El Capitan was very slow and Sierra is even worse. I have the stock 500GB HDD and the stock 4GB of RAM and yes I know that upgrading these will help significantly improve my speeds but I don't have the money to invest in that right now. I did some cleaning out of the HDD a while back when it became almost unusable with El Capitan. I am almost to the point again where the computer is unusable and I need my Mac for work. Does anyone have any FREE suggestions to get this thing running a little better?
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Sierra painfully slow on 2011 MBP
- Thread starter ben824
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Can't compensate for hardware bottlenecks. Free suggestions? Revert to an earlier OS which'll run better on a spinner, like 10.9 Mavericks.
But honestly, you need to look to ditch the drive. From the age alone, it's likely failing.
You don't have to replace your HDD with an equivalent sized SSD. A 240GB one would be much cheaper and vastly improve performance. It doesn't need to be a big brand (Samsung, Crucial) either.
But honestly, you need to look to ditch the drive. From the age alone, it's likely failing.
You don't have to replace your HDD with an equivalent sized SSD. A 240GB one would be much cheaper and vastly improve performance. It doesn't need to be a big brand (Samsung, Crucial) either.
I run a 2011 MBP and have 16GB of ram and a Samsung SSD. Sierra runs great, it's not slow at all. Boots up and shuts down quickly, apps launch quickly, etc. 4GB is probably going to page a lot on a spinning drive, making it very slow.
It's true... any SSD will do, 256 or 512, etc and even 8GB of ram will help. Check out Crucial.
It's true... any SSD will do, 256 or 512, etc and even 8GB of ram will help. Check out Crucial.
For the time being, do as @keysofanxiety suggested and revert back to an older OS, like the one that came with your MacBook, for instance.
Early 2011 MPB. Went to 8 Gb for about $50. Made a fair difference in performance; seems like less swapping to the hard drive.
After upgrading to Sierra, activity monitor shows photoanalysisd & photolibraryd processes using a lot of the CPU. Are you seeing heavy CPU load from any particular background processes?
After upgrading to Sierra, activity monitor shows photoanalysisd & photolibraryd processes using a lot of the CPU. Are you seeing heavy CPU load from any particular background processes?
@Sam Luis Obispo Not for me. I just checked and all the percentages are within the normal range, with the highest being Activity Monitor itself ranging from 8 - 12% and Google Chrome sometimes increasing to 12%, which I guess is fine?
This photoanalysisd process is currently running in excess of 175% of CPU. That is starting to get in the way.