Why is Lion so slow?

Thanks, that worked a treat for me, L was terrible before, I have a new computer now.

Cheers

Tim

MacBook Pro

MacBookPro5,5

Intel Core 2 Duo

2.53 GHz

1

2

3 MB

8 GB

1.07 GHz

MBP55.00AC.B03

1.47f2

W8945VHH66E

507CF714-B22F-5852-B56C-9FDE6D4AD41A

Same issue as everyone else. Got really slow after installing Lion.

I tried Apierce24's suggestions (reboot from recovery partition, repair permissions and disk) but didn't help.

Maybe it got a bit better but it still slows down to a crawl, esp. when multi tasking (tonight i had illustrator cs5 running with excel 2011, safari, and a bunch of other programs...but with 8 gigs this should not be a prob.). before this would not have been an issue. i was working in excel and it just started to crawl. the entire mac was slow but not frozen ....

certainly it was not a prob. before.

i guess next i should try a clean installation but what a pain.

Apierce24's suggestion was only a temporary fix for me as well.

Other things to try:

* Upgrading Parallels

* Removing and reinstalling Flash

* Ensuring you have greater than about 10GB free on your main partition.

And then a new one I just found this week (as possibly the final and ultimate solution; although I keep thinking I've cracked it and then it goes slow again)...

Check /System/Library/Extensions/

I had a bunch of kext's in there that I knew I didn't need. Things to do with MissingSync for Blackberry (I use RIM's software now), Huwaei (mobile usb modem stick driver I didn't use anymore) and a few files dating back to 2009 that I figured were old and I googled to confirm I didn't need. I deleted them (sudo -s and then rm -rf Filename.kext) and I think this has given me a bit of a boost.

Be warned though. Be very careful what you delete. It's completely possibly to bring down your system if you delete something in here that was actually part of the core mac os install. Deleting anything that starts "Apple.." or "IO.." is probably a very bad idea.

For those of you wondering if the new Lion 10.7.2 update would fix this problem, it sure didn't for me. It's even SLOWER after the update than before, and that was SLOW! :-(

I was really hoping Apple would have addressed this problem in this latest update, but I guess I'm going to have to break down and do a clean install. :-(

Ok so 99.999% sure I've solved the problem for good now. But it wasn't easy... almost worse than a clean install.

Yesterday – earlier in the day I'd upgraded to Flash 11 and latest iTunes – I was in the process of...

1) Upgrading to iOS5

2) Upgrading also my Blackberry to OS6.0

When my Blackberry update crashed in the middle putting it into a locked or 'nuked' state as they say in Blackberry world.

As I frantically tried to fix this – online people were saying I needed to use Blackberry Desktop Manager on a PC / Parallels to get into it – but it also looked like I needed to update Blackberry Desktop Manager on the Mac to be able to get through to a nuked Blackberry like this. So I was trying out both at the same time! Anyway as I was in the process of launching Parallels and installing a new Blackberry Desktop Manager I noticed my system had suffered some kind of massive wipe out.

My address book was empty.

My calendar was empty.

After restoring the Blackberry (in the end the updated Blackberry Desktop Manger was sufficient to do this) I rebooted.

Now I saw it was even worse not only were all my contacts and calendars gone but all my system preferences too. All my settings, desktop backgrounds, email accounts, bookmarks etc. etc. completely gone.

I don't know precisely whether this occured during 1), 2) or when I was upgrading Blackberry Desktop Manager as I hadn't checked these apps before then.

Fortunately I was able to restore 90% of my data right away from MobileMe. Took a bit of figuring out because it turns out in Lion calendar syncing had moved to a different system control panel.

I say 90% of my data because I did loose some recent calendar dates that were not synced with MobileMe; but mostly it was all there.

I also think the MobileMe system preferences syncing completely failed. But it hasn't been too much trouble to set my desktop background again.

It was after I'd restored my bookmarks, calendars, contacts etc. all from MobileMe that I noticed that Lion was zipping along. Really as fast as Snow leopard had been if not faster. And way, way faster than any of my previous 'fixes' that I subsequently felt hadn't worked.

In the mood to upgrade (and having already stayed up to 11pm to get this far) I proceeded with the updates to iCloud (migrating my MobileMe), 10.7.2 (note my speed was fixed before this), iPhoto, iTunes. So far so good. All running really well. Syncs with iCloud vs MobileMe also appear to be much faster.

It's lovely to have my Mac back up to full speed again (without having to do a clean install) but looking back a clean install would probably have been a lot less stressful.

My hunch after all this experience is the cause for me was either:

a) Connected to some system preferences – so I could have just deleted all my system preferences for the same affect and started again.

b) Connected to my calendar, contacts or something within the categories of data supported by MobileMe that just needed a complete wipe out on the Mac and restore from the server to fix.

Hope this helps someone! I think a controlled backing up to the cloud (rather than my accidental); wiping locally; and then restoring could still be quicker to do than a clean install – I still didn't need to go through the pain of reinstalling CS5 etc.

Hang, hang, hang and hang....

Never ever seen OS X like this. Finder hangs, QuickTime Player hangs, Safari hangs. Everything hangs for som 25-30 seconds (mostly 28) and then move on as nothing has happend. In QT the movie freez but you still see its counting seconds. When its back its spooling like **** up till correct place.

It all started after going fra 10.6.8 to 10.7, not a clean install.

Everything went serious slow. Diskutility reported errors on the disk so I bought a new disk and replaced it.

Got back my 10.7 from TimeMachine.

Still very slow...

After trying 10.7 install 3-4 times I did a clean install of 10.6 and ugraded to 10.6.8.

Now I only manually copied my documents back to the Macbook Pro 2009. No programs or settings, I even set ut Mail from scratch.

But it didnt help, I'm so sad right now after spending so extreemely lot of time on this.

My 10 cent (or, since I am a Norwegian) my 5 kroner on that 10.7 did something "hard" either to my disk, diskcontroller memory or something like that.

I am totally lost on what to do. I have been an IT worker since 1981 and usally fix everything, but not this one.

Edit: I just noticed that the diskactivity in Activitymonitor is going right down on zero every time something hangs.

In Console I see this every time it freeze: 15.10.11 17.20.37 kernel jnl: unknown-dev: flushing fs disk buffer returned 0x5

Message was edited by: dusanofrode

Looks more and moor like a firmware problem, see this tread: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?s=d173805c56ab3a809bbc18f02903d457&t= 1067084&page=2

http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=215451&NewLan g=en

Since I am away for the weekend and do not have an CD to burn on I have to follow up on this on monday. Keep you posted 🙂

My hard drive is a Western Digital (not Seagate), so I doubt that's the problem for me.

updated the firmware in my drive, I had one of the listed models. I wonder if the problem is with the new sata driver in mac os sending commands the drive doesn't understand. it has always been apples policy in with the new and out with the old. I wouldn't doubt it if they did such a thing.

so far speed doesn't seem to be impacted by constant hard drive stalls, but it's too early to tell for sure. I will post if this fixed it or not for me in a few days after I see if there's a continued problem.

it wouldn't hurt if everyone effected checks for firmware updates to their hard drives.

I have now run my Macbook pro for two days with pretty hard tasks, but NO Safari at all. It did very well. Then I launched Safari and I was soon back in the mess again with a computer hanging for 28 seconds very often.

I really cant figure out what this is. I just hpoe Apple will come with a fix for all of us!

first day into use after upgrading firmware of hard drive and not a single moment of stalling thus far. I'm still watching closely to see if problem reappears or not. As I wiped my mac and reinstalled from scratch just prior to the firmware update I still cannot be positive it has resolved the issue, but concidering I was having stalling issues same day I did a fresh install in past things are looking promising.

I have been pushing mac hard doing all the things that normally cause stalling, including using safari, office 2008, playing world of warcraft, using virtual machines under parallels, using adobe products.... all at same time in effort to cause a stall and so far so good. This could simply be a result of a fresh clean install of 10.7.2 as well, but seeing how many are saying problem is unchanged or worse I don't think so. It really is looking like the firmware update of hard drive did it.

I will continue to post updates as my testing of proformance continues untill I'm saticefied bug is fixed.

Untill then, it won't hurt anything to try it for yourself. for those who don't know how to do this I'll post step by step instructions. they will of course need to be adapted based on the hard drive manufacturer.

first we need to find out what brand and model hard drive you are using. to do this click the apple button on top left of screen on menu bar, next click about this mac. on the about this mac window click more info. it'll list some general info about your comps specs but all of it is useless to us. on the overview page click system report to get a more detailed report of your computers specs.

on the new window that opened, look down under hardware for the line that says Serial-ATA on this section it'll show you your hard drives model number and revision. in most all cases revision is the firmware version your drive is running. you can just do a google search for your hard drives model number for all the info you need on firmware updates. for the curious, mine is an ST95005620AS revision SD28, it was SD26 which I'm sure most of the ones effected by this bug are if it's a seagate drive. Just search google for firmware updates for your drives model and download them. in most cases you'll need windows installed under bootcamp to update the firmware, sometimes you can find a boot cd image that'll work. in a rare ocasion you'll find an updater that'll run under osx.

I hope these instructions are found to be useful. I don't know if updating firmware is indead the fix, but so far it looks promising. as stated it could also be a fresh install using 10.7.2 but I doubt it.

good luck and keep watching for my posts as to my testing results with the updated drive firmware.

final vertict...... firmware update appears to have fixed it, dispite pushing mac extremely hard, I've not had a single problem since the update. to confirmed that it was not mac os related I also installed osx in parallels [10.7.0 version] and ran for a while, updated each update in series and nothing. it works perfectly. I have now ruled out mac os as the cause. it is most definately a hardware compatability issue with a large range of drives.

please follow above instructions to find the update for your drive if there is one and good luck! unless the problem returns this will be my last post to this thread.

I believe this has been resolved. thanks goes to dusanofrode for the original suggestion about firmware update.

thanks all

Many thanks for sharing your solution.

Do you think there will ever be a fix that doesn't require installing Windows?

So far, the repair permission option has done the trick for me but you never know...

Thanks again!

yes, most drive manufacturers release bootable cd images or floppy images. just burn one or use the usb trick under disk utility to make a bootable drive, start mac while holding option key, don't release it till you see boot menu. your boot disk should appear in the boot menu. if that doesn't work, you can pull your drive and plug it into a windows desktop [it doesn't need to be able to read drive contents] and you can flash new firmware that way.

Well, I appear to have solved my "hangin" problem by avoiding Safari as well. I restarted my computer and made sure not to launch Safari (I actually uninstalled it)... and for the past 3 days my MBP (early 2010, 2.26GHz, 2GB RAM) has been FLYING like it was when I first bought it! I'm not sure if this solution will work for others, but it's certainly worth a try and certainly more simple than the other suggestions posted!

Good luck...