Why is Lion so slow?

The only way I can get Lion to work for me is to run Free Memory Pro when my 8gig of ram is almost used up. I still run 10.7.2 due to the major issues people have been having after an upgrade. I am so glad I did upgrade my server. I had no idea that was even worse. I am leaning towards getting a new hard drive and going back to SL on my MBP myself. Good luck everyone!

It worked! Thank you

thanks !! You saved my macbook!! lol

Funny thing, after the repeated memory cleans and reboots, my Mac seams to be running better even when RAM gets down to 10 MB. I am still on 10.7.2. 10.7.3 release offers no published fixes that apply to me. I don't know if this is an adaptive thing with OS X but not reloading Apps and rebooting is saving me a lot of time. Snow Leopard may still be in the cards unless slow Preview performance, Mail search issues, slow Lion boot, and others are fixed.

Apierce24, you have made my day, thanks for taking the time to explain this. well done.

Update, after reinstalling Lion on a brand new solid state hard drive my Macbook Pro runs like a champ. No memory issues, freezing, slow performance. I did copy my mail settings and folders but not much else was brought over from my old drive. Even when I run low of memory the Mac runs great. The funny thing is the swap file size never gets over 13 meg. Conclussion, Lion does not run well as an upgrade.

For those wondering how to do a clean install of Lion: http://mashable.com/2011/07/20/lion-clean-install-guide/ I may do myself although after repairing disk permissions and rebooting a couple of times, it seems to be a little better.

I was wondering, I'm thinking about upgrading to lion. Am I able to upgrade, then repair the disk and all that you instructed? And if so, will I lose any media, and will I lose any valuble programs like Rosetta stone, which requires you to register it. I don't want to lose any registration numbers, if you know what I mean. Thanks for the info.

I would not upgrade to Lion unless it is a fresh install. Personal experiance.

koa_noise wrote:

I would not upgrade to Lion unless it is a fresh install. Personal experiance.

Everyone has personal experiences here, mine was 3 upgrades from Snow Leopard to Lion (on my personal machines) and many more on client machines. In no case was performance impacted adversely.

Same experience.

Exporting and importing Contacts did not improve things at all.

An additional problem: When I want to identify which Group a contact is in there is a long delay after I hit the modifier key, then the beachball for a while, all the CPU capacity tied up, and then after at least a quarter of a minute, the Group lights up.

Just to add my two cents folks and give an update. Earlier on I had replied about a slow Lion epxerience and thought I had cured it with installing a swanky new Seagate Momentus XT (2nd gen 750GB) hybrid drive.

Well over the past few weeks and months, the Mac started to play up again and was failing to boot properly and restart. It also started to hang andcrash quite often.

So I have to say I bit the bullet and yesterday did a few re installs. First with using a Time Machine back up and letting it load my new account onto the mac with Migration assisitant.

Well after that failed miserably, Keychin acccess all messed up, Apps wouldnt load and the Mac to well oer a minute to load up etc. I did a full clean install of Lion via a flash drive.

As of this moment I have only to copy across over my iTunes library. As for everything else I have did it the ld school way of dragging over files from an external drive from both the Time Machine Backup and just in case a Carbon copy cloner drive.

First thing to note these Hybrid drives are fast when they are freshly installed. My ole Blackbook boots up in a respectable 18 secs. Yes you read that right 18secs. From the Apple logo to full showing of desktop. Safari is very quick now, iPhoto and other apps boot up pretty good too. Ive did approx 10 restarts to get to those speeds and the FAST tech in the drive caches all the start up files on the internal flash chips (8Gb worth in the case of the 750Gb drive.

So my conclusion is for all those having problems. Reboot your mac with a clean install with a fresh copy of Lion. Just to point out that initially I installed Lion over the top of Snow Leopard and thats where the problems started for me. Almost immediately i noticed that Lion wasnt as quick as Snow Leopard.

Now Im happily surfin the net and given the age of the Blackbook its purring along sweetly. As for the Seagate drives I can thoroughly recommend. Not only is super fast but this thing is super quiet and with absolute no vibration.

Hope this helps others in what where my shoes! Lion is running as quick as SL ever did. A fresh install I feel is the only way to go and avoid such thing as cloning your drive onto it or using a TM back up.

Regards

Stu

@Cpl BadBoy Your experience and way to solve the problem is exactly the same as for me. And during the winter and spring I have had a snappy nice MacBook Pro (mid 2009 with 4GB ram and the same disk at you put in yours).

But.... The last week or two it all started over again. And now is the spinning ball back. A way to quickly stop it from hanging is to push CMD + TAB, stop at Finder, and the back to i.e. Safari where you had the hang (I had to do that just now when I logged onto this site).

So something is taking a nap after a short time of periode after you entering a program og doing something in that program, like save og open... And it is as far as I can see every program I use on my Mac.

The big question right now is why is it all starting over again?? I cant remember what kind of updates I have taken the last two weeks, but it is the same as you guys did.

So why is my Mac taking a nap when it should not?

Sorry for my bad English 🙂

.f

I pray for a solution for this spinning ball i Mountain Lion... 😟

I have found something...

By default Lion enable Secure virtual memory...

To check if secure VM is enabled please type in terminal :

sysctl vm.swapusage

To disable it :

By doing this in terminal :

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.virtualMemory DisableEncryptedSwap -boolean yes

To enable it :

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.virtualMemory DisableEncryptedSwap -boolean no

Try this and let us know if it change something ...