Q: El Capitan running slowly?

Lag and mini freeze started after 10.11.1 update . 10.11.0 ran good for me at least for few weeks to a month as i updated as soon as El capitan came out. Just did PRAM reset and lag is all gone. Hope it lasts. Mine is retina macbook pro 15 inch 2014 . I dont use the mail app at all.

My macbook pro couldn't seem to run safari after downgrading to El Capitan. It was also making everything else run extremely slow, Activity Monitor shows that safari was using 100.2% of my CPU. I resolved this by uninstalling all safari extensions, I had never seen them before, but the results were immediate.

Try uninstalling all safari extensions

I've had the same problem after "upgrading" to El Capitan. I added more RAM to my mid-2011 iMac, but it barely helped the problem. Seemed like the hard drive was constantly active.

So, I did a bit of experimenting, to determine which programmes were accessing memory, and it turned out that "Contacts" was the culprit.

So, I disabled its "auto update" function, and decided to remove the **** thing. And, Hey-Presto, my Mac is back to full speed.

Try it - it's the only solution that worked for me and, I'm proud to say I discovered it myself, after much fruitless search on this and other forums...

UPDATE..

Replaced 16 gb of memory with the new stuff. Installed el capitan again. I also did all the resets etc. Disabled Mail,Spotlight etc as i don,t use them anyway.

Its got rid of the slow running and the beachballs.. Now the only problems are that iTunes etc often stop working for second or two while playing music.

Also my cd/dvd player has packed up again (2nd one).. And i can no longer use my printer. Iv,e tried various driver upgrades with no luck..Still have no cctv working which was ok on yosemite.. Got wrong off Apple for my previous post which has been deleted. SO ANY ONE Suggest on what can be done next..

So, I have a MacBook Pro 2010 and a MacBook Air 2014. The former upgraded into a complete dog, whilst the latter is running faster than ever. I couldn't work this out and followed some of the posts on this thread and a couple of others and could not improve the performance of my MacBook Pro. However, I just went into System Preferences... > Accessibility and selected "Reduce Transparency". The performance change was instantaneous and incredibly noticeable. Really not sure how this could make such a difference but my new windows are opening at a much much faster rate and I'm not getting a spinning ball annoying the **** out of me any more. As I say, no idea how this has made such a difference but thought I'd post it here in case it helps others with a  similar set up.

Hi all,

I installed El Capitan two days ago on our 2010 Macbook, which has just 2 GB of RAM. Had all sorts of issues with the initial startup - it wouldn't boot, and I had to boot up in Safe Mode and follow instructions for deleting all sorts of cached files (found those instructions in another thread somewhere on this site). In any case, I finally got it to boot up, but it was running really slowly, not because of high CPU usage but because of high Memory Pressure, even when only running the Finder. It was weird, because none of the applications in Activity Monitor seemed to be using a ton of memory, but the memory pressure was yellow and we got lots of spinning beach balls and hangups (and other wierd stuff happening).

I followed all of the various suggestions listed here (disabled Spotlight, reset NVRAM, reset SMC, deleted Mail log files, rebuilt Mail, reduced transparency, etc) but what really seemed to work was: time. After about 20-30 hours, the memory pressure suddenly went from yellow to green, and the laptop seems to be working just fine.

I wouldn't say it's screaming fast (I was hoping the upgrade would make the system run faster than it did on Yosemite, as the reviews I read seemed to promise - this is, sadly, not the case). But at least it's working smoothly now, and as long as we don't open Mail (which we don't use anyway) it seems to stay green.

I suspect, with others, that the upgrade takes up a lot of memory because it's rebuilding something? Or indexing? Whatever it's doing, it's well hidden (and disabling Spotlight doesn't seem to stop it). We did not have FileVault enabled so encryption was NOT the issue in our case.

I haven't tried restarting it yet, so it remains to be seen whether the slowness will return after a restart. Fingers crossed.

I've had the same problem after "upgrading" to El Capitan. I added more RAM to my mid-2011 iMac, but it barely helped the problem. Seemed like the hard drive was constantly active.

So, I did a bit of experimenting, to determine which programmes were accessing memory, and it turned out that "Contacts" was the culprit.

So, I disabled its "auto update" function, and decided to remove the **** thing. And, Hey-Presto, my Mac is back to full speed.

Try it - it's the only solution that worked for me and, I'm proud to say I discovered it myself, after much fruitless search on this and other forums...

Normally when you buy a new Mac you feel... SPEED.

I went from a late 2009 iMac 12 GB ram, upgraded with ssd

to a MacBook Pro Mid 2015 16 GB ram.

Both i7.

I don't feed the SPEED. I really miss the speed.

My 2009 iMac is faster!

I know one is a laptop the other is a desktop Mac...

but still – there's 6 years between the two Macs.

El Capitan is running slow. Turtle slow... sometimes.

Resetting PRAM helps a little. Turn off FileVault helps.

But it's still slow... many different task & apps are SLOW.

I really hope... an update will fix the TurtleOS.

El Capitan is nice... really nice. Many good feature. Looks good.

But SPEED must be increased dramatically.

#1 priority, thanx Apple.

I think you can assume that El Capitan, alone, will need almost 4 GB of memory to run decently. I'm amazed it would even start with 2 GB. When a computer doesn't have enough memory it will start using the hard drive to store temporary files, etc. and that will be VERY slow. So... you really need to have at LEAST 4 GB of RAM (memory)... preferably 8 GB if your computer can take that much. Memory is inexpensive these days so go for it! You'll be glad you did

You may all recall that I was testing El Capitan on my MacBook Pro - Mid 2009 using an SD card with the system on it.

After upgrading my iMac and having good success I decided to go ahead and upgrade the system on my HD.

I am happy to report that after the initial time consuming updates of all the syncing, spotlight and software upgrades it is running just fine. So if anyone is in doubt, running on an SD card or flash drive will not cut it.

And after reading all the various problem many are having I am convinced the problem is NOT El Capitan but rather problems with the computers it has been installed on.

What iMacs then?. Because mine still is not running ok. I still get the second or two stops when i play music files in iTunes. Windows media player through parallels runs ok. Any suggestions as to what to do next. Everything is up to date.. Found the problem with my printer not running , its a canon mp600 & the drivers won't work on el Capitan. Canon aren,t going to upgrade the driver for my printer according to their website. So it looks like a new printer is needed..All ran ok on yosemite, Even my cctv worked ok but does not show a picture on elCapitan for some reason. Baffled but still trying..

I've had the same problem after "upgrading" to El Capitan. I added more RAM to my mid-2011 iMac, but it barely helped the problem. Seemed like the hard drive was constantly active.

So, I did a bit of experimenting, to determine which programmes were accessing memory, and it turned out that "Contacts" was the culprit.

So, I disabled its "auto update" function, and decided to remove the **** thing. And, Hey-Presto, my Mac is back to full speed.

Try it - it's the only solution that worked for me and, I'm proud to say I discovered it myself, after much fruitless search on this and other forums...

Hold down the left shift, option and control keys together -- thanks very much. This appears to have helped me as well.

I think i figured a few things out since i started down this road. Some one mentioned that its Not the OS itself and i think i am starting to agree.

The issues are coming from the size of things on the computer. What i mean is i have 87,000 emails in Yosemite and the computer was fine. I covered and it horked it. I didn't realize that is what it was at first so I flattened the computer and had a fresh install.

Second i hoooked up the mail. Blam down it went again. We thought at first if I left it all alone, it would be okay but that wasn't the case, so backed the mail up on one of our servers so i can get to it through a webmail situation. And Blam, it all started working perfectly intact blows yosemite out of the water.

But i lost access to about 80,000 emails that i've never had an issue with.

Okay so i'm trucking along and launched iTunes today. I tried to import 23Gig of music.

I think the problem is that the OS doesn't plan for there to be large user databases resident on the computer. Its designed to run everything off the cloud I'm guessing. I hope apple starts to look into this and fixes this. Users especially long time users will have large amounts of files. I have 8000 MP3s i purchased from iTunes.  I think this is why the problems seem to very from machine to machine because each of us interface with our computer differently.

I hope this helps them start to correct this.