Why is Lion so slow?

I repaired permissions and restarted my MacBook. Now it is up to speed.

Thanks APierce24. My Lion Mac tower was running really slow since upgrading, but your steps worked great for me!

I installed Lion about a week ago, and it was running so sluggish I could barely operate and get anything done. Browsing was horrendous (Safari); I couldn't multitask; yesterday started getting white and black screen crashes. Spotlight indexing had long since finished; had verified and repaired disk and permissions, both in disk utility and booting in recovery mode; had installed gfxcardstatus and updated settings... Finally I could barely even boot the thing.

This morning, booted into recovery HD and reinstalled Lion. This entailed another download and install - still of the upgrade product. Running flawlessly since. Speed - no problem. Launching programs, surfing, multitasking - no problems.

-Amy

(late-model 2010 MBP; 2.4 GHz Intel Core i5; 4GB 1067 MHz DDR3)

Thanks APierce24. Did your suggestions and speed has improved dramatically. [Still want bigger faster machine than my mid 2007 iMac, but now i have less of an excuse!!]

Likewise APierce24... hats off to you!

I followed those steps and my Mac is running much better now.

Interestingly when I ran verify disk from disk utility whilst booted from that disk it said my disk was completely broken and couldn't be fixed.

When I ran from safety parition (holding down apple R whilst booting up) and ran Disk Utility it probably took half an hour to fix my 500GB (on a 12 month old Mac BOok Pro 13") but once it was done and I rebooted; Lion is flying!!!! 🙂 Very happy.

How did you do a clean install? I mean, did you create a Lion USB drive and then install that?

I made the huge mistake of upgrading my MBP to Lion and now it's so slow I'm about to smash it with a big hammer. I'm frustrated beyond printable words. Oh, and my printer "isn't found", even after it found it and prompted me and installed the new drivers.

This OS is bad. Really bad.

there is 2 good ways to do a clean install. if you view contents of the installer that you download from market, you'll find a dmg in there somewhere. forgot where. can't miss it cause it's the only dmg in it that I know of and surely the only one that's 3+ gigs 😝 take that dmg and use the disk utility to 'restore' it to the drive of your choice, be it a usb flash drive or burning to a dvd. this is your install disk. boot your mac while holding option key down [which is also how you do it second method] and choose your install disk you just created when boot menu pops up.

the second method can be done without burning or creating a usb drive. just simply hold option cause lion creates a 'repair' partition which you'll also see on that boot menu. from that repair partition you can fix permissions and check for hard drive errors which seems to fix this problem for most people, if that fails you can also do a clean install from this screen, just be sure to format your mac partition first. MAKE SURE IT'S THE MAC PARTITION! don't erase the little restore partition or bootcamp. then just do a new install into the mac partition and you're done 🙂 be aware however installing using second method requires an active internet connection to log into the app store and download the osx dmg installer from it, all handled automatically but can take all night depending on your net speed.

@APierce24 It didn't find anything wrong with my disk but I still ran the repair disk and then repaired permissions. Lions seems a lot faster, probably as fast as was snow leopard.

You just saved me from downgrading to snow leopard and therefore spending hours to backup/re install everything.

Thanks!!!

Mathieu

PS: running Lion on an "old" MBP 15" with 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4 GB RAM (only 3 GB recognized if I recall what I read)

First, I would like to formally nominate APierce24 for king or queen. I was so frustrated for two weeks and this totally solved my problem. What a relief!

Second, when I did "Verify Disk" and "Verify Permissions", it told me both were fine. I ran the repair on each anyway so don't get thrown off by it telling you everything is fine. Run both repairs anyway.

wow, I had this issue of it running slow, screwy screen draws.. bla bla bla.. was about to dump Lion. there is an Update that I applied today that helped 80% but I still don't feel it's running as well as Snow was. going to back everything up and do a clean install... good thread guys,.. not just the whine and snivel of the others!!! 😉

well, after a wipe and fresh install it's most certianly running much better 🙂 now I just have to install everything again as I don't want to pull off the old saves, thinking it might pull old crap I don't really want...😕

I found out something specifically that for me has made a big difference. I looked in /Library/LaunchDaemons and /Library/LaunchAgents and removed everything that was unecessary. I think that some of them are launching things that don't work in Lion, causing them to get relaunched again and again. This would slow things down. Since doing this, my computer is WAY faster. It was doing beach balls all day long before I did this. So it's another place for people to look.

I just did it though, if it gets worse again I'll try to remember to repost. It is a relief to be able to use the computer again at full speed without a bunch of beach balls.

The problem has returned.

I did the fix disk and permissions thing and it fixed the problem for a few days. But now the problem is back: all programs were working really slowly and I was constantly getting the rotating beach balls again. I would open force quit and see multiple programs not responding. So I did the fixed disk and permissions thing again which helped but I still experience programs freezing for one to 3 minutes, which bogs down the whole computer. I don't know if anyone else has had the problem return but I definitely have and it's very frustrating.

same problem for me. even a clean reinstall didn't fix it permanently. problems keep resurfacing. there is obviously something very bad wrong with the way mac os is accessing hard drive, this problem started after the latest update to 'prepare' os 10.6 for lion upgrade, 10.6 fully patched is effected by same bug.

If a clean reinstall isn't fixing it, have you tried running something like TechTools Pro on your hard drive? Maybe your disk is going bad.

What worked for me was basically the following:

sudo mkdir -p /Library/LaunchDaemons/disabled

sudo mv /Library/LaunchDaemons/*plist /Library/LaunchDaemons/disabled

sudo mkdir -p /Library/LaunchAgents/disabled

sudo mv /Library/LaunchAgents/*plist /Library/LaunchAgents/disabled

Then rebooted.

Nothing here is needed. Some you might really want though, which is why I don't delete them. Moving them like this is a good troubleshooting step.

HTH