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OS X Lion - Performance complaints, READ HERE BEFORE MAKING A THREAD

J

jsilas

macrumors regular
Original poster
Dec 6, 2010
102
0
Washington State
To anyone upset about slowed performance on your Mac after installing the OS X Lion update, please take a moment to read this.

Upon successful installation, your computer will attempt to re-index your computer's contents for the purposes of Spotlight functionality and related performance improvements in the long-run.

This process, while running, may lead to more sluggish performance (especially on Macs not equipped with SSDs), increased heat, increased fan activity/speed, etc.

This IS NOT a Lion 'defect' or issue with the Operating System. It is expected behavior. You should expect indexing activity to complete fairly quickly depending on how your computer is configured and how much on your computer must be indexed.

Please allow this process to complete before making a thread screaming about how Apple owes you money back, how Lion is the "Vista of OS X" or any other such nonsense. If you're curious about how to track this, check out the Activity Monitor and have a look through the active processes.
 
jsilas said:
To anyone upset about slowed performance on your Mac after installing the OS X Lion update, please take a moment to read this.

Upon successful installation, your computer will attempt to re-index your computer's contents for the purposes of Spotlight functionality and related performance improvements in the long-run.

This process, while running, may lead to more sluggish performance (especially on Macs not equipped with SSDs), increased heat, increased fan activity/speed, etc.

This IS NOT a Lion 'defect' or issue with the Operating System. It is expected behavior. You should expect indexing activity to complete fairly quickly depending on how your computer is configured and how much on your computer must be indexed.

Please allow this process to complete before making a thread screaming about how Apple owes you money back, how Lion is the "Vista of OS X" or any other such nonsense. If you're curious about how to track this, check out the Activity Monitor and have a look through the active processes.
Click to expand...

The first clue it is not finished indexing is the dot inside the spotlight icon, or the fact that is says it is still indexing if you try to search.
 
First : this is old new and everybody knows this
Secondly : the slower performance on Intel 3000HD is confirmed by Apple.

The GUI is about 5 times slower. Period. (sadly)
 
No...

It's not obvious, and not everyone knows it, so don't be so dismissive, the OP really helped me out.

Thanks OP!
 
Atarikid said:
First : this is old new and everybody knows this
Secondly : the slower performance on Intel 3000HD is confirmed by Apple.

The GUI is about 5 times slower. Period. (sadly)
Click to expand...

First of all, not everyone knows how Spotlight works or even that it exists. People who haven't been on this forum for a long time or just joined to post their Lion woes may not know about spotlight or why it's reindexing or why that would cause their computer to slow down and heat up.

Secondly, I would like to see your apple source that the 3000HD performance is slower on Lion. I believe you but I'm curious what else they said about it since they write the drivers themselves.
 
podsorcerer09 said:
Secondly, I would like to see your apple source that the 3000HD performance is slower on Lion. I believe you but I'm curious what else they said about it since they write the drivers themselves.
Click to expand...

No prob. Send me PB and I will give you the case numbers. You need a Apple dev account to access.
 
Animations (namely Mission Control) seem to be sluggish on my 2010 MBP too. This is when using the Nvidia (as well as the Intel obviously). Kind of disappointing. Oddly, there seems to be little, if any, difference in the GUI performance for the Intel and Nvidia, so hopefully Apple optimizes Lion or the drivers to make things run better.
 
karohan said:
Animations (namely Mission Control) seem to be sluggish on my 2010 MBP too. This is when using the Nvidia (as well as the Intel obviously). Kind of disappointing. Oddly, there seems to be little, if any, difference in the GUI performance for the Intel and Nvidia, so hopefully Apple optimizes Lion or the drivers to make things run better.
Click to expand...

Mines fine..
 
GermanyChris said:
Mines fine..
Click to expand...

I hate to doubt you, but are you sure? The animation sluggishness is not unbearable, but it is undeniably more sluggish than Snow Leopard's Expose. Some people may have different perceptions of what is or isn't smooth, and I suspect that may be a cause of a lot of varying opinions.
 
Lion is great so far

As far as OS upgrades go, the move to Lion has gone surprisingly well. For the sake of perspective, I recall that moving from OS9 to OSX was challenging, as was going from Tiger to Leopard (Tiger was awesome in so many ways). By contrast, the move to Snow Leopard and now Lion have been a breeze.

What few difficulties did occur were expected e.g. application compatibility issues, file duplication, lost settings, etc….

There were some surprises that disappointed me, most notably the lack of TRIM support for non-Apple SSD's.

On the positive side, both of my macs seem peppier, boot up faster, and seem to be making better use of my SSD's. I also really like the new GUI and dropzone makes using my Mac Pro and MacBook Air together an altogether more pleasant experience.

There are a few things about Lion I find puzzling - application categories in finder that can't be edited, the inability to remove unwanted launchpad items, and the reading list in Safari.

All in all I'm glad I made the move and look forward to learning more about Lion in the weeks to come.
 
Last edited:
slower...

robbym said:
What few difficulties did occur were expected e.g. application compatibility issues, file duplication, lost settings, etc….

There were some surprises that disappointed me, most notably the lack of TRIM support for non-Apple SSD's.

On the positive side, both of my macs seem peppier, boot up faster, and seem to be making better use of my SSD's. I also really like the new GUI and dropzone makes using my Mac Pro and MacBook Air together an altogether more pleasant experience.
Click to expand...

Really? For me the boot is slower, it gets to the spinning wheel whereas it never did on SL, and the shutdown can sometimes take a while for no apparent reason. I'm using an agility 2 ssd (SATA II), do you have a SATA III SSD or something?

Also iChat remarkably takes longer to start than iTunes. (does a full bounce before starting rather than instantly)

At first I thought these symptoms were due to a bad install after my upgrade so I wiped my whole computer and installed from scratch but the problems persisted.
 
Even after Spotlight finishes there are still problems. Systems that do network logins are much slower -- I was getting 40 second logins on a MacBook Air until I turned that off. My main iMac had sluggish LAN file access until I did a reinstall of Lion, and there was lock up problems with every video application as well as the keyboard. I've dealt with four Mac OS X .0 releases and this has by far been the most problematic.
 
talmy said:
Even after Spotlight finishes there are still problems. Systems that do network logins are much slower -- I was getting 40 second logins on a MacBook Air until I turned that off. My main iMac had sluggish LAN file access until I did a reinstall of Lion, and there was lock up problems with every video application as well as the keyboard. I've dealt with four Mac OS X .0 releases and this has by far been the most problematic.
Click to expand...

You mean to connect to a network account server in users preferences?
 
In general my 2GB Mac mini does not run as well under Lion as it did with SL. Specifically - Numbers and Pages is much slower loading, also Safari seems to be slower scrolling and I seem to get the spinning ball a lot more than I used to. Now I know my 2GB mini is probably marginal as far as system configuration for Lion; but Apple does say it should run Lion. There is no way I can go back to SL, but overall I wish I had not done the upgrade now. The only improvement that I really like is the new Mail app. Other than that everything else seems to be not as good as what I had on SL. Hopefully, Apple will improve the product with future updates.
 
I would like to also point out for those people who are having kernel panics after installing Lion, the reason that this may be happening is due to a corrupted root sector on the boot drive. I have seen many cases where people were having this type of issue and it all cleared up by simply running something like DiskWarrior. Every new OS that Apple releases tightens things up which creates the situaltion where problems start showing up in unexpected ways.
 
wolfpackfan said:
In general my 2GB Mac mini does not run as well under Lion as it did with SL. Specifically - Numbers and Pages is much slower loading, also Safari seems to be slower scrolling and I seem to get the spinning ball a lot more than I used to. Now I know my 2GB mini is probably marginal as far as system configuration for Lion; but Apple does say it should run Lion. There is no way I can go back to SL, but overall I wish I had not done the upgrade now. The only improvement that I really like is the new Mail app. Other than that everything else seems to be not as good as what I had on SL. Hopefully, Apple will improve the product with future updates.
Click to expand...

Did you do a clean install or simply restore Lion on top of Snow Leopard? I am planning on doing a clean install on my 2009 2.0GHz Mac-Mini from Snow Leopard to Lion. My mini has 4GB.

The nice thing about doing a clean install it will remove any bloat that has accumilated from past OS's.

You can't go back to Snow Leopard as a restore on top of Lion but you could certainly use your install disks that came with your mini to a clean install of Snow Leopard.
 
well i would expect the indexing to be done by now, 2 weeks after my clean install and yet lion is still dog slow on my 2010 mbp.

Especially graphic performance. on the intel igp it is impossible to use, the nv330 is a little better but still those new animations stutter on my mbp. the full screen animation of safari is actually funny bad, not something i show proudly to my m$ friends.

it's not lack of memory, i upgraded to 8gb although lion is a memory eater. cpu is constantly more busy now though, new animations and autosave stuff going on. that compared with the need to run on the nv330 100% of the time is also killing my battery life.

hope 10.7.1 wil come *SOON* and fix the graphics, memory and cpu issues or i am reinstalling SL. i don't care a lot about the new features much anyway but i do care about my systems performance.
 
stefan1975 said:
well i would expect the indexing to be done by now, 2 weeks after my clean install and yet lion is still dog slow on my 2010 mbp.

Especially graphic performance. on the intel igp it is impossible to use, the nv330 is a little better but still those new animations stutter on my mbp. the full screen animation of safari is actually funny bad, not something i show proudly to my m$ friends.

it's not lack of memory, i upgraded to 8gb although lion is a memory eater. cpu is constantly more busy now though, new animations and autosave stuff going on. that compared with the need to run on the nv330 100% of the time is also killing my battery life.

hope 10.7.1 wil come *SOON* and fix the graphics, memory and cpu issues or i am reinstalling SL. i don't care a lot about the new features much anyway but i do care about my systems performance.
Click to expand...

Indexing takes a few hours after install at MOST.
 
stefan1975 said:
well i would expect the indexing to be done by now, 2 weeks after my clean install and yet lion is still dog slow on my 2010 mbp.

Especially graphic performance. on the intel igp it is impossible to use, the nv330 is a little better but still those new animations stutter on my mbp. the full screen animation of safari is actually funny bad, not something i show proudly to my m$ friends.

it's not lack of memory, i upgraded to 8gb although lion is a memory eater. cpu is constantly more busy now though, new animations and autosave stuff going on. that compared with the need to run on the nv330 100% of the time is also killing my battery life.

hope 10.7.1 wil come *SOON* and fix the graphics, memory and cpu issues or i am reinstalling SL. i don't care a lot about the new features much anyway but i do care about my systems performance.
Click to expand...

How was your performance with the Intel integrated graphics in Snow Leopard?

My 2010 15" MBP is a little choppy, I'm hoping new Lion graphics drivers will fix this.
 
Atarikid said:
First : this is old new and everybody knows this
Secondly : the slower performance on Intel 3000HD is confirmed by Apple.

The GUI is about 5 times slower. Period. (sadly)
Click to expand...

Look around, the same things are being asked and commented over and over. Skip over it.
 
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