Lion is very slow please help!

Guys and gals, after installing lion your mac needs to do a bunch of things that will slow down some computers. Spotlight for instance catalogs your whole device so plug in and relax! it's going through growing pains as it makes the leap to Lion. 😝

I'm having the same issues. These people suggesting 'do you know how to use a Mac' are idiots. Photoshop is nearly unusable after Lion update. Obviously Apple changed some things around and maybe Adobe needs to implement some fixes, but it doesn't really matter, things aren't working normally. It isn't Spolight or caching or anything, I installed Lion 5 days ago now and the computer has been on nearly non-stop. Rebooting may help other programs but Photoshop seems to be unusable no matter what I've done. Hoping either Apple or Adobe can shed some light on this.

First of all 2thirthone, let's take a deep breath, no one here is telling you your an idiot, please return the favor.

Let's dig in, Photoshop and all other adobe products came up with pay update to cs5 called cs5.5 and with it Photoshop 5.1 which I did and PS AI FL and so on work in the blink of an eye.

That being said, tell us about what computer you're running. I've read that Lion suggest you have at least 4 gigs of RAM to run it smoothly. Of course putting your operating system and it's apps (Adobe CS5) on an SSD similar to how the macbookAirs are, will greatyly increase any wait time you expereince booting up the machine or starting any software.

So what are your tech spechs (RAM model identifier so on) what about PS are you expereince to be an issue, what version of PS do you have and do you have a clean install.

I had expereinced frustration the first time I installed lion because there was a driver conflicting with the whole OS. deleteing that driver made everything extremely snappy on my late 08 15" MBP 5,1 2.53gHz running on an SSD card in my expresscard slot(they got rid of these for SD card slot, which ***** if that's you but not the end of the world.

I have a 27" iMac quad-core i5, 4GB RAM, ATI Radeon HD 5750 1GB. I can assure you it is not a hardware problem. The slowdown's started immediately after installing Lion. Whether it's an Adobe problem or an Apple one, something changed. I have CS5. Lightroom works pretty much fine it seems.

This leads me to believe that software is the issue. Lion has it's fair share of problems as the internet is full of people mentioning various slowdowns, crashes, problems. Such is life with early upgrades, particularly from Apple since they don't beta test with a large number of users.

Oh and I will be the first person to call someone an idiot when they are being one. I was referring to RoyalFlush's response btw.

I've searched Adobe's forums and looked around other places and some people have no problems, some are having the same issues as me and sailo. I plan on upgrading to 8GB or maybe 16GB eventually but this isn't a hardware issue.

Well I have Lion now installed in two machines. Both 4gbs, macbook white, macbook pro, both so slow now that's anoying. the worst for me is internet and mail.... I have Lion on since day one and it's done doing whatever it had to do in the system. I love Apple but what I hate is the fact that they don't admit mistakes. The whole idea of Lion is amazing but it really doesn't matter if you can't run it well. Hope they release a proper fix soon.

"Growing pains"?

I don't remember Apple telling me that Lion was beta and that I use it (and PAY FOR IT) at my own risk.

Lion is being sold as fully-released (albeit unsupported [ unless you pay for that too ]) so don't let me hear any more "growing pains" nonsense.

Apple have made a rare mistake and they need to do something about it.

I've asked for my money back

You get 90 days of support from apple.

There are always compatability issues with new OS's

what are your computer specs? do you have applications running that you may not know are taking up your cpu? Lion needs 4gb RAM, suggested by apple, to run smoothly.

Please stop patronizing me since I'm only trying to help.

Like APierce24 I too have managed to make some progress but with more of a 'hit it wth a hammer' approach

I ran Verifiy Disk but no problems found so I..

- deleted all my system caches (library/caches)

- downloaded the trial of MacPilot & ran everything from the maintenance list

- did a permissions repair & rebooted

- crossed my fingers

There has been a marked improvement in performance.

It's not what it was prior to Lion install but I can work with it.

I was experiencing a slow sluggish response after my upgrade to Lion. I have since turnned off the 'restore windows when quitting and re-opening apps' function that can be found in the General Utility of your system preferences. After a restart, this change made an immediate impact to my machines speed, boot-up times and overall performance. Currently running Lion on a 2 year old MBP with 4 GB of ram.

Hope that helps some of you.

blackwire200 wrote:

I'm in the same boat. Lion is stupidly slow. Off with the macbook before i throw it on ground and back to my dell with windows 7.

The issues you are seeing are not normal, and it comes down to doing some work to figuring out what it might be.

Slow performance is almost always due to one of three things:

1. Spotlight indexing in progress
2. An incompatible application or kernel extension spinning, using CPU cycles
3. A hardware issue of some type that has been exacerbated, not caused, by the installation of Lion

I experienced the follwoing :

Every second or third boot i get a progressbar while booting.

After that, Lion is extremly laggy, even at the login pormpt. After Login it is nearly unusable an my adium icon in the startbar s missing

Then i reboot and everything works fine.

I have an i7 with 8gb ram and since i've changed to lion it is taking almost 5 minutes to open a program. It's like i'm back to pc xt!

I read that spotlight is indexing everything again ... But the time estimated for the process is 40 hours. Can anyone believe that. I love my mac, but they could have warned us about it!

I was also on the same boat with my MBP extremely slow after Lion upgrade and after having followed the recommendation from APierce24, it seems to have dramatically improved. Thanks 🙂

Same problem here ! photoshop is very very very slow ! I can't work with it:s

I think the problem came with previews of fonts !

Illustrator works perfeclty.

Hope to see fix ASAP.

I can't work 😟