New MBP bogs

[tlawski]

Hi All,

I just got my new MBP a couple of weeks ago. I'm not new to Apple products, as I previously owned an Apple IIe so I'm very familiar with the Mac world.

I'm loving the MBP but do have one concern and want to understand if this is common. For the most part I have no problems with any component of the machine, however, once in a while I notice that the machine completely bogs down and all operability effectively comes to a halt. The mouse won't move, I get that kaleidoscope circle/"I'm busy processing so please wait" thing, and the apps wont respond for about 30 seconds at a time, then everything seems fine for about 30 seconds, then goes back to being slow again. The only way I've been able to correct this is to do a hard shutdown which makes me cringe each time I'm forced to do that. It's only been twice that I've done this so far, but obviously my preference is to avoid this. I'm not currently running anything system intensive, but at the times that this problem is happening I have had Panic Unison and MacPar DeLuxe running in the background.

I've got the base model MBP and I've ordered 4GB of RAM from OWC on the way. My question is whether or not anyone else has experienced this and if the RAM upgrade will help.

Thanks

 

[alphaod]

Have you tried removing the possible culprits to see if it happens again?

 

[tlawski]

what do you mean by possible culprits?

 

[adamfishercox]

it diesn't sound like this is just lack of RAM... but give it a try and see if it fixes it. If not, take it to an Apple store. 4 GB of RAM should be PLENTY.

 

[gpeden]

what do you mean by possible culprits?

One way to find them is to open "activity monitor" and see which app or function is using a lot of CPU %. Here's an example that occurred to me recently. FireFox was using 100% of the CPU (good thing I have two processors, hehe) and things were really, really slow. It turns out that the TV listing website I use downloads a video or two (flash perhaps?) and even though the download had finished and it appeared that the video was not playing at all at that point, that one page was the culprit. Close that one page and the CPU usage of FireFox would drop to less than 10%. Reboot and try again and got the same result. So for me, that one page is a "culprit". Since FireFox does not seem to enable restricting individual sites to text only, I will likely access that one page with a different browser app setup for "minimalist" viewing

Cheers!

Glen

 

[tlawski]

hmm interesting. I'll try and next time it happens.

thanks for the tips