yosemite when it came out. However, after Spotlight indexing and rebooting, the overall system performance was sluggish. Sure, I only have 4 gb of non-upgradeable ram, but Mavericks performed really awesome (no swap files and blazing fast etc). But now I can see that the system begins to swap files on my SDD (info: memory pressure: green), susually a couple of hundred MB's.
Can you guys please give me a tip how to solve this problem? Because I think that Yosemite is supposed to be blazing fast on my Mac just like Mavs was. And Apple still sells Macs with 4GB of ram in the baseline MBA configuration. I heard something like PRAM reset?
Thank you in advance.
Even on my mid-2011 MBA (1,7 Ghz Core i5, 4 GD DDR3 1333 Mhz, 128 GB SSD) Yosemite is equally fast (if not faster) than Mavericks. Now that I come to think of it, it DOES actually feel snappier than Mavericks at many tasks.
I don't know what the cause of your problem could be. It SHOULD be blazing fast, considering that it's already plenty fast on my MBA which is one year older than yours.
Here are a few things I can think about that might cause the slowdown:
- you enabled FileVault at the installation (I don't exactly know how it works, but it might affect performance)
- Mail.app is still downloading your entire, say, Gmail library
- your SSD is near to the end of its lifetime (very unlikely)
4 GB ram is plenty enough for Yosemite (I dare to say, even 2 gigs should be sufficient for many).
The only thing I needed to do is to invert the icons for BitTorrent Sync for dark mode.
As an example, I used my system all day today without it getting laggy, but I minimized my use of Preview.app. If I open several PDFs in Preview.app, the system will--without fail--get laggy in less than an hour.
[...]
I suspect the problem lies in a buggy GPU driver in Yosemite.
Been hearing stories about the animations/scrolling being jerky/laggy due to the transparency. I heard turning off the transparency helps, but that isn't a solution in my mind. Any truth to this?
and why do you think it's a problem of the GPU? I'm no expert at all but wouldn't you rather suspect that somethings wrong with the preview app?
no I hate it. Loved it on mavericks. Now I'm starting to hate my macbook air. Its slow as ****. Same stuff opened. Takes an age to do stuff. WTF!![]()
do a PRAM and SMC reset, that might help. You can find instructions easily via google
edit: Or I'll search them for you
SMC: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US
Note the "Indicators" portion on the page.
PRAM: http://support.apple.com/kb/PH14222?viewlocale=en_US
I may be jumping to conclusions by saying it's the GPU drivers (or even just the underlying graphics rendering systems, e.g., WindowServer), but I think it's telling that the problem persists after Preview.app is closed. That tells me that there is something more going on than just Preview.app behaving badly.
For example, if the system was slow while Preview.app is open, and it was clear that Preview.app is eating CPU and/or memory during this time, then I would peg it directly on Preview.app. However, this is not the case. Instead, it appears to me that Preview.app is more likely a catalyst for something else to go bad (I have not ruled out the possibility that other programs can lead to the lagginess--I just haven't gathered enough data points yet).
Since the CPU/memory load is not bad when the drawing of windows and animations in laggy, that makes me think it's a GPU and/or WindowServer problem--and Peview.app brings it out. It may be that there is also a problem in Preview.app that causes the GPU/WindowServer problems, but I suspect there is an underlying issue in the GPU drivers and/or WindowServer.
I'm not a developer, so take this with a grain of salt. I'll continue to gather data...
Ya know, I am starting to see Apples strategy with Yosemite and IOS 8. With Continuity, Handoff, and iCloud Drive, the user moves pretty effortlessly from one interface to another.....desktop, laptop, tablet, phone. So, rather than trying to get one device and OS to do everything and be everything for everyone, Apple optimizes the experience for each form factor (e.g Tablets optimized for touch, and Laptops optimize with gestures and trackpads) and then makes the transitions seamless between devices.