Why is my Mac Pro slow[er than I expected]?

[pixelbaker]

TBi: I've run the Apple test and everything comes back as fine.

miniConvert: I first tried an Archive and Install and that didn't change much so I then did a clean install. I've only tried the Apple diagnostic tool, but I'll look into memtest to see if I can turn up any problems that way. Thanks

whooleytoo: Azureus is java based so it could be causing some problems, but it's been the best torrent app I've found. if anyone has any recommendations on others that are written for OS X and have a similar layout and customizeability I'd be open to suggestions. Tomato Torrent and Transmission are not options.

 

[whooleytoo]

whooleytoo: Azureus is java based so it could be causing some problems, but it's been the best torrent app I've found. if anyone has any recommendations on others that are written for OS X and have a similar layout and customizeability I'd be open to suggestions. Tomato Torrent and Transmission are not options.

I only used it once, briefly, a while back and it was very slow and very unstable on my machine.

As for alternatives, I actually use Transmission as it gives the fastest downloads on my Mac. The 'official' Bittorrent client is ok, but with a very bland UI. Bits on Wheels is another option.

 

[Eidorian]

1. Parallels is awful to get going. Once it's running, I'm ok, but it is at least 5 mins of letting my system just sit and do nothing while it loads WinXP VM.

Your hard drive is the bottle neck here. Booting up a VM takes A LOT OF READING.

Addendum: Which version are you using?

2. While extracting files from RAR, I can't listen to music. This was never a problem on my PC. I do realize it's disk intensive, but c'mon. Something isn't right here

I prefer to use Unarchiver.

3. My GUI effects sometimes get extremely choppy and I have to reboot to fix the issue. Genie effect is most affected, but sometimes Dashboard and Expose also.

Do you have any USB drives plugged in and on when this occurs?

whooleytoo: Azureus is java based so it could be causing some problems, but it's been the best torrent app I've found. if anyone has any recommendations on others that are written for OS X and have a similar layout and customizeability I'd be open to suggestions. Tomato Torrent and Transmission are not options.

There isn't anything else with the layout and customization of Azureus on OS X. People still don't seem to realize that Transmission (Even 0.7) pales in comparison to the features.

I only used it once, briefly, a while back and it was very slow and very unstable on my machine.

As for alternatives, I actually use Transmission as it gives the fastest downloads on my Mac. The 'official' Bittorrent client is ok, but with a very bland UI. Bits on Wheels is another option.

I've had Bits on Wheels choke on too many trackers.

 

[pixelbaker]

Eidorian: I have no USB mass storage devices plugged in. a thumb drive every now and then but it's usually momentary and then ejected. it hasn't done the genie effect slow down as much lately, but every now and then when it's been running for a few days it will begin to happen.

 

[Eidorian]

Eidorian: I have no USB mass storage devices plugged in. a thumb drive every now and then but it's usually momentary and then ejected. it hasn't done the genie effect slow down as much lately, but every now and then when it's been running for a few days it will begin to happen.

I have some flaky issues with USB devices (>4 GB) slowing down my computer. Sadly, I didn't have Activity Monitor open to check up on what was the cause when it does happen.

Thumb drives don't seem to cause an issue.

 

[volvoben]

I completely agree that this is not a lack of ram issue. with 1.5gb on an intel imac i can run vista in parallels, itunes, firefox etc and still watch video in osx or vista without stalling. unrarx has worked fine for me so far, not too quick but it doesn't muss up my other programs at all. throwing another $400 of ram in there is unlikely to fix this.

I would probably try memtest first, let it run for a while, and if nothing shows up just do a fresh install of OSX to officially rule out a software problem. If OSX runs fine before changing anything, at least you know your hardware is good. If it doesn't, you can focus on that (switch out ram sticks, hdds and the like), or at worst bring it in after finding a good way to duplicate the problem for the genius.

 

[pixelbaker]

I completely agree that this is not a lack of ram issue. with 1.5gb on an intel imac i can run vista in parallels, itunes, firefox etc and still watch video in osx or vista without stalling. unrarx has worked fine for me so far, not too quick but it doesn't muss up my other programs at all. throwing another $400 of ram in there is unlikely to fix this.

I would probably try memtest first, let it run for a while, and if nothing shows up just do a fresh install of OSX to officially rule out a software problem. If OSX runs fine before changing anything, at least you know your hardware is good. If it doesn't, you can focus on that (switch out ram sticks, hdds and the like), or at worst bring it in after finding a good way to duplicate the problem for the genius.

I'll be trying memtest when I get home. Can I boot from my memtest86 bootable CD that I already use for troubleshooting PC's just the same since the Mac is an x86 architecture also?
That's also part of my problem, getting the problem to be consistent. It's very random and it doesn't happen under a specific set of circumstances. Taking it to a genius is also not an option as the closest city with an apple store is 3.5hrs away and I work plus have classes all day. I do have full AppleCare.

 

[Eidorian]

I'll be trying memtest when I get home. Can I boot from my memtest86 bootable CD that I already use for troubleshooting PC's just the same since the Mac is an x86 architecture also?
That's also part of my problem, getting the problem to be consistent. It's very random and it doesn't happen under a specific set of circumstances. Taking it to a genius is also not an option as the closest city with an apple store is 3.5hrs away and I work plus have classes all day. I do have full AppleCare.

You should be able to boot off of any x86 disc as long as you have 10.4.6 and/or Boot Camp installed (You don't need to partition just the ability to boot into BIOS emulation mode.

I've played around with other LiveCD's this way.

 

[mrgreen4242]

Only 100MB free out of 2GB? Ok, that's very little. Which apps are using the most RAM?

That is incorrect. That's actually a bit on the high side for unused RAM. OSX will use ALL of the RAM it can get a hand on and fill it up with things it thinks are likely to be needed, etc. It won't leave much RAM unused - 100mb is higher than I see on my machine with 1gb of RAM (usually I have 55mb or so).

Any time I have opened Activity Monitor, the CPU's have never been taxed beyond 5% and even that is high. With the memory, I usually have only 100mb or so actual unused with about 1gb or so allocated under Inactive.

That's pretty much what I would expect from a machine with 2gb RAM being used for "normal" stuff.

 

[decksnap]

2 Gb of ram is plenty to be a 'power user'. Plenty. My guess is it's a flaky install of the OS or something else software related.

 

[Sesshi]

I completely agree that this is not a lack of ram issue. with 1.5gb on an intel imac i can run vista in parallels, itunes, firefox etc and still watch video in osx or vista without stalling. unrarx has worked fine for me so far, not too quick but it doesn't muss up my other programs at all. throwing another $400 of ram in there is unlikely to fix this.

I would probably try memtest first, let it run for a while, and if nothing shows up just do a fresh install of OSX to officially rule out a software problem. If OSX runs fine before changing anything, at least you know your hardware is good. If it doesn't, you can focus on that (switch out ram sticks, hdds and the like), or at worst bring it in after finding a good way to duplicate the problem for the genius.

That's pretty much what I do - and I don't run any of my machines with less than 2Gbs. With the 2Gb machines, either I'm used to a heck of a lot better response under Windows or >2Gb OS X on the same platform, or the hardware's faulty... again?

 

[mrgreen4242]

2 Gb of ram is plenty to be a 'power user'. Plenty. My guess is it's a flaky install of the OS or something else software related.

Agreed. I do plenty of "power user/prosumer' tasks, and lots of multitasking on my little mini w/ 1gb RAM. I regularly have Firefox, Transmission, and iTunes running in the background (along with too many widgets) and will fire up the GIMP, an HTML editor, an FTP client, and a couple other apps to do a little web developer work and have no trouble at all. I often will run MTR or Popcorn in the background as well.

That said, my next machine will have more than a gig of RAM, but that's just future proofing.

 

[sblasl]

I have bought a MBP C2D and 2 MB C2D, all of these systems have been flawless with no issues (real or perceived) whatsoever. We are happy!

 

[whooleytoo]

That is incorrect. That's actually a bit on the high side for unused RAM. OSX will use ALL of the RAM it can get a hand on and fill it up with things it thinks are likely to be needed, etc. It won't leave much RAM unused - 100mb is higher than I see on my machine with 1gb of RAM (usually I have 55mb or so).

Depends on your usage, I guess. On mine, I have >230MB free out of 768MB with several apps open.

 

[pixelbaker]

just tried booting holding C from my Memtest86 CD and no dice. got stuck on the Loading... screen. any suggestions for another memory test app I could use?

about doing a fresh install on the Raptor, I plan to do that as soon as I get my hands on Leopard anyway. I'd like to try some other things to see where my problem is first, then if I'm getting nowhere I'll do a clean install on the Raptor and run some tests.

 

[apfhex]

Unrarx is TERRIBLE, it without fail, locks up my system in the same way when decompressing large files. If you do a google search on this issue, it seems to be related to unrarx and most new intel macs.

I've used UnRarX (v2.2) on my Mac Pro no problem. I usually let Stuffit Expander do RARs, but sometimes I run into ones that don't work so I use Unrarx.

Anyway, the OP's issue isn't lack of RAM. I have 2GB on mine and yes, it is the limiting factor in performance and when I can afford it I'm going to double it. But that's because I run a lot of the Adobe Creative Suit apps regularly.

Right now I'll tell you what I'm running. iTunes, Safari, Mail, Adium, Preview, Photoshop CS2, Illustrator CS2 (with one document open), LaunchBar, FontExplorer X. A few hours ago I had Azureus open too — I use it a lot without problems and it actually isn't as resource intensive as you might think. I also have a bunch of Widgets running. iStat Pro says i have 59MB RAM free, 558MB inactive. There is no slowdown (except for in the CS apps, because of Rosetta). I could be un-RARing a file with no problems, I guarantee you. iTunes never skips a beat.

It sounds like there *might* be a hardware problem with your Mac Pro, but OTOH it could be a FUBARed OS X install (I've never had that happen to me, but, could be...).

 

[maxrobertson]

I had a similar problem with my Macbook Pro, in the end I tracked it down to a weird process run by Spotlight. I'm not suggesting you have a similar rouge process, but I would suggest you open up activity monitor to see if anything is taking up most of your processor time and hard drive access. Open up "all processes" and not just "my processes"

Activity Monitor can be found under, applications/utilities.

That process indexes your hard drive for spotlight when you first use the computer. It needs to run, but it will never slow down your computer again after finishing.

 

[pixelbaker]

I got bored so I went ahead and popped in the Raptor and did a fresh install of OS X. the boot up time is much better with the fresh install as well as shutdown times. I didn't really have any other tests to run so I just played around with the install and overall it felt the same speed wise with launching apps. I also ran an extended Apple hardware test and it came back clean.

 

[Sesshi]

So by same speed do you mean the improved speed or the same slow speed?

 

[pixelbaker]

So by same speed do you mean the improved speed or the same slow speed?

it felt about the same as my old install. my system overall feels decently responsive, just a little slower than it really should be from what I've read about how other peoples' systems are performing. with the fresh install I didn't have many apps to play with to test, but it might have felt a little bit snappier overall. I'm not sure if this is the cause of the Raptor or if that's just the result of a clean install.

 

[Sesshi]

I still think it's RAM if the hardware checks out.

 

[FireArse]

My Mac Pro

To be honest, I'd agree that something is quite wrong on your mac. What peripherals are installed? Are you having wireless issues? I have a 2.66GHz Mac Pro, I'm running iTunes (both ripping and playing MP3's) azureus in the background and FOH running, eating up cycles not used by anything else. It runs sweet. I only have 1GB of RAM. I know, I know, it's TOP of my list of things to buy on my next visit to the USA, cos I'm not paying UK prices for Mac Pro RAM!

Hope you sort this out, they are amazing machines!

F

 

[Sesshi]

Could it be a difference in expectation? I mean, I know how a Dual 5160 should go as I have Windows machines with that setup. The Pro doing much the same sort of thing with a mix of Rosetta and Universal apps + occasional use of Parallels felt comparatively sluggish with 2Gb.

 

[pixelbaker]

FireArse: I'm only using ethernet, no wifi. In fact i don't even have an airport card. I've got no peripherals unless you count my Logitech S530 cordless set.

Sesshi: I previously had an Athlon 64 system that felt faster and more responsive in day to day stuff than my Mac does overall. I have a pretty strict rule about only using UB apps with a few exceptions (Photoshop, Office 2004).

I'd still be curious to find a good bootable memtest app to do a thorough test and see how that goes. I'll still be waiting on Leopard to do a fresh install on the Raptor and actually install all my apps and start using it. Hopefully it won't be a huge deal to get fixed software or hardware wise.

 

[Sesshi]

Do you have Entourage open most of the time? Just curious.