Snow Leopard performance slow...

And then there's no sound when something is deleted to the trash can. What else does this affect?

I've not been able to find anything that explains what this file is used for. I deleted it, and it was not re-created by anything I did. But I lost sound when I sent something to the trash. I don't know what else this broke. Since I couldn't find any documentation on it I restored the file. Now I have trash sound again.

Do you have trash sound since deleting this file?

I installed SL three days ago and have had similar results. My MacBook Pro has slowed to a crawl everything seems to take longer. It's so slow it's unusable. I also use it for work so I really need it working by Monday. The worst part is VMWare. I had my work PC suspended in VMWare when I updated the OS, and after the upgrade, It started complaining about file accesses. The VM then force shut down and I haven't been able to boot it since. I tried upgrading from VMWare Fusion 2.0.5 to 2.0.6, but the machine still won't boot. I have a backup from a few days ago so I may try restoring that VM from time machine, and I'm afraid to try any of my other VM's as I don't want to corrupt them as well.

I'm trying the repair permissions now, I don't think I want to delete coreaudio, and nothing seems to be consuming that many resources. Wish me luck, since if this doesn't work. I guess I'll be spending tomorrow on the phone with Apple support. I would definitely recommend everyone waits to upgrade to SL.

Piggie wrote:
And then there's no sound when something is deleted to the trash can. What else does this affect?

I've not been able to find anything that explains what this file is used for. I deleted it, and it was not re-created by anything I did. But I lost sound when I sent something to the trash. I don't know what else this broke. Since I couldn't find any documentation on it I restored the file. Now I have trash sound again.

Do you have trash sound since deleting this file?

Actually, I hadn't noticed, but upon checking it, I had no Finder action related sounds (trash, move file, etc).

Personally, I'd rather have no Trash can sounds than an unusable system, however, I'd like to have both.

Checked some threads here about people just losing Finder sounds for no reason at all and found that by running these two terminal commands, all sounds were restored to my system:

sudo service com.apple.audio.coreaudiod stop
sudo service com.apple.audio.coreaudiod start

I'm curious, since deleting and restoring the plist file, have you experienced the pinwheeling/slowdown problem originally described in the thread?

Had same problem too. Even tried creating new user accounts. They came to a crawl too. I read all the other posts on this forum and didn't have a rogue process nor the core audio problem others have reported. Resolution (for me)? Pure grit.

Just spent the past six hours totally hand reinstalling e/thing. Had to boot into Utilities from the SL CD then format the HD. Thanks to Time Machine I've been able to manually recreate my mail folder and hierarchy, find my iWork templates, and of course all my documents.

I took a different approach to syncing to MM this time. For the initial sync force replaced all Bookmarks, Contacts, Calendars, Keychains, Mail Accounts & Rules/Settings on the Mac. Then I force replaced e/thing on the cloud. This way I was sure that MM wasn't writing something to the mac that could be the culprit. I have no proof of this but I took this extra care nonetheless.

So far my performance is extremely fast. Prior to this fresh install it'd take Pages or Keynote twelves bounces in the dock to startup. Now it's a half bounce. Prior to this fresh install, it'd take 5-7 seconds to open a group of RTF files at the same time. Now they all open in a half second.

Message was edited by: G4Monster

I was getting sluggish performance and deleted the coreaudiod plist file and lost Finder sounds. I tried to use Terminal and turn the Finder sounds back on using the sudo commands you provided, but I get this error message:

Last login: Mon Oct 26 08:46:10 on ttys001
c-66-177-185-71:~ swansadmin$ sudo service com.apple.coreaudiod stop
Password:
service: This command still works, but it is deprecated. Please use launchctl(8) instead.
service: failed to stop the 'com.apple.coreaudiod' service

I still don't get any sounds when deleting files, but the system seems to be ok otherwise.

BiknSwans wrote:
I was getting sluggish performance and deleted the coreaudiod plist file and lost Finder sounds. I tried to use Terminal and turn the Finder sounds back on using the sudo commands you provided, but I get this error message:

Last login: Mon Oct 26 08:46:10 on ttys001
c-66-177-185-71:~ swansadmin$ sudo service com.apple.coreaudiod stop
Password:
service: This command still works, but it is deprecated. Please use launchctl(8) instead.
service: failed to stop the 'com.apple.coreaudiod' service

I still don't get any sounds when deleting files, but the system seems to be ok otherwise.

The response about the command being deprecated is normal, it should still work. You could launchctl instead, but I'm not familiar with the syntax on that one. Should be similar.

Did you try the command with 'start'?

Check your system preference pane for sound and make sure that the checkmark for system sounds is checked.

I've restored the plist to my MacBook Pro with a copy from another machine, fixed permissions on the drive, then ran the two terminal commands, everything works fine. Not sure why you're having problems there.

The response about the command being deprecated is normal, it should still work. You could launchctl instead, but I'm not familiar with the syntax on that one. Should be similar.

Did you try the command with 'start'?

Check your system preference pane for sound and make sure that the checkmark for system sounds is checked.

I've restored the plist to my MacBook Pro with a copy from another machine, fixed permissions on the drive, then ran the two terminal commands, everything works fine. Not sure why you're having problems there.

I also tried the command with 'start' and got the same error message. In the preference pane 'Sound'/'Sound Effect', the Alert volume is set to maximum, the three checkboxes below that are checked, the Output volume is set halfway.

Thanks for your response. Maybe someone out there is a launchct(8) expert. Perhaps I should try to get a copy of the plist file and try it on my machine. Maybe that's why the command failed. I don't recall seeing that suggestion on other posts.

I found the format for using the launchctl command on another thread. I still get an error, but it's a little more informative:

c-66-177-185-71:~ swansadmin$ sudo launchctl stop com.apple.audio.coreaudiod
Password:
launchctl stop error: No such process
c-66-177-185-71:~ swansadmin$ sudo launchctl start com.apple.audio.coreaudiodlaunchctl start error: No such process
c-66-177-185-71:~ swansadmin$

It tells me that I have no such process. How do I get the process started again? Will restoring the plist file do that? It wouldn't seem so to me, but I'm no expert on this. I have done a restart just now, and previously I've done the usual file permissions repair and ran Disk Warrior and Onyx.

And after another eight hours of usage I'm back to a very slow system again. Something is very wrong.

When having deep problems like this on your system, there are two steps that you can take, and if you take both of them, you will be guaranteed to clear up the issue unless your hardware is faulty.

1. create a new user and see if the problem happens with that user

2. If that doesn't work, do a clean install of your system.

All of the fretting that some of you are doing about this probably is taking more time than a clean install would.

Another thread had the same basic issue as this one and another came up with the Firewire routine. Made some sense and it was easy to try so I went for it and it solved it. Pretty cool, eh? 🙂

I've got system sounds back. I restored the plist file using Time Machine and restarted. The coreaudiod process now showed up in Activity Monitor. I stopped and started the coreaudiod process using Terminal and the commands "sudo launchctl stop com.apple.audio.coreaudiod" and "sudo launchctl start com.apple.audio.coreaudiod". Now the system generates the proper sounds when emptying the trash or moving a file to a new folder.

If my system starts getting sluggish or coreaudiod starts hogging memory or CPU cycles, I'll report back. All is fine right now. Thanks for all the help.

I found something new to me on the general slowness problem. I have not used the fix, and I don't know why it might work. So, use it at your own discretion in trying the fix. No guarantees available from me. Anyway, Go > System > Library > LaunchDaemons/com.apple.audio.coreaudiod.plist and delete this file.

donv (The Ghost) wrote:
I found something new to me on the general slowness problem. I have not used the fix, and I don't know why it might work. So, use it at your own discretion in trying the fix. No guarantees available from me. Anyway, Go > System > Library > LaunchDaemons/com.apple.audio.coreaudiod.plist and delete this file.

Ummm...you better scroll back up the thread. That fix has been mentioned by a couple of us on here in this thread over a several week period, actually.

You'll lose all system sounds in Finder with that fix, but restoring the plist and stopping then starting the service seems to put all back in order.

Jensen Gelfond wrote:
When having deep problems like this on your system, there are two steps that you can take, and if you take both of them, you will be guaranteed to clear up the issue unless your hardware is faulty.

1. create a new user and see if the problem happens with that user

2. If that doesn't work, do a clean install of your system.

All of the fretting that some of you are doing about this probably is taking more time than a clean install would.

Your point is well taken, but c'mon, wipe and clean install, that sounds a lot more like Windows advice than Mac. 😟

Problem's fixed for me, it appears, with the coreaudio plist trick, which took a bit of googling to figure out, but hardly more work than a clean install of the system.