Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Why is my MBP slow?

D

dingdongbubble

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 1, 2007
538
0
Hi

I got my base model 13" MBP back in September and the performance is unsatisfactory now. Safari and Firefox are like really laggy and the responsiveness is horrible. Its very unexpected from something like the MBP. What do you think I can do? I have repaired the permissions but that doesnt help. Is it possibly because I have only 18 or so GB of HDD space left?
 
Are you visiting any Flash heavy sites? Otherwise a faster hard drive is always a good choice since 5400 RPM is standard.
 
I visit regular websites like Gamespot, BBC, Youtube, Macworld. But even so, its just strange that the MBP could get slowed down by just websites.
 
Im not rly sure about Mac hard drive format. But your MBP shouldnt be acting slow. I would try switch 50-100GB from your hard drive to a backup drive or external and see if that speeds it up. You dont use anti virus do you? I hear anti virus software on a mac can make it crawl and is not a good idea.
 
But this thing is unacceptably slow for everything in general not just youtube specifically.
 
dingdongbubble said:
But this thing is unacceptably slow for everything in general not just youtube specifically.
Click to expand...
Open up Activity Monitor and show All Processes. There might be an errant process using all your CPU time. Do you have iStat Pro? You'd be able to monitor processes and the load on the fly using that widget.
 
Do you have the latest version of Flash player 10 installed?

How much RAM do you have? In Activity Monitor, look at the System Memory tab and tell us the numbers for Free RAM, Page Outs, and Swap Used. If either of the second two are more than 50-100mb, or if Free RAM is less than 50-100 MB, you probably need more RAM.

I think you have enough free disk space.

It wouldn't hurt to run the Apple Hardware Test.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1509
 
m85476585 said:
Do you have the latest version of Flash player 10 installed?

How much RAM do you have? In Activity Monitor, look at the System Memory tab and tell us the numbers for Free RAM, Page Outs, and Swap Used. If either of the second two are more than 50-100mb, or if Free RAM is less than 50-100 MB, you probably need more RAM.

I think you have enough free disk space.
Click to expand...
The amount of free RAM doesn't matter as much as how much was paged out. I have a system with 6 GB of RAM and barely any of it is free but the page outs are non-existent.
 
Heres a screen clipping of Activity Monitors memory section. CPU seems fine. I have 2 GB RAM.
 

Attachments

  • Screen shot 2009-12-16 at 7.32.46 PM.png
    Screen shot 2009-12-16 at 7.32.46 PM.png
    23.1 KB · Views: 71
Based on your page outs and swap used, it looks like you were low on RAM at some point in the past, but not right now. If it is still slow with that much free RAM, it's probably not a RAM issue. You still might want to consider upgrading to 4gb, but I don't think it will fix the problem you are currently having.
 
dingdongbubble said:
Heres a screen clipping of Activity Monitors memory section. CPU seems fine. I have 2 GB RAM.
Click to expand...

How much multitasking are you doing? could effect that.

See if you have any rogue processes grinding your computer to a halt. Do a hardware test to see if anything is failing but if all else fails reformat and see if it helps and if then that doesn't help. apple store.
 
Hmm well yah at this time it is running fine. I am multitasking quite a bit. Safari, Firefox, VLC and OpenOffice all open together. I hope thats not too intense.
 
Yeah that shouldnt slow it down at all. I have photoshop cs4, preview, itunes, firefox, finder and transmission open now and its running great!

Must be a hardware problem or maybe a rogue app stealing some memory or cpu.
 
dingdongbubble said:
Heres a screen clipping of Activity Monitors memory section. CPU seems fine. I have 2 GB RAM.
Click to expand...

dingdongbubble said:
Hmm well yah at this time it is running fine. I am multitasking quite a bit. Safari, Firefox, VLC and OpenOffice all open together. I hope thats not too intense.
Click to expand...
I think your problem will be solved with more RAM especially since you said it's not always slow. Your Activity Monitor clearly shows that you are maxing out your RAM at times. You have almost a 1 gigs worth of page outs and swapping. Anytime your computer maxes out its RAM it will run slower when it has to use the hard drive instead. RAM is much faster than the hard drive and the problem is worst if you have a slow hard drive.

I have 4 gigs and I normally have zero page out and swapping unless I use my computer more intensely. If you like doing a lot of multitasking then you should invest in more RAM until you get zero page outs and swapping. How much RAM you need depends on how much you multitask and how much RAM your programs eat up. Even if a program doesn't use much RAM it will add up if you open several of them at once.

I had a similar problem on my desktop. It only had 2 gigs of RAM but a lot of page outs and swapping. After adding more RAM the problem was pretty much solved. Your slowness won't show itself until you have maxed your RAM and it could be some other unknown program eating up your RAM but either way something is maxing it out.
 
EndlessMac said:
I think your problem will be solved with more RAM especially since you said it's not always slow. Your Activity Monitor clearly shows that you are maxing out your RAM at times. You have almost a 1 gigs worth of page outs and swapping. Anytime your computer maxes out its RAM it will run slower when it has to use the hard drive instead. RAM is much faster than the hard drive and the problem is worst if you have a slow hard drive.

I have 4 gigs and I normally have zero page out and swapping unless I use my computer more intensely. If you like doing a lot of multitasking then you should invest in more RAM until you get zero page outs and swapping. How much RAM you need depends on how much you multitask and how much RAM your programs eat up. Even if a program doesn't use much RAM it will add up if you open several of them at once.

I had a similar problem on my desktop. It only had 2 gigs of RAM but a lot of page outs and swapping. After adding more RAM the problem was pretty much solved. Your slowness won't show itself until you have maxed your RAM and it could be some other unknown program eating up your RAM but either way something is maxing it out.
Click to expand...

1+ on ram upgrade, your multitasking is it unless your running one or two programs and its still sluggish.
 
thunderboltspro said:
your multitasking is it unless your running one or two programs and its still sluggish.
Click to expand...
That actually would be a good way to test the problem. Dingdongbubble can try limiting himself/herself using one program at time all day. In other words close each program before opening the other one. At the end of the day see how much page out and swapping you have. If it's close to zero and you don't have any slowness then the problem is multitasking maxing out the RAM.
 
But this is rather disappointing. I mean I am not running any scientific application or any video editor or some heavy duty stuff. Why cant such a powerful computer keep up with just a few web browsers and a couple of other small applications?:confused:

I will try doing what you said and get back hopefully. Thanks everyone.
 
or you could just try multitasking the hell out of your computer for an hour and if it starts freezing up and slowing down it's your ram running out.

But i honestly don't think your computer should be acting up because of the ram. 2 GB is a pretty good amount.
 
dingdongbubble said:
But this is rather disappointing. I mean I am not running any scientific application or any video editor or some heavy duty stuff. Why cant such a powerful computer keep up with just a few web browsers and a couple of other small applications?:confused:

I will try doing what you said and get back hopefully. Thanks everyone.
Click to expand...

OS X runs best with a lot of memory. It tries to keep a lot of stuff cached so it runs faster, but then it doesn't always give up that space to your programs like it should. Rebooting will clear out a lot of stuff cached in RAM.

Firefox is one of the worst memory users. It is better than it used to be, but it can still easily use 500mb or more. If it gets too high, try restarting it.

Safari, OpenOffice, and VLC shouldn't be too bad, although I could see OpenOffice using a lot if you have many documents open, graphics-intensive documents open, or many types of documents open (text, spreadsheet, presentation, etc).
 
specops said:
But i honestly don't think your computer should be acting up because of the ram. 2 GB is a pretty good amount.
Click to expand...
2 gigs is normally a pretty good amount but his Activity Monitor is saying that he is paging out and swapping quite a lot which in general is one indication that he could use more RAM.

The question is whether his RAM maxing problem is caused by the applications he has mentioned or if there is something else that is running without his knowledge.
 
The page in : page out ratio is really bad.

It should be at most 100 : 15.

Once it gets worse than this, your system is relying on the hard drive to act as RAM, which will slow things down. So, like many have said, get a RAM upgrade if possible.

Before that though, does a restart change anything?
 
Yep, get more RAM. The combination of low RAM and low hard drive space is what's killing you. Low RAM means your MBP is having to page out a lot, and low disk space means it's finding it more difficult to find space for the page-outs
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back