OS X Lion is incredibly slow (even after index)

Same boat!

My i3 Dell runs Win7 more smoothly than my new MBP13 i5. I'm new to Mac but had used SL before, and Lion seemed like a whole new thing from start. I think Lion is a memory hog too. 4GB was more than enough for SL but Lion seems to use HDD all the time even when theres free RAM left.

But, after doing the Disk Repair and Permission Repair, it seems to be running better. But animations are often still not as smooth as I experienced in SL.

My brand new MacBook Pro 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7 is slow and choppy right out of the box (I bought it yesterday). I have been buying Macs for years and have never experienced this type of lag, especially right out of the box. I know Lion is new, so I'm going to be patient here. I may have to revert to Snow Leopard if this continues!

I feel you. If Apple doesn't recognize and address this issue, it will be a huge damper on their growing momentum. If they put out an ios update that brought iphones and ipads to a grinding halt they'd take that seriously I think, so why don't they care that Lion just behaves badly with applications that are supposed to be compatible and worked fine under Snow Leopard? Also, having to repair permissions and recheck your hard drive to try to fix performance issues on systems that snow leopard ran great on speaks of a poorly designed upgrade package. Lion should just tell you a hard drive sector is bad if that hard drive isn't "good enough" for it, since Snow Leopard seemed to work around it without a peep.

Even so, I think the biggest blind spot is blaming "3rd party apps" wholesale, or suggesting people don't use any anti virus, without addressing that these things ran fine under Snow Leopard, and just what it is about Lion that can't run them right anymore. If Apple just leaves people hanging, maybe it will be OK for most and doesn't affect too many, but the word of mouth for those people Apple tries to charge extra for fixing things the upgrade broke certainly won't help their current momentum.

Sorry to tell you, you most likely will NOT be able to "downgrade" to SL. All new Macs are being shipped with hardware "optimized" for LION. I've tried downgrading an iMAC with a clean install and it will CRASH if you use the SL install disk. I called Apple Tech Support and they confirmed this with me. In fact, I suspect they will NOT support a "downgraded" device.

Just a word of warning.

motox570 wrote:

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.

When you say you tried everything, do you mean you repaired disk and permission before taking it to Apple store? I'm trying to understand if they can detect a bad drive even if disk repair and permission repair doesn't tell you that the HDD is bad.

If that is the case then I should take my MBP to Apple store. Mine seems too slow.

If I were you, I would not be patient, but have Apple fix it while you're still in warranty or can replace it. You do not want it to become "your problem" down the road once your warranty or return period expires. They don't all do that. I think it's just a quirk in Lion that it is fussy about little hard drive imperfections or tiny issues that did not faze Snow Leopard. Chances are if you take it back, they will replace something and it will be fine.

Try and NOT use iTunes. It seems to use most of my machine's memory.

iTunes does take up a little memory, I agree. But not as much as some of the Web Browsers do. I'm typing this message right now and iTunes is using up 122.1MB (Real Memory) and 160.4MB (Virtual) while Google Chrome is using 17 Processes of over 100 to 200MB, 1 Process at 316MB (Real) and 1 Process at 630MB (Real). OSX was designed to handle all of these applications at once, with-in reason, but fails to hold up it's end of the bargin sometimes. Saying not to run iTunes probably isn't as helpful as maybe watching what applications consume more of your processor and memory.

Yep, browsers these days eat up a lot of memory. My brother keeps saying his Lion has been faster than SL ever since it came out. But so many people here say the opposite, including me! What is the deal really? Is Lion really slow or all of us have some sort of hardware issues or installation problems?

Disk and permissions repair did not help as much as I thought it did. RAM tests all went fine. HDD seems to be fine. But some of my recent downloaded .mkv and other files were corrupt in places. It never happened on Windows 7 for me. Does this indicate any specific problem?

Lion is so much more problematic than Win7, its very upsetting to find this out right after switching.

Please if anyone reading this thread knows exactly what to do to speed up Lion, kindly let us know! Thanks a lot.

I'm finding it really amazing how many people are having performance issues with Lion and Apple is not actually recognizing this publicly or at least contributing to this message thread with some insight.

@samhaque I did post this message, https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3203965?start=207 with how I was able to speed up Lion. If you HDD seems fine, you ran disk permissions and repair, cleaned up your system, removed as many startup items as you could-- then I really I am not sure what else is going on. It's got to be something underlying. Maybe at the kernel level, I'm not sure though.

I hope my link helps a little bit, if not I'm sorry I could not be of more help.

Fixed typo. Message was edited by: creativeboulder

@creativeboulder Thanks you. I think I've read your post and thats when I did the repairs you talked about.

I'm waiting for my 8GB RAM to arrive. Really hoping hard that it would solve some issues. Right now it takes just like 4 apps to eat up all 4GB I have. And things get pretty slow whenever there is considerable HDD access happening. Wish I could afford solid state just because of this.

Does the battery have anything to do with slowness? Maybe uneven current or something? I really know nothing about electricity but I'm pretty sure 'unclean' power causes malfunctions.

BTW, this thread has been viewed 106662 times! There are obviously a lot of people in the same boat out there.

I tried the Disk Utility method from APierce24and didn't have success. However, it might be a combination of that and this that made my MacBook Pro run like a cheetah and not a snail:

1. Go to "User (you) / Library / Preferences", make a Copy of the entire Preferences folder and place it on your desktop. *If you use Lion and can't find your Library, go to Finder / Go, hold down "Alt" on your keyboard and click Library.
2. Change the folder name ex: "OLD Preferences".
3. Go back to "User (you) / Library / Preferences" and delete the entire contents.
4. Restart your computer. Doing this resets all of your Preferences. You will instantly notice that your "System Preferences" are reset to factory settings. IMO the tradeoff of 10 minutes of adjustments to settings is justified.
5. Empty the Trash.

*If you run into any challenges along the way simply refer to your "OLD Preferences" folder and copy the one(s) you want back into the Preferences folder. For example, I found that iTunes, Calendar, and Safari all retained my content. Apple Mail on the otherhand didn't so I simply brought back into Preferences the "OLD Preferences" (com.apple.mail.plist and com.apple.mail.plist.lockfile) in order to see my messages. If you use Apple Mail and Gmail then you're fine. You can delete your "OLD Preferences" folder when you're confident all your applications are functioning as desired.

im surprised apple hasnt fixed this. i got my brand new mac mini installed with lion about a month ago. i connected it to 24 inch samsung. at first it was laggy a lot, so i fix the hd permission as suggested. it fixed only a few things. then i reinstall the osx. it did not do anything at all to fix the performance.

but now i cant do anything without having a laggy performance. im not sure why and how i can solve this. im using 2.5GHz i5 dual core with AMD 6630 256 MB 4G memory. i cant play quicktime movie smoothly (but its fine in vlc), switching program took 1-2 second (and its very annoying), and sometimes, typing on the web has an occasional delay. i dont have anything installed on my mac except optimal layout, drivepulse, keyboard remap.

im not sure what to do now. is it possible its a hardware failure? im plannign to bring it to apple strore, but im not sure what to tell them. any advice?

Tell them its running slower than a 5 year old computer, tell them about typing delay and Quicktime problem. Make sure you let them know you are experienced enough to know there is a serious issue with the Mini.

And let us know what Apple does about it!

Good luck!

It sounds to me like something is running in the background. Take a look at Activity Monitor and see what might be going on. Whenever I've seen a typing delay like your talking about, it's usually because something is running and taking up processing power.

Just a thought.