Snow Leopard performance slow...

1. Enable Spaces with 16 Desktops
2. Click on a window and drag it around the Spaces Matrix
3. Is nobody else seeing it lag behind your mouse movements by about 5-10 seconds?

Configure changing between desktops to a key combo like Left Control+CursorKeys. Use this combo to change between desktops. The lag is much greater in Snow Leopard than in Leopard.

Create a new user, and replay the steps above. Same result.

This is insane. Same thing happens on a 17" 2009 MBP (8G RAM) and 2009 iMac (4G RAM). 17" MBP 2008 with 4G RAM running Leopard doesn't have the problem.

Apple, please, please, fix this. Pretty please?

Message was edited by: quantumonion

Hi, I'm in desperate need of help. I tried to do the fix listed in the message board thread, and like you must have deleted too much. Now I'm having the same spinning wheel problem as you. I know you probably have better things to do, but I'm in dire straights and would really appreciate if you could tell me how you fixed your problem. I do not have an external drive so cannot backup from time machine. Is there anyway to startup from a different disk and manually replace the file? Thank you so much!

There is a way to put the files back, but it is really tough if they are in your trash. I will tell you that the best way to do this is to start by connecting to another Mac and boot via firewire ( http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1661). Then you will have to do a spotlight search including hidden files for the .Trash folder and manually drag the file out of it and back to where it came. If you already emptied your trash, you will have to use one of the many data recovery programs (expect to have to pay for it) to recover the file, as long as you have not overwritten it.

Alternatively, you could reinstall Snow Leopard.

Hi: In addition to slowing to a crawl, anyone notice their address book sync to MobileMe and/or hard wire sync with iPhone to iTunes running like a snail? I tried over-writing everything with data on the mobile me cloud, and optimistically hoped that it would work it self out after a while, but after letting the sync run over night for 2 days, I am not so optimistic. The entire system is so much slower that in 10.5 it is not usable.

- I tried booting in safe mode (shift key) and it seemed to help a little, but then bogged back to a crawl.
- I logged in as a new user which had nothing installed, that seemed a little better, but then bogged back to a crawl.
- I deleted the sound preferences file noted above, seemed to help a little, but then bogged.
- watching activity monitor, I saw a couple of items that were older (non 64 bit intel) so I deleted them as they were not needed anymore; reboot, but no difference.

Looks like I need to go back to 10.5 what a bummer!

I am also experiencing serious performance problems in all our macs after upgrading to SL: One Alum iMac and two MacBooks Pro.

Snow Leopard is not Working Properly yet... more QA and bugfixing is still required, main issues:

- If freezes from time to time: Safari, Video Playbacks, Eye TV, itunes, etc.
- Massive Memory Leaks: I am restarting Safary every other day, memory usage reaches more than 1GB very easily... With my 4GB mem, swap was never used with leopard, and now it reaches easily 3GB in swap.
- User interface freezes as well, becomes unresponsive for seconds... expose, dock, etc.. they are no longer smooth...

Generally speaking I regret having upgraded to SL. I should have waited to see that it was stable before upgrading. I don't recommend upgrading to other uses until this issues are fixed, unless you are a developer or early adopter.

To be fair, I feel "back to windows and Microsoft", and the solutions that we are reading in this forum do not help. I am not going to mess up my Mac with new accounts, or manual fixes. If apple means quality, apple must understand that mac users don't take workarounds as solutions. I just want all the issues fixed either via software update or a rollback to leopard procedure.

I am confident we will get it soon.

SL runs like a scalded cat on my Mac Pro, and on a friend's year-old iMac. WAY faster start-up and performance in native applications, but there are some problems with third-party stuff: MS OFFICE works but is considerably slower.... and Adobe CS3 just doesn't work at all.

I do have 12 GB of RAM, however.... so perhaps SL needs more memory to shine.

Joe Erkes wrote:


I do have 12 GB of RAM, however.... so perhaps SL needs more memory to shine.

Exactly what I found. Now that I have upgraded from 2gb to 4gb SL is great. But with 2GB it was like molasses, where before on 10.5 the performance was decent.

I usually do not bother with posting something I haven't spent an enormous amount of time trying to figure it out as I don't want to be guilty of it being an User error. In this post, I am deciding to post as I've spent way too much time with SL and its slow to let it go unnoticed. Since having SL, I have: a broken Maxtor HD (crash and burn), reinstalled SL with the DVD because it would fail to boot (the Time Machine restore failed to reboot much to my chagrin) for some totally unknown reason, spinning beachballs on the most common tasks like iTunes (I have the very last latest) as well as Finder (I have the latest SL Updates) doing simple tasks like pointing to a folder to look at the files, my iPod Classic now says the iPhoto folder has changed and wants to re-copy & update it (sorry but nothing has changed). I have checked Permissions several times and ran some SL utilities to run the weekly maintenance chores all without change. It is slow slow slow man! I thought Leopard was slow (my iMac came with it) but this has got to be figured out. Very annoying. I will do one more thing and create a new account to see if (what) SL is not happy with. It it turns out its my 2GB RAM installed then Apple should just say that 4GB is bare-bones minimum.

I'm having the same problems as everybody else. Pinwheel on even the simplest of tasks (opening iTunes, Firefox, etc.), freezes that last far longer than they ever did in 10.5, etc. All my apps run slower that before the upgrade and the same thing goes for the OS and Finder in general.

This is all getting to the point where it's making me want to go back to Leopard and kill the Snow. Apple needs to fix this.

I have never had a lasting problem with any Apple product until this.

Put me on the 'I'm about to punch my computer in the head' list.

Since Snow Leopard upgrade, it's turned into a Royal PITA.

Safari slows to a halt. Switching tabs brings up beach ball, disk starts whirring and it just sits there for 15 seconds. Firefox the same.

Have updated to 10.6.1
Have tried cache cleaning / repairing permissions & other suggestions i've found
Have 20GB free space
Have tried all i can, but this POS is just crazy.
Went round to a friends house last night, he's got Windows 7, and it's faster and much more appealing at the moment.
Have a 2008 Macbook 2.2Ghz - 2GB of RAM

I'm really not sure what to do. Perhaps it's some existing piece of software installed causing the problem

Have tried looking at the activity monitor. Safari seems to be the problem. Especially when flash elements load
Expose takes around 5 seconds to respond
It's totally unusable and causing a LOT of frustration.

Like the rest of the folks here, SL has slowed my iMac down to a crawl. I don't want to have to fix something, reset anything, reload, refresh, reboot, restore or RE anything; if I wanted frustration and irritation, I wouldn't have switched from Windows and saved the money for a case or two of good single malt,
Azartguy

I just suddenly started having this same problem. After reading this thread I created a new user account and logged in and was amazed at how fast it worked!

But now what do I do?! I can't just start using the new account, all of my settings, bookmarks, etc. are on the other one. Plus the other account is the main one so I won't be able to make changes on this new one.

Can someone please help me? I feel like I finally found a fix, but it's just out of reach!

Update: Turned out that it was my Firewire drive. The fix was least evasive than creating a new account (as the last poster found out). What I did was to let SL see the Firewire drive for the first time (I unplugged it) and let it create the device like it was brand new. That did the trick! Its been running in tip-top shape since my last post (on this thread) so a few weeks is a good test!

Hey! That's interesting! What led you to realize it was the firewire drive? I'm curious because I can't help thinking my USB drives seem slower to wake up than they used to be. Sometimes painfully slow.

Deleting the core audio plist as mentioned above resolved this issue for me.