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This can't be right?

A

AFPoster

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jul 14, 2008
1,565
152
Charlotte, NC
My early 2011 15" (high-end) MacBook Pro has been sluggish for the past 3-4 months for some strange reason. I've taken it to the Apple store 3x and it passes every test that they run on it so they won't fix anything, except for the superdrive b/c that had crashed.

It now takes around 15-25minutes to open a 7mb Excel file, just to take the screen shot attached took 2 minutes, opening the screen shot was 1 minute and opening Safari was 3. This is getting ridiculous. Anyways I know MKVtoolnix is running which does take up some speed, but the fact that it's only 6% cpu proves it's not much. I mean holy crap I have 8gb of ram and it says 6.11gb is inactive why isn't it even using that?

Could this be a logic board issue? Does anyone have any suggestions? I've reset PRAM and SMC (yes I know they don't pertain to my issues) I just can't seem to figure this one out.
 

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First things first...reinstall OS X. If that doesn't help, then it might be a bad drive.

The Genius bar should have taken care of this.
 
There isn't anything out of the ordinary in your AM shot. That kind of performance hit is wrong. It does lean towards a failing HDD though...I would take this up a notch..Phone Apple and be polite, but insistent....I have a 17" Top end MBP with 8GB....It certainly doesn't take that amount of time to open large files....SOmetimes the store is a little hit and miss....Take out a support ticket, and back up ALL your stuff now...If that drive goes, you don't want to lose data.
 
*shields self* have you tried turning it on & off again, I find if I leave it running for weeks on end my ram fills up
 
Sort it via memory rather than CPU. Maybe something it taking up all the memories.
 
I would back that drive up ASAP just in case it dies on you. That's what it sounds like I know there is nothing more frustrating than a HD failing
 
SDAVE said:
First things first...reinstall OS X. If that doesn't help, then it might be a bad drive.

The Genius bar should have taken care of this.
Click to expand...

This has been done 3x already with no avail...

Macman45 said:
There isn't anything out of the ordinary in your AM shot. That kind of performance hit is wrong. It does lean towards a failing HDD though...I would take this up a notch..Phone Apple and be polite, but insistent....I have a 17" Top end MBP with 8GB....It certainly doesn't take that amount of time to open large files....SOmetimes the store is a little hit and miss....Take out a support ticket, and back up ALL your stuff now...If that drive goes, you don't want to lose data.
Click to expand...

Redoing my backups, working on calling for further assistance.

PAPO said:
*shields self* have you tried turning it on & off again, I find if I leave it running for weeks on end my ram fills up
Click to expand...

Yes I have, I shut down every night and erase cache, etc daily. Constantly trying to stay on top of this.

Puevlo said:
Sort it via memory rather than CPU. Maybe something it taking up all the memories.
Click to expand...

Checked, nothing major.

basesloaded190 said:
I would back that drive up ASAP just in case it dies on you. That's what it sounds like I know there is nothing more frustrating than a HD failing
Click to expand...

Yeah on top of this...sucks but at least Apple is great about replacements.
 
Puevlo said:
Sort it via memory rather than CPU. Maybe something it taking up all the memories.
Click to expand...

This

Note that all your RAM is inceptive, not free. I'm not an expert but I'm pretty sure this means that it's allocated to a certain program or task that simply isn't using it at that given time. Because so little is free to be used by other applications, they run sluggishly.

It's very possible that it is an HDD failure as people are saying and certainly back up your stuff as a precaution but there are other options. I certainly wouldn't jump to logic board issues.
 
Repair disc permissions?

If not, then make a very obvious case to the Apple employees that it's far too slow, regardless of what their behind the scenes tests come up with. Escalate it farther if they just say "sorry, tests fine".
 
Dangerous Theory said:
Repair disc permissions?

If not, then make a very obvious case to the Apple employees that it's far too slow, regardless of what their behind the scenes tests come up with. Escalate it farther if they just say "sorry, tests fine".
Click to expand...

Repair permissions done a handful of time to no avail. I've talked with Apple they said that their tests show positive results and all I can do now is leave it with them for 3-5 days to see what they can find / replace. My mistake is I don't have a business account with them so I will be laptop"less" for those days and I can't have that happen for what I do. Now to contemplate buying a MBAir for the 5 days and returning once mine is ready...thoughts?
 
AFPoster said:
I've cleared the PRAM and NVRAM, should I be doing anything else? Still nothing.
Click to expand...
Turn off it and turn back on.
That happened for me for a lot of times before with 8GB ram, sometimes it just fills in in two hours of browsing the net.

I got MemoryFreer from store, works very good on this thing.
 
ModestMoo said:
Turn off it and turn back on.
That happened for me for a lot of times before with 8GB ram, sometimes it just fills in in two hours of browsing the net.

I got MemoryFreer from store, works very good on this thing.
Click to expand...

restarted 3x since this morning. Was off all last night and when I turned it on today it was so sluggish I couldn't function. It just feels like everything is being bogged down.

The guy with a PC next to me is just flying on his machine laughing, where is the slingshot when you need one.
 
AcesHigh87 said:
This

Note that all your RAM is inceptive, not free. I'm not an expert but I'm pretty sure this means that it's allocated to a certain program or task that simply isn't using it at that given time. Because so little is free to be used by other applications, they run sluggishly.

It's very possible that it is an HDD failure as people are saying and certainly back up your stuff as a precaution but there are other options. I certainly wouldn't jump to logic board issues.
Click to expand...

Inactive RAM is free RAM in OSX. It was allocated at one time but is no longer in use. The contents just hasn't been dumped.
You're thinking of "wired" RAM which is allocated and reserved but not currently in use.
 
mikeo007 said:
Inactive RAM is free RAM in OSX. It was allocated at one time but is no longer in use. The contents just hasn't been dumped.
You're thinking of "wired" RAM which is allocated and reserved but not currently in use.
Click to expand...
When inactive fills completely in, filling with all the wired, active etc and it takes all together 7.99GB out of 8GB, my Macbook crashes and only way to get it working press turn off button on Macbook and turn it on again.
Thats why Memory Freer and other freeing applications says "Remind me to free memory when inactive reaches *GB", because it just takes most of a place and does nothing.
And free RAM is "Free RAM". Not."Inactive"

Btw, not just on mine. My very few friends had the same problem.
 
ModestMoo said:
When inactive fills completely in, filling with all the wired, active etc and it takes all together 7.99GB out of 8GB, my Macbook crashes and only way to get it working press turn off button on Macbook and turn it on again.
Thats why Memory Freer and other freeing applications says "Remind me to free memory when inactive reaches *GB", because it just takes most of a place and does nothing.
And free RAM is "Free RAM". Not."Inactive"

Btw, not just on mine. My very few friends had the same problem.
Click to expand...

No, that's wrong. Inactive RAM is available, just as I stated. If you open iPhoto, load a bunch of photos and then close the app, it deallocates the RAM and it becomes inactive. That RAM is 100% available and free for system use. It's actually more efficient to leave the RAM inactive rather than dumping the contents.
 
Backup your data and run a integrity test on your HDD to check for bad blocks. If you have bad blocks, get a new drive.
 
There's no way having full ram should ever do this on Mac OS X.

Must be your HDD.

To the guy whos computer crashes when ram fills up - something is wrong there too.
 
Is it factory 8gb of RAM or did you upgrade it yourself? If yourself, can you put back the RAM it came with?
 
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