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Macbook Air 2011 too slow!

S

SpeedFleX

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Apr 22, 2009
301
2
Interwebz
Hi all,

I just got my macbook air 2011 and unpacked it, booting seem ok but nothing special compared to my macbook 2008.

Anyways everything seems just slow so I did a geekbench 32 Bit test, my old macbook has a score oaf 3403, my air only 1847. What is wrong?!?
 
It will probably be Spotlight (mds) doing the initial indexing.

______________________________________________________
Have a look at Activity Monitor (Applications / Utilities /) and select All Processes and sort by CPU to see what the culprit may be.
image below uses sorting by CPU as an example
Acitivty_Monitor.png

Further reading:
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6​
 
Last edited:
SpeedFleX said:
Hi all,

I just got my macbook air 2011 and unpacked it, booting seem ok but nothing special compared to my macbook 2008.

Anyways everything seems just slow so I did a geekbench 32 Bit test, my old macbook has a score oaf 3403, my air only 1847. What is wrong?!?
Click to expand...

Seems odd. There people who have been Geekbenching theirs in 32 bit haven't been as fast as the 64 bit test. Perhaps there is something wrong with your unit?
 
SpeedFleX said:
Hi all,

I just got my macbook air 2011 and unpacked it, booting seem ok but nothing special compared to my macbook 2008.

Anyways everything seems just slow so I did a geekbench 32 Bit test, my old macbook has a score oaf 3403, my air only 1847. What is wrong?!?
Click to expand...

Are you sure it's a 2011? The i5 is putting out GeekBench scores in the 5000s.

http://www.primatelabs.ca/geekbench/mac-benchmarks/

Lion boots a bit more slowly than Snow Leopard did. The 2010s booted in about 15 seconds. The 2011s are closer to 20. Hopefully 10.7.1 fixes this.
 
I will wait a bit maybe it is spotlight Write is at 10MB/s Read is 0, but as an example I sent a file over Airdrop and Finder CPU kept spiking to over 160%.

it's the 13" i5.
 
SpeedFleX said:
I will wait a bit maybe it is spotlight Write is at 10MB/s Read is 0, but as an example I sent a file over Airdrop and Finder CPU kept spiking to over 160%.

it's the 13" i5.
Click to expand...

You might have a problem with yours. I have the 2011 11" i5 1.6 and it FLIES!! How much ram do you have?? 4GB is the minimum you should be running. Sure they sell a 2GB model, but the way I use my mac I have about 600MB-1GB free at most times on 4GB....I don't think 2GB would be useable!
 
SpeedFleX said:
I will wait a bit maybe it is spotlight Write is at 10MB/s Read is 0, but as an example I sent a file over Airdrop and Finder CPU kept spiking to over 160%.

it's the 13" i5.
Click to expand...

It's Spotlight. That 13" 1.7GHz i5 is Turbo Boosting to 2.4GHz most of the time, and with the SSD (either one) it should be significantly faster at just about everything than your 2008 MacBook.
 
gentlefury said:
You might have a problem with yours. I have the 2011 11" i5 1.6 and it FLIES!! How much ram do you have?? 4GB is the minimum you should be running. Sure they sell a 2GB model, but the way I use my mac I have about 600MB-1GB free at most times on 4GB....I don't think 2GB would be useable!
Click to expand...

yes 4 GB

here are my geekbench scores:


Geekbench Summary

System Information
Platform: Mac OS X x86 (32-bit)
Compiler: GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5494)
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.7 (Build 11A2063)
Model: MacBookAir4,2
Motherboard: Apple Inc. Mac-742912EFDBEE19B3 MacBookAir4,2
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2557M CPU @ 1.70GHz
Processor ID: GenuineIntel Family 6 Model 42 Stepping 7
Logical Processors: 4
Physical Processors: 1
Processor Frequency: 1.70 GHz
L1 Instruction Cache: 32.0 KB
L1 Data Cache: 32.0 KB
L2 Cache: 256 KB
L3 Cache: 3.00 MB
Bus Frequency: 100.0 MHz
Memory: 4.00 GB
Memory Type: 1333 MHz DDR3
SIMD: 1
BIOS: Apple Inc. MBA41.88Z.0077.B00.1106300929
Processor Model: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2557M CPU @ 1.70GHz
Processor Cores: 2

Geekbench 2 Score: 1851

Integer Performance (Score: 1279)
Blowfish
single-threaded scalar -- 516, 22.7 MB/sec
multi-threaded scalar -- 1756, 72.0 MB/sec
Text Compress
single-threaded scalar -- 682, 2.18 MB/sec
multi-threaded scalar -- 1796, 5.89 MB/sec
Text Decompress
single-threaded scalar -- 741, 3.05 MB/sec
multi-threaded scalar -- 2013, 8.02 MB/sec
Image Compress
single-threaded scalar -- 572, 4.73 Mpixels/sec
multi-threaded scalar -- 1544, 13.0 Mpixels/sec
Image Decompress
single-threaded scalar -- 578, 9.72 Mpixels/sec
multi-threaded scalar -- 1362, 22.2 Mpixels/sec
Lua
single-threaded scalar -- 1141, 439.3 Knodes/sec
multi-threaded scalar -- 2652, 1.02 Mnodes/sec

Floating Point Performance (Score: 2381)
Mandelbrot
single-threaded scalar -- 675, 449.3 Mflops
multi-threaded scalar -- 2408, 1.58 Gflops
Dot Product
single-threaded scalar -- 1074, 519.1 Mflops
multi-threaded scalar -- 3051, 1.39 Gflops
single-threaded vector -- 1323, 1.59 Gflops
multi-threaded vector -- 3691, 3.84 Gflops
LU Decomposition
single-threaded scalar -- 311, 277.0 Mflops
multi-threaded scalar -- 742, 651.3 Mflops
Primality Test
single-threaded scalar -- 1644, 245.6 Mflops
multi-threaded scalar -- 3261, 605.3 Mflops
Sharpen Image
single-threaded scalar -- 1518, 3.54 Mpixels/sec
multi-threaded scalar -- 4986, 11.5 Mpixels/sec
Blur Image
single-threaded scalar -- 1923, 1.52 Mpixels/sec
multi-threaded scalar -- 6736, 5.30 Mpixels/sec

Memory Performance (Score: 1864)
Read Sequential
single-threaded scalar -- 1848, 2.26 GB/sec
Write Sequential
single-threaded scalar -- 2461, 1.68 GB/sec
Stdlib Allocate
single-threaded scalar -- 922, 3.44 Mallocs/sec
Stdlib Write
single-threaded scalar -- 1823, 3.77 GB/sec
Stdlib Copy
single-threaded scalar -- 2267, 2.34 GB/sec

Stream Performance (Score: 1979)
Stream Copy
single-threaded scalar -- 1701, 2.33 GB/sec
single-threaded vector -- 2928, 3.80 GB/sec
Stream Scale
single-threaded scalar -- 1799, 2.33 GB/sec
single-threaded vector -- 2832, 3.82 GB/sec
Stream Add
single-threaded scalar -- 598, 925.1 MB/sec
single-threaded vector -- 3025, 4.21 GB/sec
Stream Triad
single-threaded scalar -- 685, 970.2 MB/sec
single-threaded vector -- 2267, 4.24 GB/sec
 
Try running Geekbench 64 tomorrow. Let Spotlight run its course today. How much data does it have to index?
 
KPOM said:
Try running Geekbench 64 tomorrow. Let Spotlight run its course today. How much data does it have to index?
Click to expand...

its just the fresh install didn't put any other data on it, no migration no time machine. Ok I'll just wait i didn't know indexing took the system down so much, I expected maybe a 1000 points but almost 4000 is pretty bad..
 
Why does all this indexing need to take place?

Surely all these laptops are being shipped with the same image and so could they not have been images from one where the initial indexing has already taken place.
 
I just ran the geek bench test, have the same laptop as OP and got a 5439 score. I think there may be something off with your computer. My computer screams, 5X faster than my 2009 MBP.
 
Mlrollin91 said:
I just ran the geek bench test, have the same laptop as OP and got a 5439 score. I think there may be something off with your computer. My computer screams, 5X faster than my 2009 MBP.
Click to expand...

yeah that is what I'm afraid of^^Such is life sometimes, I decided to reinstall Lion just for the heck of it.
 
I think I fixed it.

I reset the NVRAM and Pram, didn't help :(

reinstalled OSX Lion, didn't help :(

went to the Apple Store, didn't help :(

reset the SMC, this helped^^Maybe a temp fix but atleast geekbench jumped to 5432
 
My 13" i7 did pretty well on Geekbench. This was the 64 bit test.
 

Attachments

  • 2011-08-04 05.27.22 pm.jpg
    2011-08-04 05.27.22 pm.jpg
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Wait, did you actually all spend $12.99 just to get the 64-bit version?????

Second (independent) question: What should the score be for the 32-bit version?

Third question: What should the Xbench score be?
 
macbook123 said:
Wait, did you actually all spend $12.99 just to get the 64-bit version?????

Second (independent) question: What should the score be for the 32-bit version?

Third question: What should the Xbench score be?
Click to expand...

No, I just ran the 32-bit version.

As for XBench, it's out of date and the thread test doesn't work right in Lion (it freezes there), but here are my results for the other tests.
 

Attachments

  • XBench Rev E 11%22 i7 Samsung SSD.pdf
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