Why is Lion so slow?

repairing permissions we know sometimes gives a temporary increase in proformance. startup entries is sometimes successfull, or has appeared to be. microsoft products have ALWAYS been a memory hog since the me days so no help there lol. flash being removed check. since you did other things can't be sure if that fixed or not.

guess we'll just have to wait it out for the night and see how many this fixed problem for 🙂

good night all! still not 100% sure of flash being the culprit, anyone who gives it a good test please push your machine hard over next few hours and see if it still slows down to a crawl with flash removed.

post your results! cant know if it works if we don't hear back 🙂

Seems like my primary problem continues to be Outlook. If I use Mail, Address Book, & iCal vs. Outlook I don't get the spinning beachball of slowness since repairing permissions, ditching Flash, and cleaning out uneeded startup stuff. When I run Outlook, even after it has fully started and updated from the server it is the Outlook App and the Outlook database DAEMON that are hogging my system. Since I've got a 2.66GHz, Core2 Duo 13" MBP with 8GB of RAM installed this shouldn't be happening. So hopefully somebody will figure out where the Outlook for MAC vs. Lion OSX problem is and help to get it sorted out.

Thank you very much, worked for me, my MacBook Pro was running terribly slowly and now its restored to its normal zippy performance - very grateful. Susan

This is very frustating..

I have a 2011 MBP quadcore i7, 8 GB Ram and an old iMac core 2 duo 2.4 with only 3GB RAM

the MBP still have 300GB free space out of 750GB

iMac only have 70 GB free out of 320 GB

both upgraded to Lion (not clean install)

and the imac start faster than my MBP.. omg...

does anyone resolve this matter? honestly, clean install is something i wanna avoid.. its too time consuming reinstalling everything back 😀

so far the most likely cause is adobe flash player. flash player for os 10.7 is still a beta, [flash player 11] I tracked it down via a strange kernel message that was spamming the logs like mad. uninstalling flash player seems to have greatly increased lions proformance, but I'm still having a few stalling issues from time to time but nowhere near as severe. seems flash is only part of the problem, although a pretty big part. here is the fix so far and what I have been able to determine.

flash player 11 beta is causing a large number of strange kernel messages, sometimes hundreds per second or more. I'm not sure how or why yet but it's a major contribution to read/write stalls with mac os lion. the read/write stalling out leads to incorrect permissions [or incomplete] being written as well as ocasional hard drive errors which further contributes to the slowness [which is why perm fix and scans seem to give temporary speed boost] this by far isn't the only problem, other programs have been generating similar kernel messages and causing mac os to stall on drive read/write operations but not as severe.

current steps to help increase your macs proformance till these issues can be solved by apple and or adobe are as follows

download the uninstaller for flash player here http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/909/cpsid_90906.html I know it says the uninstaller is for up to 10.6 but it still works fine on 10.7, this will remove the flash plugin. Don't reinstall it till it's been fixed by adobe unless you want your comp to go slow again 😝

step two, boot your mac while holding the alt/option key and you'll get a boot menu, boot to the recovery drive and run disk utility, repair your macs drive and fix permissions, even if it doesn't display any errors found for some reason it still helps.

final step if the above two steps don't fix your problem, open a terminal window and follow these instructions posted by rich cook, it'll disable all the automatically launched background stuff that mac really doesn't need. you can restore the ones you do need later.

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

good luck.

ps, for me, uninstalling flash and the drive checks was all that was needed, final step wasn't needed. your own milage may vary, I'll continue researching this problem and provide more information and/or better fixes as I discover them.

Just to say my fix which was ensuring I had the latest version of Parallels which I think updated a kernel extension is still going strong.

I have flash 10.3.183.5 installed so at least for me I don't think flash is the problem.

10.3 is compatabile with Lion (you don't need to run the 11 beta). I haven't tried 11 beta myself so perhaps that also causes problems.

@

bstone109

Perhaps you could try installing 10.3.183.5 and see if your problem comes back again?

Personally it would be a pretty big pain to loose flash on Lion. It's irritating enough not to have it on iPad and iPhone. Although I do accept Apple's arguments for not supporting it – even if perhaps they overstate a little the technology part vs the business reasons.

24 iMac 2007

2.8 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo'

4 GB 667 Mhz DDR2 SDRAM

NO parallels or other stuff--straight Apple all the way except for Adobe products.

Have run the disk repairs and uninstalled flash as recommended.

No improvement to incredible slowness and occasional freezeups.

Seems worst when RUNNING PHOTOSHOP CS5 AND/OR LIGHTROOM AND/OR APERTURE. Freezeups, screen shifts to the right or left.

I have run it both with and without Flash and it is way better without. Programs load way faster and no herky-jerky in operating the SW or switching from one program to the other.

On another note, I have not had a Mac crash in years (the odd SW freeze but not computer crashes). I almost forgot about computer crashes. With Lion and Flash running, I have crashed many times.

APierce, I did *exactly* what you said and it worked like a charm! Thanks for a solution that really works!

you might have other things running in background from adobe, you can try uninstalling those products or following the other steps listed in my post.

as mentioned, flash isn't the only problem, just a big part of it. something is still bad wrong with lion somewhere, but this at least gets you a workable computer in most cases. good luck

I did the permissions repair and the disk repair, and I uninstalled Flash and then reinstalled it (as opposed to when Lion was installed as an OS upgrade over Flash). All of those things made a big difference. I have been running for a few days with Flash reinstalled with no problems. I will keep you posted if anything bad starts to happen.

OK, I spoke too soon. Computer crashed again today (hasn't in years until Lion). Restarted a couple of times. Was working fine then started to bog down. I uninstalled Flash, and did nothing else, and everything speeded back up again.

APierce??? (or anyone who might know) What is #6 in your instructions? I don't know what or how to do that.

thanks! 🙂

Spotlight is the little magnifying glass in the upper right hand corner of your Mac. It just indexes everything. Just reboot your computer and it'll run/index automatically. You really don't have to "do" anything.

hey ray! thanks, i appreciate your help. i use my spotlight all the time, (one of my favorite things!) but the instructions made it sound like i needed to do something! 🙂