MacBook randomly slows down, despite CPU/RAM ok.

[Flore]

Hello everyone.

I am having problems with my blackbook 2.16ghz 2GB RAM, 320 HDD, 10.5.6.

The issues are random slowdowns and lots of beachballs since yesterday.

At the moment I am running iTunes, Safari, Adium & Skype only.
Might add that it's Safari 4Beta and also the Skype beta.

Now even at this fairly basic usage I get slowdowns in typing (the letters won't follow up), iTunes playing a song when i click it, or Safari when opening a new tab. Sometimes I will get the beachball, sometimes not.

Now I have 40GB of Harddrive space left, Hardware seems ok, restored permissions, ran all the maintenance scripts (Onyx, MainMenu), followed Activity Monitor to determine potential problems, but I never get more than 50% CPU and I always have at least 500MB free RAM left (way more Page Ins than Page outs also).

I know this is all very vague but I just cannot nail an issue, as most of the time everything runs smooth, but just every 30min or so I experience extreme performance problems.

Maybe you have any idea, I will keep updating this when I discover more relevant information.

 

[SHADO]

Have you tried running Disk Warrior or Drive Genius 2 to de-frag your directory? This would be my suggestion.

 

[techound1]

What happens when you avoid the betas? Just use itunes, say.

 

[Flore]

Have you tried running Disk Warrior or Drive Genius 2 to de-frag your directory? This would be my suggestion.

Not yet but these cost a ton of money.
I want to avoid spending money on stuff is not necessarily useful for now.. crisis you know

What happens when you avoid the betas? Just use itunes, say.

I had it running with iTunes and did some file movement in finder for a while, the problem is still there.. might be less prominent but it is hard to say as all this is very random...
On the other hand I doubt this is caused by an app, just judging from what I can observe in activity monitor.

I am just not used to have this kind of lag and I don't think it is normal.

Thanks for your input, both of you though!

 

[coday182]

Man I am having this exact same problem. Same observations and same attempted remedies as the OP. My biggest problem seems to be coming from itunes. I have my library on a 500gb portable USB2.0 ext drive, and have never had a single problem with it since probably November (think that's when I got it). But now I can't listen to music on iTunes! It's like when I listen to music, I'm trying to stream it from a 56k connection. I click on a song but iTunes doesn't react for 10 or so seconds and when it does I get a pattern of 5 seconds audio 5 seconds freezing 5 seconds audio...

And the same kind of lag/delayed response time is happening with Safari (3.1.2)

 

[ViciousShadow21]

you should take a look at your activities monitor. something may be running in the background that doesnt need to be.