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My mac is slowing WAY down, keep getting pinwheel of death.. Please help!

F

fastpicker89

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 29, 2009
8
0
So I'm not sure what's up, I've never had a problem with mac... But as of late, and I mean like this past week and a half, and without fail, my mac has slowed way on down. I mean I get the spinning pinwheel on almost every click and every action.

It will run smooth for a few actions, and then BAM... I try to open a new tab in Firefox and it just stops. I have to force quit. But it's not just Firefox... Microsoft Word, iTunes... whatever. When checking Activity Monitor, I have over 2 gb free.

Any help is much appreciated.

15" Macbook Pro
Processor: 2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
Memory: 4 gb 1067 MHz DDR3
Version: 10.6.8
 
fastpicker89 said:
So I'm not sure what's up, I've never had a problem with mac... But as of late, and I mean like this past week and a half, and without fail, my mac has slowed way on down. I mean I get the spinning pinwheel on almost every click and every action.

It will run smooth for a few actions, and then BAM... I try to open a new tab in Firefox and it just stops. I have to force quit. But it's not just Firefox... Microsoft Word, iTunes... whatever. When checking Activity Monitor, I have over 2 gb free.

Any help is much appreciated.

15" Macbook Pro
Processor: 2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
Memory: 4 gb 1067 MHz DDR3
Version: 10.6.8
Click to expand...

are you running low on hard drive space?

in activity monitor what are you page outs vs you page ins?
 
fastpicker89 said:
I have 121GB used and 128GB free...

Page ins: 3.96GB
Page Outs: 2GB
Click to expand...

you likely need more RAM you page outs should never be that high, a true test would be to reboot your MBP to reset the page in/outs and use it for a few hours than see what those numbers are

you page outs would be at or close to 0 if you never ran out of ram during usage
 
iisforiphone said:
you likely need more RAM you page outs should never be that high, a true test would be to reboot your MBP to reset the page in/outs and use it for a few hours than see what those numbers are

you page outs would be at or close to 0 if you never ran out of ram during usage
Click to expand...
That's not true. His page outs are fine. That's not the issue here.

OP: Have you checked Activity Monitor to see if there are any runaway processes consuming all of your CPU cycles? Make sure you're looking at "All Processes" not just your own.
 
Bill Gates said:
That's not true. His page outs are fine. That's not the issue here.

OP: Have you checked Activity Monitor to see if there are any runaway processes consuming all of your CPU cycles? Make sure you're looking at "All Processes" not just your own.
Click to expand...

well unless he never reboots his page outs should not be 2GB if his page ins are less than 4GB, you are running out of RAM often for page outs to get that high if your rebooting every day
 
fastpicker89 said:
So I'm not sure what's up, I've never had a problem with mac... But as of late, and I mean like this past week and a half, and without fail, my mac has slowed way on down. I mean I get the spinning pinwheel on almost every click and every action.
Click to expand...
Launch Activity Monitor and change "My Processes" at the top to "All Processes", then click on the CPU column heading once or twice, so the arrow points downward (highest values on top). Also, click on the System Memory tab at the bottom. Then take a screen shot, scroll down to see the rest of the list, take another screen shot and post them.

Performance Tips For Mac OS X
iisforiphone said:
in activity monitor what are you page outs vs you page ins?
Click to expand...
There is no meaningful correlation between page outs and page ins. You will always have page ins, but you may not ever have page outs. Also, you can run for weeks or months, accumulating page ins, then go through a period of intense activity for only a few minutes which produces page outs. No ratio between the two is useful. The only thing that indicates a need for more RAM is the presence of significant page outs during normal workload, regardless of the page ins.

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.
 
Last edited:
GGJstudios said:
Launch Activity Monitor and change "My Processes" at the top to "All Processes", then click on the CPU column heading once or twice, so the arrow points downward (highest values on top). Then look to see what may be consuming system resources.

Performance Tips For Mac OS X

There is no meaningful correlation between page outs and page ins. You will always have page ins, but you may not ever have page outs. Also, you can run for weeks or months, accumulating page ins, then go through a period of intense activity for only a few minutes which produces page outs. No ratio between the two is useful. The only thing that indicates a need for more RAM is the presence of significant page outs during normal workload, regardless of the page ins.

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.
Click to expand...

thanks for correcting me

i did mention to the OP to do a reboot and than monitor his page outs after a few hours of normal use, but Bill Gates says page outs dont mean anything
 
iisforiphone said:
thanks for correcting me

i did mention to the OP to do a reboot and than monitor his page outs after a few hours of normal use, but Bill Gates says page outs dont mean anything
Click to expand...
Since page outs are cumulative since the last restart, it's entirely possible that the OP went through a period of high memory demands that caused the page outs hours or days ago, but that demand is long since past. High CPU usage is a more common culprit for beachballing, unless there's high paging activity on a drive that's almost full. Because page outs are cumulative, they need to be looked at along with current free and inactive memory, to determine if paging is currently happening, or if it occurred in the past and is no longer an issue.
 
GGJstudios said:
Since page outs are cumulative since the last restart, it's entirely possible that the OP went through a period of high memory demands that caused the page outs hours or days ago, but that demand is long since past. High CPU usage is a more common culprit for beachballing, unless there's high paging activity on a drive that's almost full. Because page outs are cumulative, they need to be looked at along with current free and inactive memory, to determine if paging is currently happening, or if it occurred in the past and is no longer an issue.
Click to expand...

so how high should page outs be if your rebooted daily?
 
iisforiphone said:
so how high should page outs be if your rebooted daily?
Click to expand...
If you have sufficient RAM for the workload you have, page outs will be zero. However, not everyone's workload remains constant. Having page outs from time to time during peaks in memory demands isn't a bad thing. Having constant page outs under your normal workload is.

Freyqq said:
2GB/4GB is high. That's 50%.
Click to expand...
Read my earlier post (#9). The ratio is meaningless.
 
Freyqq said:
2GB/4GB is high. That's 50%.

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depends on what you are doing.
Click to expand...

let me try and re-phrase that, if you doing everyday tasks

obviously if you do something that uses a lot of RAM but its something you rarely do than it shouldn't make you go out and get more RAM but at what point should you consider more RAM based on page outs after 4-5 hours of your normal everyday usage
 
Create a new user

Had a very similar problem. Crate a new user and see if the problem goes away. If it does, then your user folder got corrupted somehow. Did you manually add something from an older user to the new user? (I am guilty of that.)
 
Tried turning it off and letting it sit a while. When I turned back on, It took about a minute to open Firefox because of the evil pinwheel.
 

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fastpicker89 said:
Tried turning it off and letting it sit a while. When I turned back on, It took about a minute to open Firefox because of the evil pinwheel.
Click to expand...
Did you look at the performance tips I posted? Especially the first 3? I'd also disable all Firefox plugins and see how it performs.
 
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