I've been patiently waiting for a new machine the last couple of years. I have been able to push my 2007 Santa Rosa Macbook Pro 3,1 so far to meet my needs by upgrading the ram to 4gb and getting faster sata hard drives.
Lately performance came to a grinding hold with Lion. I work in computer security so am quite familiar with the underlying functions of osx. For some reason, memory management wasn't the best with Lion, everything would write to disk and because the sata chip was limited to 1.5gb/s there wasn't too much I could change. It just didn't feel right. Believe me I've tried it all with checking permissions, recovery disk checking, digging around in unix, even thought of moving swap files somewhere else or turned them off...
So I started digging around some more and remembered that I had enabled the 64bit kernel with lion. My guess was this was just too much for my machine, so I forced it to boot the standard 32bit kernel and what a difference! It flies like it used to in Snow Leopard! Today I had all the adobe apps open, lots of tabs in firefox and safari causing the machine to write to disk, but it felt smooth and fast. It's been great the last few days since the change.
For those who are finding Lion sluggish and slow and if you have 4GB of memory, try forcing booting the 32bit kernel instead of the 64bit, it makes memory management that much better! There's tool which let's you force which kernel to boot: http://www.ahatfullofsky.comuv.com/English/Programs/SMS/SMS.html
Give it a try, when you force the 32bit kernel to boot, the 64bit apps still load as 64bit apps, only your kernel and extensions are booted into 323bit mode.
This is bad timing for me because I've ordered a retina macbook pro and my machine can last a little bit longer! But going to go with the retina, 5 years is quite a long time for a machine and I do really push this laptop to its limits!
I nice 16GB, Ivy cpu would be most welcome!
Lately performance came to a grinding hold with Lion. I work in computer security so am quite familiar with the underlying functions of osx. For some reason, memory management wasn't the best with Lion, everything would write to disk and because the sata chip was limited to 1.5gb/s there wasn't too much I could change. It just didn't feel right. Believe me I've tried it all with checking permissions, recovery disk checking, digging around in unix, even thought of moving swap files somewhere else or turned them off...
So I started digging around some more and remembered that I had enabled the 64bit kernel with lion. My guess was this was just too much for my machine, so I forced it to boot the standard 32bit kernel and what a difference! It flies like it used to in Snow Leopard! Today I had all the adobe apps open, lots of tabs in firefox and safari causing the machine to write to disk, but it felt smooth and fast. It's been great the last few days since the change.
For those who are finding Lion sluggish and slow and if you have 4GB of memory, try forcing booting the 32bit kernel instead of the 64bit, it makes memory management that much better! There's tool which let's you force which kernel to boot: http://www.ahatfullofsky.comuv.com/English/Programs/SMS/SMS.html
Give it a try, when you force the 32bit kernel to boot, the 64bit apps still load as 64bit apps, only your kernel and extensions are booted into 323bit mode.
This is bad timing for me because I've ordered a retina macbook pro and my machine can last a little bit longer! But going to go with the retina, 5 years is quite a long time for a machine and I do really push this laptop to its limits!
I nice 16GB, Ivy cpu would be most welcome!