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Sloooow Performance...

H

HeadGear

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 21, 2012
79
0
---- 2011 MacBook Pro 15" 2.2GHz i7, 8gb 1600MHz ddr3, 750gb HD. ----

I'm getting very sluggish performance lately (past 3-4 months) running any Microsoft product, Safari, Chrome, Mail and Parallels 7.

My system just starts to halt when I click on anything. On top of that YouTube videos when in HD won't play in Safari only in Chrome and if they do play in Safari they skip and won't fully load. It's killing me basically.

Any suggestions or should I go see Apple for a swaperoo?
 
How much RAM have you given the VM you run in Parallels Desktop?

Performance Tips For Mac OS X

______________________________________________________
Have a look at Activity Monitor (Applications / Utilities /) and select All Processes and sort by CPU to see what the culprit may be.
Also check the "System Memory" tab to see what your "Page ins:", "Page outs:" and "Swap used:" are.

image below uses sorting by CPU as an example
Acitivty_Monitor.png

Further reading:
______________________________________________________​
 
If you're running that all at the same time, that's your problem...

Try doing an SMC reset (google it, apple tells you how)

Unless there's a specific actual fault with your machine, Apple won't replace it because it's "slow" you could have some kind of software corruption, but I highly doubt that.
 
4gb to my Virtual. But none of these items are running at the same time. My virtual runs just fine as well, it's only on the Mac side.

I've reset the SMC and PRAm as well.

As an example: I'll open Word start typing then I'll jump on Safari and google a word or item, switch back into Word and I have the beach ball for like 3 minutes before I can type again.

simsaladimbamba said:
How much RAM have you given the VM you run in Parallels Desktop?
Click to expand...
 
HeadGear said:
4gb to my Virtual. But none of these items are running at the same time. My virtual runs just fine as well, it's only on the Mac side.

I've reset the SMC and PRAm as well.

As an example: I'll open Word start typing then I'll jump on Safari and google a word or item, switch back into Word and I have the beach ball for like 3 minutes before I can type again.
Click to expand...

And what does Activity Monitor have to say? Use it as shown in my screenshot.
 
Schtumple said:
If you're running that all at the same time, that's your problem...
Click to expand...

Nah, see below :)

Close to the same machine and I’m running Parallels V6 (Win7, IIS, SQL, SQL EM and Visual Studio ‘10) and Safari, Mail, Preview, occasionally firing up Word, or Seashore (working on some documentation).

Machine is reasonably quick. No delays, beach balls ... a touch of latency switching between Windows apps if I use the task bar (vs. directly clicking the window). Usually running in Coherence.

Heck, I’m even running slightly slower RAM (1333), but I do have a 2.3 i7 quad/8mb CPU, 6750 GPU and a 7.2K HDD.

I’ve got 4GB allocated to the Win VM, 2 cores I believe.

Since we’ve got a pretty matched setup, I can check/confirm anything else if you’d like.

As I write this my smcFanControl is showing 62-63 C temps (fans ~2150), so it’s not really breaking a sweat right now :)
 
Attached is Activity Monitor:
 

Attachments

  • Screen Shot 2012-02-22 at 12.01.19 PM.png
    Screen Shot 2012-02-22 at 12.01.19 PM.png
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Your Safari looks a little bonkers! Mine bounces around WAY down in the list, maybe spiking here and there in the single digit %, but yours is actually hogging more CPU than your VM!
 
D.T. said:
Your Safari looks a little bonkers! Mine bounces around WAY down in the list, maybe spiking here and there in the single digit %, but yours is actually hogging more CPU than your VM!
Click to expand...

This is a daily thing. I'm just more annoyed with HD youtube videos not playing.

Do you think reinstalling OS X Lion is the right choice?
 
HeadGear said:
This is a daily thing. I'm just more annoyed with HD youtube videos not playing.
Click to expand...
For Flash-related issues:

I know simsaladimbamba posted this already, but have you taken the time to look through these?: Performance Tips For Mac OS X
 
I've gone through the Performance tips, Flash version is updated to the newest one, I have ClickToFlash installed since yesterday and I'm still having the issue. I'll get the YouTube HTML5 Video Player but for anyone else out there that is having a similar issue without knowing about this tool is their a way for them to have a workaround instead of downloading something else?

GGJstudios said:
For Flash-related issues:

I know simsaladimbamba posted this already, but have you taken the time to look through these?: Performance Tips For Mac OS X
Click to expand...
 
HeadGear said:
4gb to my Virtual. But none of these items are running at the same time. My virtual runs just fine as well, it's only on the Mac side.
Click to expand...

MacTech did a shootout of Parallels vs Fusion in a recent issue. Said more than 1gb assigned to a Windows VM in Parallels actually degraded performance substantially due to the way memory management was done. Dunno if it's out there on the web, as I got the print version, but it was a very concise well done analysis.

Edit: A lot of the info is here. Well done analysis: http://www.mactech.com/2011/11/01/mactech-labs-virtualization-benchmarks-fall-2011

"Many people have the feeling of "more is better," but when it comes to RAM in the virtual machine, that is not necessarily the case. More RAM means longer virtual machine launch times, suspends and resumes. For most users, 1 GB of virtual machine RAM will work best for Windows 7. Use more than that only if you really know you need it. Gaming may do best with 1.25-1.5 GB of RAM if you can spare it."
 
Last edited:
HeadGear said:
I've gone through the Performance tips, Flash version is updated to the newest one, I have ClickToFlash installed since yesterday and I'm still having the issue. I'll get the YouTube HTML5 Video Player but for anyone else out there that is having a similar issue without knowing about this tool is their a way for them to have a workaround instead of downloading something else?
Click to expand...

Well, the good thing is, the HTML5 player isn’t an app you have to download, it’s just using the native video capabilities of Safari. Some limitations right now, but well worth the huge reduction in systems resources (vs. Flash).

Ccrew said:
MacTech did a shootout of Parallels vs Fusion in a recent issue. Said more than 1gb assigned to a Windows VM in Parallels actually degraded performance substantially due to the way memory management was done. Dunno if it's out there on the web, as I got the print version, but it was a very concise well done analysis.

Edit: A lot of the info is here. Well done analysis: http://www.mactech.com/2011/11/01/mactech-labs-virtualization-benchmarks-fall-2011

"Many people have the feeling of "more is better," but when it comes to RAM in the virtual machine, that is not necessarily the case. More RAM means longer virtual machine launch times, suspends and resumes. For most users, 1 GB of virtual machine RAM will work best for Windows 7. Use more than that only if you really know you need it. Gaming may do best with 1.25-1.5 GB of RAM if you can spare it."
Click to expand...

Good article, thanks!

The part you quoted, is kind of suggesting that you don’t have to throw a huge amount of RAM at the VM, because it does lengthen things like startup and suspend (where the RAM state is stored to the HDD), but it does have that caveat about “use more if you need it”, which for me at last, definitely applies (a 1-2GB VM would struggle with my environment).
 
Good to know.

D.T. said:
Well, the good thing is, the HTML5 player isn’t an app you have to download, it’s just using the native video capabilities of Safari. Some limitations right now, but well worth the huge reduction in systems resources (vs. Flash).
Click to expand...

I also had the VM at 1gb and it ran fine but OS X was still slow, I took it to 2gb same thing and then finally I just did 4gb.
 
Is it also slow if you don't run the VM?

My guess is the following: You have a slow HDD. Both the VM and the OS regularly write to it, on different locations. Once you start swapping out parts of the memory to the HDD, it takes the system a lot of time to recover the memory stored on the HDD, so you see the beachball.
This is most likely the reason for the huge slowdowns you experience.

I was used to that on my old 2008 MBP, because I never upgraded from the 2 GB stock RAM. Now with 8 GB RAM and a SSD I don't have this problem anymore.

Still, I think your machine should be able to handle the load a bit better, even without a SSD. I remember that there were some problems with MS Office on Lion, but I thought those were solved. Did you upgrade to Lion sometime in the past?
 
It's very slow when "not" running the VM as well.

I have the 750gb 5400rpm that came with the MBP. I know this is a slow hard drive compared to an SSD or a 7200rpm drive but my friend has my exact same setup and never has these issues I even borrowed it for a weekend and it was smooth sailing.

My laptop came with Snow Leopard and I had to upgrade via the Mac App Store. I did this the same day it came out and have had issues ever since.

I also didn't buy AppleCare when I purchased the MBP so I am doing that this week before my 1 year expires in April.

--- Also about the YouTube videos playing slowly and choppy when selecting HD in Safari I was on our Admin's MacBook Air (just purchased on Friday) and it played perfectly, then I got on my buddies MBP (same spec) and his did as well. I don't know if I'm just unlucky or maybe I've got some stuff just messing up my system (i.e. the upgraded 8gb kingston hyper-x ram 1600mhz).



thundersteele said:
Is it also slow if you don't run the VM?

My guess is the following: You have a slow HDD. Both the VM and the OS regularly write to it, on different locations. Once you start swapping out parts of the memory to the HDD, it takes the system a lot of time to recover the memory stored on the HDD, so you see the beachball.
This is most likely the reason for the huge slowdowns you experience.

I was used to that on my old 2008 MBP, because I never upgraded from the 2 GB stock RAM. Now with 8 GB RAM and a SSD I don't have this problem anymore.

Still, I think your machine should be able to handle the load a bit better, even without a SSD. I remember that there were some problems with MS Office on Lion, but I thought those were solved. Did you upgrade to Lion sometime in the past?
Click to expand...
 
miniConvert said:
If it won't be a massive hassle then yes, I think an OS reinstall would be the right choice. If problems persist after that, time to go to Apple :(
Click to expand...

Looks like I know what I'm doing tonight. Now to clean up some external hd space for some files.
 
HeadGear said:
Looks like I know what I'm doing tonight. Now to clean up some external hd space for some files.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I got my machine “used” (it was basically new) and the previous owner smoked the drive and supplied a Lion install CD, so I’ve had the advantage of running from a fresh OS install.

(This is an early/mid 15, so it originally shipped with SL).

I also got the balance of the Applecare which was most of it (2 years, 8 months), and I originally thought I might just refund it, but now I’m pretty happy knowing I have coverage on my machine (and an Apple store ~30 minutes away).
 
Yeah I've always had AppleCare on all my Mac's but this time when I bought this MBP I didn't get it since I had a year to do it. As I previously said though I'm buying it this week when I go to the store to buy a case for our Admin's MB Air.

D.T. said:
Yeah, I got my machine “used” (it was basically new) and the previous owner smoked the drive and supplied a Lion install CD, so I’ve had the advantage of running from a fresh OS install.

(This is an early/mid 15, so it originally shipped with SL).

I also got the balance of the Applecare which was most of it (2 years, 8 months), and I originally thought I might just refund it, but now I’m pretty happy knowing I have coverage on my machine (and an Apple store ~30 minutes away).
Click to expand...
 
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