Lion slow whereas Windows on Bootcamp is a breeze

[lukeanderson]

Hey guys, just have some annoyances with Lion on my iMac.

I have a 27-inch Mid 2011 iMac (Quad Core i7 with 4GB of RAM) and it came preinstalled with Lion. I noticed my computer was freezing up whenever I was doing simple tasks like looking at a web page with Safari so I download FreeMemory from the Mac App Store. I saw that Lion requires nearly 3GB to run leaving me with just under a GB to do simple tasks. I can be running a few apps and in the menu bar it will say something like "60MB free". I've recently just reinstalled Lion as well, and it was the same with the last install. Is this right?!

I've also recently installed Windows 7 Ultimate with Bootcamp and weirdly it is a breeze to use. It's amazing. It's still quite bad with it using 1.70GB when I'm just browsing the web but it's better than Lion! I still have over 2 GB left, and everything is just so fast.

This is so weird and from such a powerful system I really wouldn't expect it. Anyone have any suggestions about why it's being so slow/how I can remedy it?


Thanks so much for reading that rant, any help is appreciated!

 

[ckeck]

Bump...

Would like to see if anyone else has seen this or diagnosed it as well. I've been having a similar issue on my late-2011 MBP and it's quite annoying. I've owned tons of Apple hardware and never seen this discrepancy in performance before.

Lion is constantly slow/sluggish yet Windows under Bootcamp screams. I even did a clean format and install of both the other week just incase something went screwy w/ OS X but the problem persists. It may not be 'huge' but certainly noticeable when it shouldn't be. If anything I'd expect to see the opposite.

 

[swingerofbirch]

From what I've read this seems to be the consensus. Even those who defend Lion tirelessly never say that it offers improved performance over Snow Leopard. At the most they seem to say it's the same. It's definitely more resource intensive on my 13" MBP.

If Microsoft were business savvy, they'd offer Mac users a free trial of Windows 7, given Apple has practically given Microsoft a trojan horse to ride in on (Boot Camp), with a feature that was intended to attract Windows users to the Mac . . . it could do the opposite if Microsoft were a little more adept at marketing.

 

[mark28]

Bump...

Would like to see if anyone else has seen this or diagnosed it as well. I've been having a similar issue on my late-2011 MBP and it's quite annoying. I've owned tons of Apple hardware and never seen this discrepancy in performance before.

Lion is constantly slow/sluggish yet Windows under Bootcamp screams. I even did a clean format and install of both the other week just incase something went screwy w/ OS X but the problem persists. It may not be 'huge' but certainly noticeable when it shouldn't be. If anything I'd expect to see the opposite.

I have been saying that Windows 7 is better than Lion months ago. I'm sticking to Snow Leopard and hope that Mountain Lion is better.

 

[GGJstudios]

I saw that Lion requires nearly 3GB to run leaving me with just under a GB to do simple tasks. I can be running a few apps and in the menu bar it will say something like "60MB free".

There's more to the story than just free memory. Inactive memory is also available for use by apps. You don't have to worry about memory management, as Mac OS X handles that well, without user interference. The only thing you need to watch for is page outs. 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.

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor