Why is Lion so slow?

Nah, you'll be ok. Spotlight will index itself, may take a few minutes, but you'll be good to go.

I tried your suggestion and it really made a difference but I still see the colored spinning wheel, but less than before. I'll try a clean install and see what happens. Thx for the help!

Did you use a wired or wireless keyboard?

Wireless.

After I felt upgrading Paralells fixed the problem I'm now feeling that whilst it's not as bad as it was Lion is still slower (more spinning cursors and so forth) than Snow Leopard.

Uninstalling flash (no difference) reinstalling it (also no difference). Guess the only solution is clean install. Loath to do this; will take at least a day.

after more time on the flash fix, it does help, as does the permissions check, and the error check. none of the above fully solves the problem but does eliviate the symptoms for a time. after a few days the problems come right back to greater or lesser degree's.

unable to find anything further so far. anyone else have any ideas what the root of this problem could be?

APierce24 - your trick worked a treat! Thank you!

I've tried repairing the disk and permissions already. Did a fresh upgrade to Lion from Snow Leopard. It's almost like it has to pause and wait before you open a document, an app, switch to another app. It's embarrassing to have to tell co-workers to wait a few seconds more while I wait to switch to another screen and wait for it to load.

All my earlier fixes only resulted in temproary improvements in speed. They were:
1) Repairing disk permissions.

2) Upgrading my install of Parralels (which updated kexts).

However my latest fix which has lasted now for over a week (best yet) was:

1) Deleting a load of files I didn't need from my HD. Large docs like movies and old apps that weren't compatabile with Lion anyway... so I went from 7GB free to 25GB of my main disk.

2) I then rebooted.

Lion is running really well for me now. As good if not better than Snow Leopard. With the one exception of Safari which is still absolutely dog slow (but I find a simple fix for that is using Firefox instead).

I upgraded my mid-2009 MacBook Pro from 2GB RAM to 8GB RAM.

It made all the difference in the world. It flies now. Even with Lion.

did the same today. upgrade the ram of my mid 2010 MBP from 4 to 8GB. Even with Parallels runnig it flies.

Sharing the same problem, upgraded to Lion (late-july) and my MBP became very slow (mid-2010 MBP 17", 2.66 i7, 8gb,ssd 256gb). I've done everything said here except the clean install. My MBP has gradually improved but one issue, which I think is the root cause, still prevails.

I have a memory stick which I manually backup to MBP. I usually transfer some 1gb in a backup from the memory stick to MBP. Before installing Lion, it took about 1 minute to transfer the files. Now with lion the transfer takes some 5 minutes. And the only thing different is the operating system...

For me it seems the disk operations are slow in Lion and that is the cause for slowness. Any thoughts?

I've now done the full "repair" twice (as per APierce24 and what I thought worked in my earlier post), but the slowness always returns. I even used AppZapper and GrandPerspective (two great apps) to take the free space on my hard drive from 10% to over 50%, but mail and opening up some apps, such as TextEdit, are still very slow. I wonder if it has something to do with how Lion now stores versions of files? It's definately hard drive related, either an indexing thing, or file retreval problem of some sort. I sure hope Apple is looking into a fix. I'm regretting having updated to Lion at this point.

Hmm very odd!

Have you tried a little app called MemoryFreer - Its available from the app store for 69 p i think. Some people have had great success freeing up to 2gb of inactive memory - hence speeding up your machine.

+1 for APierce24 solution!

HI there,

Your experiment helped a lot of people, including me🙂, and it did improved the speed of my mbp. Now the issue is that earlier my mac never used to take soo much time to boot and shut down. These days after a month of intallation of lion suddenly it takes time to perform the above mentioned task. If there is anything regarding the same. Please help me.

Thanks for your experiment , cheers