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Why is Lion so slow?

I installed Lion on a relatively new MacBook Pro (released early 2011) with an i7 dual-core processor. It is painfully slow, much slower than Snow Leopard was. Even things like surfing the internet (using Firefox) is very slow, and I see the little rainbow circular icon frequently.


Any ideas?

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.7)

Posted on Jul 21, 2011 6:16 PM

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Posted on Jul 21, 2011 6:19 PM

How long since you installed? sometimes spotlight will take a long time to index your drives and slow your computer down a LOT. Are you backing up with Time Machine? That can also slow down the computer until the backup i done.

313 replies

Jul 22, 2011 7:04 PM in response to Barry Porter1

same problem here, spotlight fully indexed, permissions fixed, pram smc both reset/clear, no hard drive errors of any kind, in fact it's a brand new drive, a hybrid ssd that supports osx just fine.


I originally installed this drive with 10.6.7 with blazing preformance increase, 10.6.8 killed it. constant freezes and system lockups. 10.7 is at least stable for me, but it's so horribly slow it's just rediculus. Apple broke something major for lion, and imposed same change in snow leopard 10.6.8, and I'm betting it's relating to the way it manages the hard drive. it's stupidly slow and then some.


and for all the basic questions that follows of everyone who thinks they're right......

no there's not a lot running, yes I'm virus free [for those who would suspect such a thing] no there's no fancy 3rd party stuff, yes I have 4 gigs of ram, 2.4 ghz 17 inch macbook pro. only thing not stock in it is the hard drive and I only installed it cause apple care plan ran out like a month before my drive kicked the bucket. and you can skip 90% of the other basic trouble shooting steps like clearing caches and maintiance scripts and so on.


I suspect I might be able to solve the problem by pulling the sata driver related files from 10.6.7 and overwriting the new ones. not sure. all I know is lion wasn't ready, it shouldn't have been released till full regression testing was done on all mac models.

Jul 24, 2011 12:00 AM in response to JWKanvik

Ok guys I had the exact same problem but I think I found a solution. I just did it about 30 minutes ago and since then my MacBook Pro is running just like it used to with snow leopard. No guarantees that i fixed the problem but this is what i did. I went to Applications>Utilities>Disk Utility. I then ran a verify disk scan and found that there were many problems with me Macintosh HD drive. It said I needed an install disk of lion to fix. Since there is no disk I thought I would experiment and this is what I did.

1) shut down my computer and then started it back up while holding down the alt key. (this should bring up two disk options to run your computer)

2) I chose the second option (I believe it is called something like "recovery disk" but dont quote me on that. you want to select the one that is NOT Macintosh HD)

3) It loaded and then gave me four choises of what to do. I clicked disk utility.

4) From there I ran the verify disk scan again then clicked repair disk.

5) I then ran the verify disk permissions scan and then repaired those as well.

6) then I restarted my computer and spotlight indexed the computer (i let it do its thing without running any programs) once it was done my computer worked so much faster and for the first time I can say, I AM GLAD I HAVE LION! 🙂 I hope this is a permenant fix. Please let me know if you try this and how it works for you 🙂

Good Luck!!!

Aug 2, 2011 12:43 PM in response to APierce24

APierce24 you're a bloody lifesaver! Have an MBP (2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo - 4GB RAM) and loved Lion's features but was getting a load of spinning beach ball action.........Firefox was almost unusable


I'd downloaded Lion from the AppStore, and effectively done an upgrade rather than a clean install


Followed your instructions out of interest and it's like I've a brand new machine, much faster than Snow Leopard.......brilliant!


Sincere, huge thanks to you.........S4MST3R

Why is Lion so slow?

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