OS X Lion is incredibly slow (even after index)

No worries. If you can goto Applications -> Utilities folder -> Console then when it loads make sure that 'All Messages' is selected in the left column. Then press Command+Shift+S to save it. You can save it to the desktop or your downloads folder. If you can copy and paste the contents of that file to http://pastebin.com/ (Just open a Web Browser, then direct your Browser to the address. Click New Paste in the top right, then copy and paste the contents of that Log file from Console). After you have created that on Pastebin, if you could post the link here. If you need more instructions on the Console application and Pastebin, feel free to ask, I can walk you through it if you need.

I'll look forward to seeing the output of your system as it could help troubleshoot what is really going on under the hood. I've been a Mac/PC/Linux guy for a long time now, so I know what it's like going from Windows to OSX. I find your situation really really odd. I'd love to try to help.

Hi, folks! I share all your frustrations about Lion being slow. Even though I have a Mac Pro (2 x 2.66ghz) and 5 gb of ram, I was disgusted with the speed of Lion compared to Snow Leopard. I tried all the "tricks" but did not see any improvement.

However about a week ago, I was looking at my font library in FontBook, and found the spinning beach ball of death running for 10 to 15 seconds after every mouse click. So I decided the Font Book was one of the culprits, and removed literally thousands of fonts I'd accumulated but never used (or needed). It took several hours to delete them, and as I proceeded, the beach ball was a little less evident after every delete.

When I was complete, I ran Disk Utility and Repair Permissions. I ran it TWICE, and found out that although it SAID it was repariing permissions, some were reappearing again. They were all HP files, so I deleted everything which applied to an HP printer I didn't own, keeping just the two I use.

Then I ran Cocktail and used the Localization option. This took another 2 hours to run. But PRESTO - after all this, Lion is running faster. Still not as fast as SL, but so much better I'm happy with my Mac again!

So my particular problems - bad fonts, too many fonts, and crappy files from HP were the problem.

Since so many people have had so many different issues leading to slowdown, I've decided Lion is not very tolerant of any little issues whatsover. We've got to get the computer clean then keep it clean to make Lion roar.

very interesting bart... i have hp shortcut manager, hp scanjet manager, hp scheduler, and hp event handler loading at start... the RAM worked wonders but i may try to toast these too.... the thought of Mountain Lion really scares me after this ordeal, not a good first experience with a mac.

I can confirm the list from creativeboulder. After these steps Lion on my MacBook Pro 2007 2.33 with 2 GB RAM was usable. Then I upgraded to maximum of 3 GB RAM and now I can use Aperture, Firefox and Mail all together and the speed is ok.

When using and exporting Canon RAW files in Aperture there is a longer delay. But that's not a problem, I'll do that at home with my iMac. I think about upgrading the iMac from 4GB to 8 GB because of Parallels with Windows 7 but I think 16 GB is not necessary.

I don't think that Firefox is a problem. Every browser uses a lot of memory if you have pages loaded with flash etc. Watch at the activity monitor and you see the memory used for plugins. And the these pages also take a lot of CPU power. Close them, if not necessary.

I tried most of the suggestions here except for the clean install. Was kind of reluctant to do that. And it did improve but will become slow again after a while. I noticed that it would be particularly slow when isight is on or when I'm using Safari. So I checked for a common denominator and it was iglasses app. I updated to the latest version but that didn't solve the problem so I just uninstalled it and now my MBP is running smoothly on Lion OS X 10.7.3

iglasses app ... Isn't that an iOS app? If so why would that have an impact on OS X?

iglasses app is a Mac OS X app for isight:

http://ecamm.com/mac/iglasses/

Ah, I see the confusion, when you said 'iglasses app'. I always think of an 'app' as a product from the app store rather than a third party program for the Mac and assumed you mean i-glasses which is iOS only. The term 'app' is now used for any program it seems. My bad.

Wiped Lion of of my Macbook (white 2008) and downgraded to Snow Leopard. Happier then ever, finally smooth running Snow Leopard again, what a relief after the terrible Lion Saga...

Both of my primary machines (a Mid 2011 21" iMac 2.5GHz i5 with 12GB of RAM, and a Mid 2011 11" MacBook Air 1.6GHz i5 with 4GB of Ram) that shipped with Lion are both flawless when it comes to running Lion or any programs on them. My Mid 2007 Mac Mini (1.83 GHz Core 2 Duo with 2GB of Ram) even seems to do ok, but it does little more than sit there and hand out files as well as act as the media center. My early 2011 13" MacBook Pro on the other hand... It had some issues so Apple replaced it under warranty.

What's causing the issue, I haven't the foggiest. In my experence the machines that shipped with Lion work better than ones that were upgraded...

I found that the Dropbox app was the problem - once I quit the application (it was launched automaticly) performance in OSX Lion was back to normal.

SO! I had the same problem, and here is what solved it:

1-problem: 16 gigs was about to be transferred in 3 ⚠ hours. That's a joke and clearly some mess up, especially because this was a hard drive working flawlessly prior to this.

2-I do use one partition as the iTunes folder (I am paranoid about overusing the internal HDD, which I know is dumb but makes me sleep better).

3-I rebooted with the HDD plugged in, after 'repairing' the Disks in Disk utility.

4-3.95 gigs copies in a beautiuflly blissful 2 minues. Hope this helps.

I have also fresh installed (formatted drive) Lion and it is quite disappointing.

Those bounces at the end of scrolling is very annoying and the whole system is so much slower than Windows 7

It takes 2 seconds until the right click menu is shown and anytime i see the Beachball.

My choice is to format the drive again and install Windows 7 !

Next Computer will NOT be a MAC

I understand your frustration. I use Windows 7 at work on an intel 3.0 gHz Pentium D, a fairly old computer. It boots very fast and programs open almost instantly. For sure, Microsoft got it right this time - which is probably why they want to screw it up with Windows 8!

But back to the Mac.

Lion is a struggle. Apple's business was built on doing things the way WE want to do them. We should not have to modify our normal behavior to suit the computer's whims. Having said that, I have brought Lion's performance up to a speed faster than Windows 7 (excepting for program open/close), with an older Mac (Mac Pro 2.66 x 2 which is listed as Mac Pro 1,1).

First, clean out the font folder. It did wonders for me. Pick 40 or so font families you really like and remove the rest. Don't trash them - move them out of the trash to a folder somewhere on your hard drive. If they won't delete, use the "Show in Finder" command and then delete them from the font file. Be careful with system fonts - you need some of them.

Next - remove all those little start-up routines you don't need. Many of the "cute" little routines sap energy, memory, and disk space.

Shrink the files with X-Slimmer. Remove the languages you don't use with Cocktail. Get Onyx (it's free) and clean - clean - clean.

Get rid of all the thousands of printer drivers which you don't use. HP particularly provides lots of "bloatware". I'm not sure how bad it is for the computer, but less is always better.

I think you'll find Lion can be acceptably speedy and the Mac can be "fun" again. And that's my biggest complaint with Lion - it removed the fun factor from the computer.

'Nuf Said.

I was having a very simmilar problem. Got my new 21"imac 2.5 quad core 8gig ram machine before lion came out. It shipped with SL, and was very happy. Long about December, I decided to try lion. I downloaded it and was happy. It was good. Then after a while, when my imac would wake up from sleep, it would crawl. Very slow and very unusable. Had to reboot, then it was fine. Tried everything. Nothing worked. Finally took it to the apple store, (still under warranty), they said the HD was bad. They replaced it and my imac is running just fine ever since.