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RAM/CPU Question about Mid-09 17" MBP

ideal.dreams

ideal.dreams

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Jul 19, 2010
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I have a 17" Mid-2009 MBP that I got for Christmas in 2009. Over the last few weeks I've noticed that something seems to be bogging it down. I don't know if there's something wrong with the processor or if it simply needs more RAM (or if the current RAM is going bad?). Using Safari right now with a few other apps open (like Mail and iCal) the fans are going at about 4000 RPM when they should be near 2000. When I use Minecraft the fans spike to 6000 RPM and I am literally not able to use any other app without the app slowing down immensely. Even then, I only get about 20 FPS in Minecraft.

What are my options for getting some speed back? Would installing a fresh copy of Lion help at all? Would a RAM upgrade to 8GB help at all? Or would the bottleneck be with the CPU?

Any suggestions would be appreciated.
 
ideal.dreams said:
I have a 17" Mid-2009 MBP that I got for Christmas in 2009. Over the last few weeks I've noticed that something seems to be bogging it down.
Click to expand...
Performance Tips For Mac OS X
ideal.dreams said:
Would a RAM upgrade to 8GB help at all?
Click to expand...
To determine if you can benefit from more RAM, launch Activity Monitor and click the System Memory tab at the bottom to check your page outs. 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.

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor
 
Alright - I'll give that a go tomorrow. The post you linked me to offered basic information and wasn't much help to me. Thanks anyways, though.
 
ideal.dreams said:
Alright - I'll give that a go tomorrow. The post you linked me to offered basic information and wasn't much help to me. Thanks anyways, though.
Click to expand...
On the contrary, it gave you very specific steps to both improve and diagnose performance issues, as well as how to accurately determine if increasing RAM will help.
 
GGJstudios said:
On the contrary, it gave you very specific steps to both improve and diagnose performance issues, as well as how to accurately determine if increasing RAM will help.
Click to expand...

My apologies, I was referring to the first link, not the one towards the bottom. Should have been more specific. Sorry! :)
 
ideal.dreams said:
My apologies, I was referring to the first link, not the one towards the bottom. Should have been more specific. Sorry! :)
Click to expand...
The first link will address many performance issues. If you take the time to go through those, particularly item #5, you'll find what's consuming system resources and causing slow performance and the fans to spin up.
 
Concerning RAM, Safari and iTunes are at the top of the list. Safari has two processes that use 400MB combined. iTunes uses 81MB.

Concerning CPU, Safari, iTunes, and Geektool are at the top of the list but none of them go over 10%.
 
ideal.dreams said:
Concerning RAM, Safari and iTunes are at the top of the list. Safari has two processes that use 400MB combined. iTunes uses 81MB.

Concerning CPU, Safari, iTunes, and Geektool are at the top of the list but none of them go over 10%.
Click to expand...
  1. Launch Activity Monitor
  2. Change "My Processes" at the top to "All Processes"
  3. Click on the CPU column heading once or twice, so the arrow points downward (highest values on top).
  4. Click on the System Memory tab at the bottom.
  5. Take a screen shot of the whole Activity Monitor window, then scroll down to see the rest of the list, take another screen shot
  6. Post your screenshots.
 
There are many processes running and I don't have time to take 7 screenshots to show them all. Here is a screenshot of the first group:

Activity_Monitor-20120520-023050.png


The others not pictured are using low amounts of memory anyway - the ones pictured are the ones eating up resources.
 
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