Lion is very slow please help!

you need to give more information like your ram and other computer specs. My first guess is you need to upgrade your ram.

My second guess is there is an application that doesn't work with lion eating up your CPU. Another trick to speeding up your computer is putting your OS and APPS on an SSD which I found is ten times faster. You might also need to install lion again.

Immediately after installing Lion (and rebooting), your system is likely to run slowly as the mds and mdworker processes thrash around getting themselves reorganised.

Both of these processes are related to Spotlight. So my guess is that after the installation and so many file changes / additions, that these processes have an awful lot of work to do to "catch up".

After I installed Lion, these processes were consuming lots of CPU for a couple of hours. Try opening the Activity Monitor. Click on the column labelled "%CPU" and see what's going on. If it's mds and/or mdworker, you can rest assured that it will (eventually) settle down.

If it doesn't, I hear that Dell have some very high-performance Windows machines these days 😉

Hi. It might be that Lion is still indexing/organizing. This will cause slowness for a while, but will pick up speed. Give it a while and see.

I'm in the same boat as Sailo

Installed Lion yesterday.

All indexed & finished settling down but man it's sluggish.

Permissions repaired, caches cleared, prebinding updated.

In Logic I get constant system overload errors on files I was working on for a week without problem.

Indesign has almost ground to a halt, photoshop slow, internet slow. Slow to boot, slow to shut down.

Time machine again really slow to open.

I've disabled Restore Windows when quitting etc

Activity monitor shows nothing untoward.

I'm stumped. I know most peopel have no issues.

I guess I'm just special.

On a 2.4Ghz iMac 3gb Ram, loads of free disc space so the system's fine.

Am contemplating/dreading a re-install of everything - sigh...

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.

again you might want to look into putting your OS and the apps that need to be on the same disk on an SSD that supports the OS.

all these things you can find at OWC, other world computing. They have tests of unsupported ram boosts, for example my late 08 unibody was advertised at 4gb max RAM but I have 8gb max ram no problem. It's all on their site whether or not this will work for you or not. of course apple will not help you if your stuff breaks because of these upgrades but it's almost 100% safe.

For those expereincing slowness, was this a clean install of LION or did you upgrade from SL? You might want to try deactivating things. For me, I had a plugin called displaylink that was making things all kinds of buggy and very very slow. uninstalling it fixed the issue.

I have a Macbook 2,4 Ghz Intel Core 4 Gb Ram. Boot time is taking forever after upgrading to Lion. System is ok. To load Photoshop it asked me to install Java for Mac.... serious? I did. It is not a good experience now to run image editors.... everything is very slow. Also it's like my internet speed has decreased in half! Even gmail takes forever to load 😟 I hope Apple release a good fix update for the performance soon or I'll go back to my Vaio!

do you have the plug?

you need to be plugged during the instalation. my MBP 13" runs extremely fast after I installed Lion, 17 seconds to boot. bugs or any other problem. are you sure you know how to operate a mac machine?

RoyalFlush,

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 choices 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 permanent fix. Please let me know if you try this and how it works for you 🙂

Good Luck!!!

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.

Save your emotions...just restart a few times (3 or 4)...that's what I did; and now, I am experiencing a slight increase in performance.