Computer Lagging/Moving Slow

Hi Enter.The.Circus,

A couple of things we can try.

1.) Make a new user, navigate around the computer as you normally would for an hour or so. Does the problem reproduce itself?
2.) When this is occurring, go ahead and launch Activity Monitor (it's in the Utilities folder, inside the Applications folder). Towards the bottom of Activity Monitor you have some choices. Choose System Memory. What portion of that pie chart is green? What portion is yellow (when the sluggish performance is occurring).

Those are the first two things to try, the first step is to try and isolate the issue to user specific or system wide. The second is to determine what process (if any) is consuming your RAM/CPU.

Hi Enter.The.Circus: One thing that is quite easy to check is to see if there is an activity using too much of the CPU. Go to Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor, click the CPU column to sort, check the drop down box at the top to show all processes. If there is an activity or App using a large amount of the CPU, you can highlight it and then stop the process.

Hope this helps
Stedman

Hi Enter.The.Circus: If there is a process using too much of the CPU it may not be visible until you select "All Processes" instead of "My Processes". The numbers you quote are for the amount RAM being utilized, those numbers may not be related to your issue.

Stedman

If it's account-specific, more memory is not the answer. If you see the behavior with one user account and not another, it's specific to what's running in the first account. Check System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items for the account that has the behavior. Especially see if anything has an icon that looks like the process named (null) in your Activity Monitor screen shot; that seems odd to me.

Something is definitely not right with that Activity Monitor. That's off a restart in a new user?

The frog icon, if I recall, represents Vuze which is a file-sharing client. Clearly it went to launch and got hung and then started chewing up your system resources. From a restart, no startup items, on a MacBook Air with 2.0GB of RAM I'm at almost 75% green in that same pie chart. With over 50% of your available RAM being consumed, and maybe 5% available it's very clear why you're having performance issues.

No, more RAM is not the fix, identifying what's causing all of yours to become "in use" is the first step. If we startup a new user, with nothing set to be in startup items and no applications running but Finder & Activity Monitor, what does that pie chart look like?

Oh, it's a frog. And it's a file sharing process. I don't have any experience with them, but a little googling shows a number of opinions that Vuze is a resource hog.