OS X Lion is incredibly slow (even after index)

Thanks to everyone for the discussion. Initislly I tried the permission fix, and while it helped briefly, my computer was back to a slow crawl within a couple of days. Someone mentioned checking console (I'm pretty new to Macs so I didn't know to do this) and I saw a ton of errors related to Little Snitch, which I thought I had removed ages ago. Apparently I didn't uninstall it correctly and it was hanging around in the background, making things run slow as mud. Finder had become unusable, apps were hanging left and right, and restarting took ages.

My fix: I downloaded the Little Snitch installer from their website, ran it and selected "uninstall". After a restart, the difference is remarkable. I had forgotten how fast my Mac actually could be! It's actually faster then ever.

Good for you! It sure seems to work overthere, a thing I envy, you have the fastlane callback, so fantastic - here I was on the f.... phone for 120 mins and never got through!!!

Thanks man, for the kind words, if more would just reconice my work - I'm gonna die like another picasso, if a miracle doesn't happen soon!

Good for you, that you found the fault! -But what if you do not know where it is?

@APierce24

Tried your solution and it worked great on my intel desktop (2 x 3 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon)! Thanks for posting it! I too am now glad to have Lion!

Thank you so very much. Your suggestion just saved me from a longer period of anguish!!! I uploaded lion before leaving the country and thought maybe the Internet connection in the country I was visiting was the culprit. When I returned home it was just as slow and frustrating, especially because I had deadlines to meet and was not getting anywhere fast! I called a friend who I consider an apple pro and he told me he'd been having problems as well. Going to the Apple store, which is usually a nightmare, was less appealing seeing as though we're right upon the holidays. All that to say, I so appreicate this post! Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Thank you APierce24! I have been struggling with the epic slowness and constant freezing/crashing of my MacBook Pro since installing Lion several weeks ago and was getting to the point where I was thinking of going back to Snow Leopard (or throwing my computer out the window). But I finally got the courage to try your solution this morning and it's now working beautifully! I am so delighted. Thank you!

Is the Alt key Option, Command, or Control?

The Alt key is the "Option" key. It should have a little "alt" on the top left corner.

I just downgraded my Macbook Pro late 2009 to Snow Leopard because i need rosetta. Amazing how much faster it is. 🙂 For me no Lion is good Lion.

I finally did a clean install, wiped my HD, started with a new user account and then backed up from TM. my MBP is back to normal speed now. The only issue I had was when I was backing up. Luckily I had 2 TM backups and one SuperDuper backup. TM wouldn't let me restore my old main user account for some reason. At the end there would be a failure message, and although basically all data were restored my MBP wouldn't recognize the folder as a user account. It only worked with the SuperDuper backup.

I got a brand new MBP by the end of October and it came w/ Lion installed. It was working great up 'til tonight. When I was using it last night I noticed it took quite a while to shut down, but didn't give it much though. Then tonight when I was going to use it all went bad... taking forever to start up... unbelievable slow... freezing... and every single symptom all of you have described here.

Am giving the solution posted by APierce24 a go and right now it's doing the disk repair... I think it's taking a long time too, but I'll wait and see what happens. Will post update later.

The disk util is okay for fixing permissions but doesn't detect all faults. I had my MBP taking ages to shutdown and startup, it ended up being the HD disk utility was reporting everything as okay but when i used the trouble shooting tools i found the problem.

Some macs have the tools on the harddrive, in my case it was the second dvd that came with the machine. You'll save a lot of time running a proper scan and making sure the HD isn't broken before messing around with disk utility. Once I found the fault I bought a new harddisk and everthing works just fine (in fact a lot faster as I got a 7200 rpm drive). SSD would be even better.

It didn't work.

I did the disk repair and when trying to verify permissions it froze. Tried the disk repair again and this time I got an error stating that the repair should be done from a DVD.

So since I just got the MBP 3 months ago I decided to take it to the shop. And for what they said, I'm not the only one lately w/ this problem. Apparently it's becoming a widespread issue.

I hope this is not what we have to start expecting from apple now that SJ is gone.

I had a problem with my 24" iMac running Snow Leopard. The machine had had a hard disc failure. I had a new one installed and restored from Time Machine however after that the finder was very slow taking minutes to open folders and display contents. After deleting plists and fixing permissions to no avail I checked 'console'.

Lots of error messages relating to 'Little Snitch'. I then tried to run the app and it said 'Little Snitch is Broken'. A quick install and everything is perfect again!

This worked great for me.

I fixed the Lion for me!!

Thanks.