Slow and Beachballs

[heisenberg123]

without doing much, just using Safari and Finder I get major beach balls

I have used hMemTest and my 16GB of Ram show no errors.

Is there a way to determine what else could be causing it

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Open Activity Monitor and go to the System Memory* tab and look for Page Outs and Swap used and report back.

Using Activity Monitor to show you CPU and RAM usage​

* Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor​

It could also be a sign of a slow HDD, thus you can use the following applications to benchmark the speed of your HDD, to see, if it might be the culprit:

• AJA System Test
• Blackmagic Disk Speed Test
• Xbench

 

[heisenberg123]

looks like Activity Monitor has changed with Mavericks, I dont see the usual page in and out info



here is my hard drive

Samsung Spinpoint M8

 

[Mnowell69]

a re-install seems like the best answer without actually being able to find out what caused the problem in the first place. the hard drive won't cause beach balls unless it's failing

 

[yjchua95]

View attachment 457155

looks like Activity Monitor has changed with Mavericks, I dont see the usual page in and out info

View attachment 457156

here is my hard drive

Samsung Spinpoint M8

That's bloody slow. You should get an SSD.

Here's my SSD speeds (Early-2011 MBP 15", 2.3GHz quad core i7, 16GB RAM, 512GB Samsung 840 Pro, 1GB Radeon 6750M)

 

[heisenberg123]

That's bloody slow. You should get an SSD.

Here's my SSD speeds (Early-2011 MBP 15", 2.3GHz quad core i7, 16GB RAM, 512GB Samsung 840 Pro, 1GB Radeon 6750M)

ya I may need to upgrade, same test results after a clean install using 10.8.5

 

[Weaselboy]

looks like Activity Monitor has changed with Mavericks, I dont see the usual page in and out info

There is nothing there indicating a problem. That green "memory pressure" bar at the bottom is what you look for in Mavericks. You have plenty of memory available.

When the system is bogging down like you described look at the CPU tab in Activity Monitor and sort by % and see if anything is chewing up CPU cycles.

 

[heisenberg123]

There is nothing there indicating a problem. That green "memory pressure" bar at the bottom is what you look for in Mavericks. You have plenty of memory available.

When the system is bogging down like you described look at the CPU tab in Activity Monitor and sort by % and see if anything is chewing up CPU cycles.

thanks for the info, problem is when its "happening" not even Activity Monitor will open, other than still being able to move the cursor everything else is frozen.

 

[Weaselboy]

thanks for the info, problem is when its "happening" not even Activity Monitor will open, other than still being able to move the cursor everything else is frozen.

Open Activity Monitor and put it on the CPU tab then leave it open on the side of the screen. Then hopefully when this happens you will be able to see what is munching your CPU cycles.

Try a boot to safe mode by holding shift key when booting and see if it does it there.

Just for drill, do a command-r boot to recovery and from there start Disk Util and do a repair disk and tell us what you see.

 

[whitedragon101]

I had this with my early 2011 17" MBP. OSX just loved to swap in and out of the HDD even when there was memory available causing beachballs and slowness.

Upgraded to Samsung Evo 750GB SSD. Problem solved, no beachballs and very fast and responsive. Swapping still happens just 115x faster (Random 4k access HDD = 0.2MB/s , SSD = 23MB/s x bench)