Snow Leopard performance slow...

Thanks, and you are welcome too--for me trying to help you guys/gals. Ummmmm... No need for me to scroll. Just trying to help. Didn't really care if it was posted above since all may not have seen it anyway. Thanks for the info on the services issue.

So you posted half an answer that causes other issues. Thanks. And you don't care that your half an answer is only half the answer. Thanks again.

Can't say I haven't done the same, but it's sound advice that we all should perhaps scan through a thread before contributing.

You're welcome as well.

I had exactly the same symptoms — MacBook Pro mid 2009 edition, pretty clean 10.5.x upgraded to 10.6 and suddenly running very, very slow.

Ran Disk Utility and repaired permissions, now it's running like a beast. Apps boot in one bounce whereas before they were taking 10 or 12.

Very happy camper, here.

My system started slowing down about 1 day after I restored the coreaudiod process. I restarted and things went well for a short time. Then the system slowed again. This time I couldn't even force quit several applications and was forced to use the power button to shut down.

This time I paid close attention to the Activity Monitor displays. The odd thing was the no process, in particular the coreaudiod process, seemed to be hogging CPU resources when the system slowed. I also didn't see any excessive disk activity or memory leakage.

I once again deleted the coreaudiod plist file and restarted, and my system has been running fine ever since (about 2 days). Off course I do not have any system sounds anymore, which I find annoying, but survivable. I don't know how someone pinned down the coreaudiod problem, but that's the fix that worked for me.

I agree with previous posters that the problem seems to be Rosetta related. I use an old version of Filemaker which requires Rosetta, and the troubles seemed to crop up after I've used it for a while. Conversely, things work fine until I use an application that requires Rosetta.

Upgrading to Snow Leopard has not been a pleasant experience for me, but I'm hanging in there. I'm looking forward to the next update and getting the system sounds back.

It too was suffering the SL slow down, complete with bad response time in Safari and Firefox, slow Flash, crazy fan, and just generally instability.

I'm a fool, but I FINALLY decided to check Activity Monitor (after waiting way too long). Turns out DropBox was using over 100% of my CPU! Since I killed that (last night) and told it to never come back again, my Mac has been cruising. I tried reopening DropBox last night, and again it was over 100% CPU.

I haven't seen anyone with that same problem....But you might want to check it out if you are still struggling.

BiknSwans wrote:
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.

I have the exact the same issue. I haven't got the sound back yet. can anyone help us?

Hello there,

I have the exact same problem and it started after i've upgraded my Snow Leopard 10.6 to 10.6.1 by the software updater.

It's extremely slow since the update and my MB Pro is overheating all the time.I watch this stupid turning-colorful-circle all the time 😀

It's becoming very annoying...!I've also tried this Performance Update 1.0 thing already but it said i don't have the proper hardware for this update during the installation..

Please someone help or i'll have to format my mac os and install it from the beginning again.. 😟 if this will change anything of course

Finally, success! Upgraded to 10.6.2, replaced the offending coreaudio.plist file, repaired permissions, restarted and now my MacBook runs fast AND I have my system sounds back. Who knew I'd miss the crumpling paper sound of the Trash emptying? Keeping fingers crossed that the problem will not re-surface. Will update if that happens. If I don't post here anymore, it means I'm in the clear!

Thank you all for your help, advice and suggestions. This has been an interesting and infuriating experience indeed. Cheers!

Message was edited by: Alf Teo

Thanks for the update. My iMac has been running fine since my last post when I deleted the coreaudio.plist file, October 30th. In the meantime, I've also upgraded to 10.6.2 using the combined file, but haven't tried replacing the coreaudio.plist file.

How can someone create or get a coreaudio.plist file that works? I don't have another source that I can use to replace the old one I saved.

I too miss the system sounds, but don't want to go through that miserable slowdown again.

Hi, I used the same .plist file that I pulled out of the System/Library/LaunchDaemons folder. It wasn't a new one or anything. So if you have Time Machine set up, you might still be able to retrieve it. Or, if you still have the original .plist file, try using that. Remember to repair permissions with Disk Utility. I didn't run Disk Utility off the DVD, btw, just from my hard-drive itself. Hope this helps. Cheers!

Hi, since i upgraded to SL (clean installation), i noticed that my Macbook Pro boots up very slow (48-50 secs). When i was on Leopard my boot time was of 30-32 secs.

I don't have any daemon running in background that could affect this slowness.

I tried to:
- Repair permissions;
- Reset PRAM;
- Run Onyx to clean my system (cache, old files, etc..)
- Create another account to test if the problem is user-side.

No success. Any help will be appreciated. Thank you! 🙂

"("I unplugged it") and let it create the device like it was brand new"
What if it is an internal Drive?
Thank you

Try resetting SMC.

Worked for me, SL is running better than before, though I don't quite buy that it's that much faster or better than Leopard. Time will tell.

This has been ****. Thanks Apple.

Usually it would be fine after a restart, but then get crappy again. But, I did the SMC repair and it cleared things up for me, at least for the past three days it has been slow down free. Let me know if it worked for anyone else?

No joy here. I'm still running fine. However, I did restore the coreaudod.plist file expecting to get the system sounds back, and start running slowly. I still don't have the system sounds even though I've rebooted multiple times. The process doesn't even show up in the list displayed by Activity Monitor. I simply copied the .plist file back to the LaunchDaemons folder, re-booted, but nothing changed.

I guess the next step is to re-install Snow Leopard and the combo update see what happens.