Stuart Grimshaw wrote:
i have to agree with the don't do it faction. my macbook has become virtually unusable after the upgrade. the new features are quite cute, but so were the features that you lose. net gain is about zero, but the problems caused by a slow running system - mail takes about fifteen seconds to show a mail sometimes, safari ten seconds to change already loaded tabs - are massive. i will spend this evening reinstalling snow leopard.
Almost certainly your problems are caused by low-RAM conditions. How much RAM do you have installed? If it is less than 4 GB, then you will encounter low-memory conditions quite often. Your system will slow down, noticeably. This is because Lion uses more RAM than SL does. You can avoid low-RAM conditions several ways.
1 wait for the system to finish indexing. There is a system process named mds which indexes the disk for Spotlight. When you install a new OS, one of the things that happens is that the old index is deleted. The system then runs mds to generate a new one, and this means generating a _complete_ index, which can take some time if you have a lot of stuff. While this is happening mds will grab a _lot_ of RAM. it is not a good idea to interrupt the indexing, doing so may corrupt the index, and then mds will be stuck in a loop trying, and usually failing, to fix it, and you will have to delete the index and start over. Once the initial index is created, mds will use far less RAM.
2 be careful when using Safari. Safari was always a memory hog, and now it's become worse. In addition to Safari itself pigging out on your RAM, there's the new sandbox, introduced for security reasons, called Safari Web Content, which is even more of a memory hog. If Safari and Safari Web Content start to eat too much RAM, quit Safari. This will clear the RAM for both of them. When you relaunch Safari it will use far less RAM. Note that over time it will gradually resume its former piggishness, so you will have to periodically quit and restart it.
3 the main system process, kernel_task, gets larger if you have lots of apps and/or extensions running at the same time. It will automatically reduce its memory footprint if you quit apps, but little can be done about extensions. If you are low on RAM you should limit how many apps you open at the same time and you should be careful about installing extensions, which basically would include anything which puts an icon into the menubar: Drive Genius's drive monitor extension, Dropbox, VMWare's extension, Sophos' extension, Little Snitch's extension, Growl's extension, Time Machine's extension... etc. (These are all menubar extensions on my system. I've got a lot more. There's a reason why Lion ain't on my machine.)
You can monitor your RAM usage using Actitvity Monitor, from the /Applications/Utilities folder. It should be noted that 4 GB of RAM is the realistic minimum for Lion, and even then you may run into low-memory conditions. 6 GB or more will avoid a lot of the low-memory problems. If you have 6 GB or more and still have significant problems, then there's something else wrong and you need to get back to us with considerably more detail. That, or to contact Tech Support, 'cause you have a problem, and it's not a Lion problem.
