Why is Lion so slow?

APierce24

Thanks for the help. It worked, had a lot of problems but this fixed them.

Dude you saved my Macbook Pro (3,1 6GB RAM OSX 10.7.2) from an olympic discuss session in my back yard. It is faster than I can ever recall (maybe since tiger out of the box) THANK YOU....

Cpl BadBoy wrote:

Update :- Seems you cant just turn off iCloud without removing content of the mac. Not good!

Nonsense, backup your data, disconnect iCloud, restore the data (if required)

I have an iMac 10,1, with the Intel Core2 Duo E7600 @ 3.06GHz, ATI Radeon HD 4670 256MB, 8 GB DDR3 RAM, and I upgraded to LION a couple of weeks ago...

Immediately I could see that the whole system slowed down, ESPECIALLY MEDIA RELATED CONTENT:

PHOTOSHOP CS5

IMOVIE

IPHOTO

MAIL

MISSION CONTROL (aka EXPOSE), was unusable. Very slow and shaky.

Checking activity monitor now and then would show that only 20-50MB is left FREE of my whopping 8GB RAM.

Well, RAM is dirt cheap these days, so I took out the 4x2GB modules, and installed 4x4GB DDR3 SO-DIMMs, giving me a total of 16GB DDR3 SO-DIMM.

IMMEDIATE IMPROVEMENT!!

BACK TO BEING SILKY SMOOTH.

Obviously Mac OS has very very VERY poor memory management....

Hope this helps...

I'm running on 3GB ram without a hiccup. CS4 and CS5, FCX, Office 2011, Corel etc. No difference in performance than Snow Leopard here.

This is the most correct answer to this entire problem IMO.

I have this drive, the Seagate ST9500420AS

My machine is fast enough, a 17" MBP 2.66ghz C2D

I have enough RAM, 6GB

I have repaired the drive while booted from an external Lion disk

I have repaired permissions multiple times

I have completely wiped out the internal drive and reinstalled Lion, twice

I have obviously waited for the indexing to complete

I have removed just about all the extra frameworks from the startup routines

I have looked for broken fonts using an Adobe utility

I have removed "background" programs like LittleSnitch and iClipboard and Expandrive to no avail

I believe I have done pretty much *everything* to help solve this consistent problem.

Except one.

I opened up the computer and put in a jumper to force the drive to a 1.5Gbps transfer rate (which About This Mac *said* it was running at) and, 2 days later, the problem has not resurfaced. In reality, I could tell right away my machine was faster.

I suspect that the problem is that the OS believes it has negotiated a 1.5Gbps speed to the drive, but has not somehow told the drive via a command block to *stay* at that speed and drive keeps throttling up to 3.0Gbps. This would cause drive related transactions to constantly renegotiate / handshake / fail-over to the 1.5Gps rate.

As these little micro-second handshakes add up, the machine starts to stutter to the point that typing is a real painful chore...

To the point:

for those suffering from *slooooow* Lion, in my experience, if you cannot update your drive firmware, force the drive transfer rate (via a jumper if possible) to the same rate which your "About This Mac" says it is operating at.

BVRoc,

Great answer and its looking more and more likely that this drive is the problem. I can honestly say that ever since i installed this drive my mac just hasnt been Zippy. I put windows XP an the speed at which everything opened was considerably faster but thats a hard thing to admit!

Can you please offer a bit of further advice on this jumper solution that you posted?? How do I install the jumper?

Many thanks

Stu

Update: I may aswell add that I am awaiting the delivery of the new 750Gb Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid (3rd gen) So ill be swapping out the drives in the next few days but solving this issue would give me piece of mind as opposed to a headache!!!!!!!!

Sure, here's a picture of the business end of the drive. Close the 2 pins on the far left (with the drive oriented properly) and you get a "locked" transfer rate of 1.5Gbps. It's a "mini" jumper.

BVRoc,

Thanks for taking the time again to help out. I appreciate it. Ill be doing the mod probably tomorrow once I get my hands on a jumper. Although it will be short lived as Ive just had the Momentus XT 750Gb arrive! Probably wont get round to fitting it for a few weeks though as Im pretty busy so the interim fix will be welcome.

Really hope the XT drive functions without problems.

Regards

Stu

BVRoc,

Just an update to my Lion saga. I had no option to switch over to the new XT drive tonight. My little ole Blackbook just couldnt keep up and was hanging really bad. Didnt have any jumpers to rob off my other drives. Watching YouTube was nigh on impossible - it was taking 10-15 seconds just to start playing the video and even then it wouldnt buffer properly.

Just did a clean install of Lion onto the new drive and wow. considering the age of my Blackbook, its refreshing to see that Safari immediately opens up, internet speeds are on par with what I had last year and even opening the System Prefs happens instantly. Seems that having that little bit of Flash memory on board is a real deal for everyday surfing.

Still gonna jump the other drive tomorrow or Monday and try the drive again just to finally put the matter to rest. For people that are reading this with older hardware you may want to look at BVRocs solution and the original fix of repairing disk permissions etc. Big thanks to all those on here that have invested time in helping fellow mac users. Its appreciated.

Regards

Stu

i'm really annoyed of Lion!

I can't get it working right! I have a 2008 2,4ghz C2D MacBook Pro with 4Gb ram. Obviously enough for running Lion smooth.

But it doesn't ! -,-

I have 2 gb free RAM and the hole system is lagging all the time (while CPU is 70% idle!!!) Even keyboard input is lagging under normal conditions!!!

No workflow possible and i don't want to switch back to SL, because of iCloud and so on.

Does someone have some XBench Comparisons?????

I Noticed that under SL my CPU Benchmark is twice as much as under Lion!!! How can this be possible? Maybe thats the Problem.

NC neo,

Welcome to the forums! I know your pain! Have you repaired disk permissions and repaired disk as described by Apierce24 on the first page? It's the 9th post down the page and it's I'd a proven fix for many users. I initially did this and my mac functioned ok for 20mins but eventually started to lag again

Reading into it further along these forums and with the help of BvRoc my problem was the actual hard drive (seagate ST950042AS 500Gb model) speed of the drive was conflicting with lion, maybe worth checking what drive you have installed and seeing if that's the culprit. There is a fix for it as detailed in BvRocs solution a few posts previous.

Updating firmware of the actual drive may offer a solution also. My advice is go through each step and I've no doubt one of them will work to get you back up to speed. If not keep on posting back and the mac community will no doubt get you sorted. They helped me out a ton!

Regards

Stu

tanks for your reply! I did nearly all the stuff you meantioned.

Repaired permissions and checked the disk at all with the recovery utility.

In deed i have the seagate ST950042AS 500Gb model!!! I already opend my macbook and set the jumper to the 1,5gbit sata limitation. No improvement! :-(

The only thing i'm not able to do, is a firmware upgrade of the hdd. Becaus is need Windows ?!? And i just have Win XP !!! And bootcamp forces me to use Win7! Is there a possibility to install WinXP as easy as with Bootcamp?

NC_Neo wrote:

The only thing i'm not able to do, is a firmware upgrade of the hdd. Becaus is need Windows ?!? And i just have Win XP !!! And bootcamp forces me to use Win7! Is there a possibility to install WinXP as easy as with Bootcamp?

Maybe post this question in the bootcamp forums

https://discussions.apple.com/community/windows_software/boot_camp?view=discussi ons

finally i got everything working with windows!

Despite the new Seagate Firmware, the mac is still so slow. It is as i thought. The issue has nothing to do with hdd (which is working fine with nearly 100mb/s read/write).

As i supposed: It is in some way connected to a possible CPU slowdown ... i get twice as much CPU points in xbench running SL! ...

but i don't know why!!! I checkt console but no strange errors occur.

Current situation:

Opened programms: Firefox (3 tabs), Trillian, Word, Preview

Ram usage: 2gb of 4gb --> 2gb free and 0 pageouts

CPU: 90% IDLE!

HDD: Not working at the moment.

Result: Keyboard input delay, launchpad takes seconds to open and even the "open-folder" animation in Launchpad is horrible ...

Guess i have to go to a apple store or somewhat?!? What do you mean?