Snow Leopard performance slow...

Hi all...

I have a MacBook Pro and installed Snow Leopard over Leopard just yesterday. While the install ran fine and I have had no major issues, I have noticed a substantial slowing of my computer's performance. It's as if the processor is busy or memory is full. Everything happens as it should, but just a lot slower than before. For example, I have expose set to occur when I move the mouse to the upper-left corner of the screen. Before, expose occurred immediately. Now, it will occur after a 0.5-2.0 second lag. Many other apps are slower, such as Firefox, MS Excel, and MS Entourage. Adium also took about 2-3 times as long to launch, though I run it continuously and have had no further problems. In general, I get the pinwheel a lot more, as well as the ticking watch.

I was under the impression that Snow Leopard would improve performance, not slow it. Has anyone else had these issues as well? If so, did you find any way to resolve it?

- Jason

Owner of MacBook Pro, 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 3 GB RAM. I have other macs but I'm going to wait to upgrade the OS to Snow Leopard.

MacBook Pro 17", 2.33 GHz, Intel, Mac OS X (10.6), 3 MB RAM

Posted on Aug 30, 2009 6:47 PM

113 replies

Soogs

Level 1

0 points

Jun 17, 2010 7:28 AM in response to JasonWDC

Hi all when i upgraded from 10.5 to 10.6 i had the same slowdown issue as most of you.

I followed the steps and removed the coreaudiod.plist and everything sped up and when back to better or nowmal performance.

i got bored of not having the mac sounds so i reinstalled the plist via pacifist and the system seems to still be in good working order.... i cant tell if there is a slowdown or not as of yet.

what i can say for sure is that it defo is not like it was before the removal of the file where i would be watching the beachball for hours.

hope this is the same for the rest of you.

(i did not read all the posts here so please dont flame me if this has already posted hehe)

Rednoser

Level 1

8 points

Jul 19, 2010 3:36 PM in response to JasonWDC

I've had for 2 months now OS X Snow running on a alu-block Macbook with 4Gb Ram and 40Gb free space and I'm frustrated to the point of completely going back to Leopard. SNOW = SLOW! Everything I've read in this discussion is true. Just wished I had read it before upgrading.
I will visit the Genius Bar tomorrow, to see if the Geniuses can do something about it, but this is the worst OS X upgrade ever!

roblight

Level 1

0 points

Sep 30, 2010 11:31 AM in response to Rednoser

Rednoser wrote:
I've had for 2 months now OS X Snow running on a alu-block Macbook with 4Gb Ram and 40Gb free space and I'm frustrated to the point of completely going back to Leopard. SNOW = SLOW! Everything I've read in this discussion is true. Just wished I had read it before upgrading.
I will visit the Genius Bar tomorrow, to see if the Geniuses can do something about it, but this is the worst OS X upgrade ever!

I'm feeling the same way!

Did the Genius Bar help?

Oct 1, 2010 9:09 PM in response to roblight

Probably a dumb question, but if the coreaudi file is the culprit on my now very slow machine, shouldn't I be seeing the memory usage of the core audio process in activity monitor going through the roof? I am not. It is sitting at 3.0MB.

Also, my problem is intermittent, after some use obviously. Right now the iMac is fine. Later it will have a hammer through the screen. Feels like the M-soft I have to use at work that needs to be restarted to breathe it life.

One last thing I have noted on activity monitor, whenever my Mac is symptomatic, the kernal_task process soars and locks. It is no longer variable. That may be a symptom more than a problem but thought I would get opinions on that.

Thanks!

Nov 1, 2010 5:19 PM in response to roblight

I cannot believe that after almost a year of complains about this issue, Apple has not made any attempts to address it. I'm done with Snow Leopard...

Olga1982

Level 1

8 points

Nov 20, 2010 12:08 PM in response to KineticTalk

I had similar problems in SL. It seemed that there were CPU spikes on occasion which would freeze the system for an instant. Disabling Spotlight for Macintosh HD fixed the issue. I use EasyFind instead of Spotlight now. After disabling Spotlight, the system felt snappier immediately. I couldn't even scroll through webpages without hickups when Spotlight was activated. All is well now. Apple need to fix Spotlight ASAP. I had similar performance issues when using earlier versions of OSX10.5...

lucklik

Level 1

4 points

Dec 8, 2010 5:27 AM in response to JasonWDC

I have OSX 10.6.5 on a 13" MacBook from mid 2007 with only 1G SDRAM
iPhoto is unusable slow, Safari and Firefox are very slow. The computer seems to be in some sleep mode. When I use the touchpad to scroll it takes the macbook about a second to respond. Sometimes it even takes a few seconds to react to in input from the keyboard.

I unloaded coreaidiod.plist with sudo launchctl unload /system/library/launchdaemons/com.apple.audio.coreaudiod.plist

I started up with holding down the 4 and 6, I noticed no speed improvement

My next step would be to upgrade the SDRAM and here is my question.
Apple tell that the Maximum SDRAM for the mid 2007 13" MacBook is 2G (2x1G)
I read somewhere (forgot where) that if I put 2x2G, I will get 3,3G
3.3G seems better then 2G.
Does anybody knows what happens if I put 2x2G in the mid 2007 macbook?
Does it work?
Will it be better than putting in 2x1G?

ynx

Luc

lucklik

Level 1

4 points

Dec 8, 2010 6:50 AM in response to lucklik

I found an answer for the maximum SDRAM @
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=12018623&#12018623

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Snow Leopard performance slow...