Lion is very slow please help!

TheSmokeMonster wrote: "to the person who has 3gb of ram, you might want to consider upgrading to 4 or more. In general if you want faster speeds and your computer supports more ram, then give it more RAM."

This is excellent advice in general, but in this case I can't help thinking it's a bit off the mark: I doubt these cases of extreme slowdowns, which seem to be popping up with some regularity, are RAM-related. I myself own two older machines, one maxed out at 3GB and one maxed out at 2GB, and both run Lion flawlessly.

It seems far more likely that either:

1. A small percentage of installations are hosed in a very specific, similar way, or

2. Some system extension (similar to your experience with DisplayLink) is marginally incompatible with Lion, and is the cause.

While we can all agree that such slowdowns are not commonplace -- if they were, the tech press would pounce on it, the way they pounce on any widespread Apple flaw, e.g, Antennagate, OS X's original instability, etc. -- it now seems disingenuous to claim the problems are confined to underpowered hardware, either.

@fabiofromcampinas, while it's no fun to hear that you're an outlier, please note that your experience is exceptionally uncommon. The tech press would be all over this issue if Lion were rendering customers' machines essentially unusable, as you have described. I personally know a dozen people who've upgraded to Lion, and none of them experienced any slowdown whatsoever, after the initial Spotlight index -- which took on average 20 minutes -- had run its course.

No, something else is at the heart of your machine's woes. Forgive me if I missed it somewhere else, but have you run Activity Monitor to see exactly what process it is that's running rampant?

I'm sure there are many different opinions on this subject. What I know is that there are thousend of people sharing the same problems on Mac Comunities. Yesterday I called Mac Store near here and they have received some complaints in my city. The "Apierce24" tips on this topic helped a lot to free up Ram Memory and speed up a litle bit. Now, looking at the Activity Monitor there are about 6GB of free RAM (From 8GB available). But, for example, to shut down the system is taking more than 2 minutes (when it's not locked up at the "still processing circle that took overnight last time). To open Office 11 is taking about 20 minutes. I Gave up trying to open PS, but to open Adobe Lightroom is very fast.

In Summary, System remain slow, even with free RAM and few activities running.

Still waiting for the next good tip.

My MBP is brand New, with I7 Processor and 8GB RAM. It was running like heaven before upgrade. It seems that it is not related to The HW, like one replied saying that his 2GB RAM was running Ok.

Any new information, feel free to share.

I just retested and it takes a minute 40 seconds to boot up! Am headed to Apple Store tomorrow to get Lion removed. I am a business customer and telling all my employees NOT to use Lion until they figure it out.

Alf Megson wrote:

Spotlight's dreadfully slow indexing has been completed but it has re-indexed a number of times for no apparent reason, i.e. it did not coincide with any diagnostic action.

This sounds like the reason here because my computer reindexed itself zero times after the initial indexing. a tip to speed up the indexing process is to prevent spotlight from indexing large files that you normall navigate to anyway. I don't allow spotlight to index my external hard drives or my itunes folders and media folders. From what you're saying it sounds like you jumped the gun on thinking everything is slow when spotlight had to index stuffs and it never really was able to finish. So in response to your issues, again, If spotlight is completely done indexing, meaning it's not randomly indexing different things here and there as time goes on, and it's still slow, then install Lion with a clean install after you do all your disk utility stuffs. Also be more specific and less emotional.

This was the most helpful solution. I added a few more twists. First, I went to System Prefs, General and disabled the RESTORE WINDOWS WHEN QUITTING.... Second, I went to Utilities and verified and repaired both the Permissions and Disk. I also did it in the RECOVERY DISK mode as mentioned Apierce24 solution. Finally, I zapped the PRAM 3 TIMES (command, option, P and the R keys). On restart, I held the keys until I heard 3 start up tones. IT WORKED! I am back up to speed. These forums are great! Another reason Mac is the best.

THANKS EVERYONE.

I know what you mean, it's happening with many people.

Just try this, open a web page like youtube that runs flashplayer, you'll notice that UI starts beahive correctly.

I'm running lion on mbp 13" 2011 with 8 gb ddr 3 and SSD vertex 2.

I beleave this is graphics drivers related.

That's interesting, I've seen a lot of things about how the 9400m is messing up software that has been compatible with SL and Leo. Xarl3z seems like your automatic switcher goes to the better graphics card when playing flash. I don't have this option of automatic switching so I have to set it to one or the other. Xarl3z. do you have DisplayLink installed?

Indeed. I do not have installed displaylink, but I do have air display with the message saying that "drivers are not installed". Actually graphic is Intel HD 3000

the theory is that it has something to do with power saving. The gpu seems to be clocked down when idle, but that clock is not enough the render animations properly. This happens even when the laptop is connected to power.

What do you think about it ?

video card seems to be a good theory.

The HD intel! how do you like it? are you able to run 1080p vid with no issues while running other apps?

I know the there are issues with the nvidia 9400 and third party drivers but I've also had issues with 9600 and third party drivers, just less with the latter.

Message was edited by: TheSmokeMonster

My mbp don't have nvidia video card, it's a new Intel HD 3000. I've see a lot of people complaint about this performance issue in foruns, I'm just trying to indentify a common scenario. For instance with Xbench 1.3 LEO on UI I have 120 - 130 score. With SL it was about 300-310 score.

Yes, 1080p runs smooth with others apps even on my 32" lcd tv.

It's juts the UI. Now scrolling a pdf was painfull, but after I open youtube and play a video, pdf starts scrolling smoothly.

KaptainKopter wrote:

"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

KaptainKopter,

Certainly Apple didn't tell us if this was beta or not, but it goes without saying that you use quite literally everything at your own risk, and "everything" includes Lion. Of course, it would indeed have been nice if Apple had stated this very clearly on its homepage (or better yet, publicly reported it so that it'd go all over the news), but then again, in this world we ought to know that every thing we use—even commonplace things like pencils, tea kettles, and even cell phones—is used at our own risk, and news OS's are no exception. It's not a wrong thing to ask for your money back, but it's important to understand that you use and pay for quite literally everything at your own risk, and "everything" includes Lion, as I just said.

And please don't be offended: I'm not trying to say that you lack understanding; I'm stating a fact.

Tiff

Smart. Way to go! I did a clean install and mine is running as yours is, much better. The upgrade install was a disaster.

Ok, as a novice what is the best way to do this ?

Thank you .