Why is Lion so slow?

Ram is the problem because I heard some where that lion requires at least 3 GB of ram. I upgraded my late 2007 iMac 2.4ghz duo to 4 gb of ram in preparation for lion two installs of lion one being from the recovery partition later success now it runs prety fast it takes about 30 seconds for everything to load up after I sign in

I have 6 GB of RAM and still have the problem.

same thing...

I just reinstalled lion yesterday.

and now , i get 9GB pages out and the performance is slow ..lag....

(i finished spotlight index)

My configuration:

Macbook Pro 17" Mid 2010

Processor 2.53 GHz Intel Core i5

Memory 8 GB 1067 MHz DDR3

Graphics NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M 512 MB

Software Mac OS X Lion 10.7.2 (11C74)

Still I am facing slowness in openning anything. Logging in taking time, new application opening very slow, shutting down taking quite a while.

I have done Disk Repair and Permission Repair several times. No improvement.

Is there something really wrong with Lion OS?

I have another 15" MBP, which is also slower than Snow Leopard version, but a little faster than my 17".

Donno whats going on... Apple Support please advice.

Have you tried booting Lion and reinstalling a clean install of it?

Not sure if you can, but check my previous posts. I had many problems with my mbp and despite the negative comments suggesting it was something i was doing wrong, I persisted and found a person on here who was very helpful and they suggested to go ahead and wipe and reinstall. I havent posted much since then, so it shouldnt be hard to find. But thats what I did and my issues went away. It is still a tad slower than my snow leopard was, but better than what it had been since the install of lion. just dont give up or be dissuaded from getting it fixed. you get what you settle for!

One user here, in the post linked below, thinks it could have something to do with the new encryption in Lion. He gives some very geeky method for testing your drive with and without the encryption, but looked to dangerous for me to try, and even if this was the problem, the article gave no suggestion for how to fix it.

http://simon.heimlicher.com/hints/macosx/file_vault_2

Kevin, FileVault was not introduced in Lion, it has been around for quite a while. Some people that had encrypted their drive with it seemed to have had some issues, that was probably what the poster was trying to get at. IFrom what I have read, reinstalling 10.7.2 Combo Update over the current system (Won't effect any of your files and such) seems to have cured more issues than anything.

People are having various isues, yet lump them all together in someone else's thread where they get lost or not addressed properly. Threads marked as answered like this one and drag on are more often than not side stepped by the most experienced users here.

And comments like DJ_Mac's Donno whats going on... Apple Support please advice. don't help much. No good demanding other users to solve problems, it is not Apple's site. For that you need to leave feedback at

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

This is simply a user to user forum where others try to help voluntarily and in good faith.

Cheers

Sorry Neil...!

I was trying to find the feedback site, for which u provided url.

I prepared this text for the same, but somehow forgot to remove that line and posted here.

Neil. Thanks for the clarification about FileVault.

You'll see I've posted throughout this thread, back from the benginning. I've tried many of the proposed, possible solutions, and none have yet worked for me. The only thing I haven't tried is a clean install of Lion, which is what I guess I'll try next. I've been avoiding it, as I have A LOT of software installed. I will first try a fresh install and then a full restore from Time Machine. If that doesn't work, then I'll do another fresh install, only this time I'll re-install the software slowly, over time, and only use time machine to restore my data files, trying to isolate what the problem may be.

I have logged my problems with Apple's feedback system as well.

Thanks

Might consider backing up to a time capsule, then zero the drive, install Lion, restore from time capsule

I did and that worked well for me. I did not back up boot camp, I just reinstalled that after I was done.

Hope you get yours operating well

Hi,

I have a MBP and faced the same symptonms until i discovered this feature which is introduced in lion and enabled in potable macs by default, it is the local snapshots.

Apple posted a new Knowledge Base article, # HT4878, on how Local Snapshots work on portable Macs, with OS X Lion, that are not connected to a Time Machine drive.

One of the new features of OS X Lion is the ability to take what’s called “Local Snapshots,” made hourly, in the background, just like Time Machine.

When you enter the Time Machine browser, these snapshots will appear in the timeline along with regular backups, but they have a different color. According to Apple, “Gray tick marks represent local snapshots and pink tick marks represent backups stored on your external backup disk or Time Capsule. Note: Pink tick marks will be dimmed if your portable computer is not connected to your external backup disk or Time Capsule.”

Check your disk usage in "About This Mac" to figure out how much space is taken for this local backup. I think the process of taking hourly snapshots of the entire disk consumes a lot of CPU power and time as will as HDD read/write cycles. I stoped it using terminal command:

"sudo tmutil disablelocal"

it can be enabled again by

"sudo tmutil enablelocal"

more info in : http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/30.html

When I stoped this service my MBP returns to its SL speed. That was my case.

i have time machine back via LAN . but as i look into time machine , all backup time lines are gray and white 。there is no purple ones .

I had never done any terminal command like you adviced to dianable local snapshots , so I am confused .

I've posted here earlier about the problems I'm experiencing, namely slow Lion. Most of the time my mbp is running very fast, but anything to do with images either with Lightroom or Preview make the mbp tumble.

In my previous post I wondered if this problem is due to some HDD issues as copying files from memory stick nowadays take 15x more time than with Snow Leopard.

I've followed all your advises except reinstall and clean install but none has worked. I haven't though found a new firmaware for my SSD drive.

Macbook Pro 17" Mid 2010

Processor 2.53 GHz Intel Core i5

Memory 8 GB 1067 MHz DDR3

HDD SSD 256gt

Graphics NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M 512 MB

Software Mac OS X Lion 10.7.2 (11C74)

If all time lines are White/Gray this means that all your backups are on your local Disk Drive not on the external one. Check if you have made a correct installation to your external drive and pointed to it throw the time machine configuration window in preferences

allaithy wrote:

If all time lines are White/Gray this means that all your backups are on your local Disk Drive not on the external one. Check if you have made a correct installation to your external drive and pointed to it throw the time machine configuration window in preferences

you are right . i found i have some wrong configuration on the time machine settings .

thank you! and now time machine backups on my lan disk , just do the right thing as before.