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OS X slowing down...

C

CyberPrey

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 10, 2006
209
0
IGH, MN
I have a Mac Pro, and I am experiancing slow down.. programs take longer to open, it takes longer to switch program to program.. things like that... I do not see any option in OS-X to defrag the hard drivers or anything like that to try and speed up things... I am also not to sharp on how to uninstall anything I am not using....

My specs are
Mac Pro 2.66, 2gb RAM, X1900
HD1 250gb OSX boot
HD2/3 2x250gb HD RAID for games (World of Warcraft)
HD4 200gb for Windows XP

Is there anything I can do to figure out WHY my system is running slower than it used to? Or a way to look at things to try and deduce what is happening to cause slowdown?
 
What is your system up-time?
Sometimes programs have memory leaks that can slow the system to a crawl if they've been on for too long. Firefox and Safari are particularly bad.

OSX doesn't need to be de-fragged (Diskwarrior will do it if you really wanted to) by the user. The filesystem does it automatically when you open files.

How full is your boot drive?
When mine get down to under about 6GB free things start to drag.

Do you keep a lot of files on your desktop?
For some reason having too much out there can lag things.
 
To uninstall things you aren't using, just trash 'em, unless anything came with an uninstaller. You could also try repairing permissions with Disk Utility in the.. wait for it... Utilities folder :D.
 
I had a system slowdown problem with Flash videos in Safari. It would slow my whole system to a crawl. Even when I quit Safari, the problem would still persist until I logged out and back in again to clear it.

I switched to Firefox and now I don't have that problem at all.
 
Are you doing video editing or anything that uses a lot of disk space?

Also realise that Mac's do slow down over time and sometimes you have to wipe the system ala windows, but unlike Windows if you copy your Applications back they will work just fine straight away!
 
Angrist said:
. . .

Do you keep a lot of files on your desktop?
For some reason having too much out there can lag things.
Click to expand...


This is because the way OS X views icons on the desktop. It views each icon as a open window and allocates the memory for an open window. There for having alot of icons on the desktop can affect system performance as opposed to have very few icons.
 
Hmm, I generally reboot about once every 2 or 3 days....
I only have my 3 hard drive icons on the desktop...
The system is basically for 'net surfing, basic financial tasks, and gaming...
the boot drive is about 50% full.... 250gb total, has 116gb free
RAID array has 390gb free....

I disabled all my widgets to see if that helped, but it really didn't....

I rebooted, and it seems to boot a bit slower as well....
 
still slower than it was when I first got the machine.....

Is there a way to tell what is starting up on the machine? as far as programs go?
 
I'll check that out as soon as I get home... perhaps something is starting that should not be...

My machine used to be blazingly quick.. and now it is just sluggish... even my Dell XPS M170 laptop is faster :(
 
OK, I gave a peek at what is starting up... there are only 2 items starting up when the comptuer boots..

Itunes helper and the Logitech control center (for my 530 keyboard/mouse combo)

I got rid of pretty much everythign I could think of, but still running slow :confused:

Also, I checked, and it is showing the system with all 2gb RAM
 
Well, I can't actually prove it is slower :)

BUT.. it is opening programs slower than it used to...

It used to pop programs right up after maybe 1 or 2 bounces of the icon on the bar, but now they sit and bounce 6-10 times, THEN open.....

And no, I don't :(

I'm VERY sorry, I am a 110% NEWB to OS X and Mac's.... Been a windows buffoon for to long.....
 
CyberPrey said:
Well, I can't actually prove it is slower :)

BUT.. it is opening programs slower than it used to...

It used to pop programs right up after maybe 1 or 2 bounces of the icon on the bar, but now they sit and bounce 6-10 times, THEN open.....

And no, I don't :(

I'm VERY sorry, I am a 110% NEWB to OS X and Mac's.... Been a windows buffoon for to long.....
Click to expand...
Have you used the DOS prompt before in Windows? If you have, the Mac OS X command line shouldn't be too hard to get used to. Anyway... This Apple Support article describes how it's done.
 
CyberPrey said:
I'm VERY sorry, I am a 110% NEWB to OS X and Mac's.... Been a windows buffoon for to long.....
Click to expand...

Start with this:

Open Disk Utility in the applications/utilites folder.
Select the disk partition for OS X from the left side, and then do the "repair permissions" item, and then the "verify disk" item.

Repair Permissions should always succeed. With respect to verify disk, at the end, you should either get (green, I think) text indicating that the disk was successfully verified, or text indicating that there were errors detected.

If there were errors detected, you put the install / restore DVD in the DVD drive, and open system preferences -> startup disk. Select the DVD from the list in the sys prefs window, and click the restart button in the window. Then when the restore DVD boots up far enough to have a menu bar at the top of the screen, select Disk Utility from one of the menus. Now the "repair disk" icon will not be ghosted out, and you can repair the disk.
 
CyberPrey said:
Well, I can't actually prove it is slower :)

BUT.. it is opening programs slower than it used to...

It used to pop programs right up after maybe 1 or 2 bounces of the icon on the bar, but now they sit and bounce 6-10 times, THEN open.....

And no, I don't :(

I'm VERY sorry, I am a 110% NEWB to OS X and Mac's.... Been a windows buffoon for to long.....
Click to expand...

My G4 with 1/4 the ram your Mac Pro has opens apps up faster, even when I've already got 5 or 6 or so apps already open. Try going into Disk Utility (once again in the utilities folder) and looking at the RAM usage.. what are the page ins and page outs? How much RAM is used... a screen shot might be helpful.

I don't think it's a hard drive problem.. more like something chewing up your RAM. Do you run a lot of apps under rosetta (Word and Excel being most common)?
 
CyberPrey said:
I'll check that out as soon as I get home... perhaps something is starting that should not be...

My machine used to be blazingly quick.. and now it is just sluggish... even my Dell XPS M170 laptop is faster :(
Click to expand...

to determine what might be causing the slow down while you are in OS X:

Applications - Utilities - Activity Monitor
- especially look for things that take up more than a couple percent of CPU or takes up lots of RAM

to determine what's running at start up:

note your system time, restart computer immediately, as soon as the system starts up, don't do anything, do the following straight away

Applications - Utilities - Console
- click on Logs on the left upper corner, and click on system.log

find the first entry after the time you noted previously before restart.

anything after that is what went on at shut down and start up
i think log for startup usually start with
Feb 20 10:28:41 localhost kernel[0]: hi mem tramps at 0xffe00000

you can either post the log, or just read it yourself to see if anything is out of ordinary.


**
have you installed photoshop or any of the creative suite?
have you installed parallel or equivalent?

there are a number of applications that might slow down the startup, because they install kernels or fonts that gets loaded during startup.

also, what part(s) take the longest during startup?
 
Once you've booted with the Installation disks and repaired permissions and checked the drive volume, quit.

After re-booting from your main drive, open Activity Monitor, which is in the Utilities folder and click on the System Memory tab toward the bottom, as well as the CPU % tab toward the top so that it looks like what I've included.

Take a screenshot (Command-shift-4, spacebar, and click within the window) after re-boot and when you start a certain application and then, when you restart an application after several others have been running. If I'm not being clear, take a screenshot just after booting, as you're starting Photoshop or something else that's particular slow, start a web browser, e-mail, whatever in the meantime. Stop and restart Photoshop and take another screenshot. Do something like that which fits your routine.

Please post those screenshots after you've accumulated a few.
 

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I would download OnyX and run most of the maintenance routines. Especially the ones that clear out all of the caches (including the kernel, font, system, and application caches) ...also do the "Optimize the system" as it will rebuild the links between the OS and apps and make them open as fast as possible.

All of these procedures are under the automation tab in OnyX ...after you run them the OS will be slightly slower after reboot because it has to rebuild all of the caches ..but after that happens your machine should act a little peppier

PS ...you don't happen to have a crap ton of fonts loaded on your system do you?
 
^^

Exactly. i would download OnyX or MacJanitor, as your "too many bounces to open" issue seems to be related to prebinding.

Just run the daily, weekly and monthly scripts, and I'd think apps will start opening much more quickly.
 
CyberPrey said:
I have a Mac Pro, and I am experiancing slow down.. programs take longer to open, it takes longer to switch program to program.. things like that... I do not see any option in OS-X to defrag the hard drivers or anything like that to try and speed up things... I am also not to sharp on how to uninstall anything I am not using....

My specs are
Mac Pro 2.66, 2gb RAM, X1900
HD1 250gb OSX boot
HD2/3 2x250gb HD RAID for games (World of Warcraft)
HD4 200gb for Windows XP

Is there anything I can do to figure out WHY my system is running slower than it used to? Or a way to look at things to try and deduce what is happening to cause slowdown?
Click to expand...

They intentionally slow OS X a bit with each incremental update. 10.4.9 should bring your Pro to its knees, hence insuring that you will be lining up outside the Apple Store nearest you the night before Leopard is released.

The good news is that Leopard will be blazingly fast...at least for awhile.
 
OnyX - get it and run the automatic system maintenance, clear all cash, repair permissions, optimize system... The program is free and very good...

Also go through your library and try to eliminate any old preferences that hang around.

To uninstall things, you can drag them to trash, but the .plist files as preferences remain behind in the library. Appzapper is a great little program to take care of clean uninstalls...
 
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