OS X Lion is incredibly slow (even after index)

i've been looking at the activity monitor for a while. that actually what makes me confuse. there is no spike at the cpu, the memory usage is low (below 1G from my 4G memory). It looks like the os is simply waiting for an i/o data from hd, which doesnt make any sense to me at all.

anyway, i recently bought worms special edition from the mac update bundle, boy that game is unplayable. theres nothing wrong with the frame rate, it runs normally, the problem is every 5 second the system just hang for less than a second. im pretty sure there is no other program running on the back. and its just a 2D+ game, not a complex 3D game.

the problem is i dont even know where to look, and im a computer science student. i can easily notice virus or a wild background program, but not like this one!

Is the latest mac mini cant handle a full hd monitor? or something wrong with the hard drive? or lion is just being apple's vista?

Believe it or not, that's good news. It sounds like there could be a hard disk problem. Could be a bad drive, bad sectors on the drive, or a bad controller. I think you said you did a clean install of the OS, so that should have meant if there were bad sectors, they would have been blocked out.

Tech support should be able to fix this for you. They may also have some other diagnostic tests you can run to verify if it's a hardware issue. But that's what it sounds like to me.

i already test my hd with drive genius, no bad sector/block detected. the defragment only 3% of the total used hd. im going to defrag it today, but im pretty sure thats not the problem.

im kinda confuse what im going to say to the apple 'not-so-genius' in my local store. the problem is every hardware check i perform says no error on my machine. of course i can open a movie file and game to show it but in the end they'll just say its probably a faulty file or broken program.

so this is the problems that im having:

playing movie with quicktime (even .mov file) is unwatchable. every 5 second the frame stops for about half a second (but not the sound) then the movie fast forward to the current frame. the sound, time slider/counter, music does not halt.

playing games, even the simplest one like 2D+ worm game shows the same problem: frame halt then try to keep up by fast forwarding.

same problem with xcode. sometimes when i type something, the word does not appear for half a second, then it try to keep up by popping the letter fastly. i already disable the live compilation, but it does not effect the performance.

switching application takes time like powerpoint and safari. i use powerpoint a lot so i am sure that this is a problem.

anyone ever felt ths same problems?

From this forum alone and a dozen others I'm sure you can find, this is not uncommon with Lion. When working right it's great, but has a poor response to tiny hard drive errors or many programs that ran fine under Snow Leopard, and the upgrade can handle permissions very poorly.

I would just tell the genious the truth, that this is a very significant issue for enough people that we know it is an issue with lion. If they really seem unaware and care, point them to this and the many forums that don't seen acknowledged by Apple, since we obviously like Lion and want it and Apple to succeed as well as care about this problem.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3234699?start=0&tstart=0

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1195587

http://forum.mamp.info/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=14081

There are many solutions and causes, but enough to know Lion just doesnt have the performance clearance to jump over performance snags that Snow Leopard did.

i followed the advce Apeirce posted and it seemed to work

the imac is running quite a bit faster than before running the repairs

nice one,

catch

After trying almost anything and evrything on every possible post I found- unfortunately with no success...I decided to DELETE my Time Machine backup on Time Capsule and redo a completely new backup. Seems as if this was the problem all along! Last backup dated from the pre-Lion era therefore there was some kind of incompatibility...my imac was constantly trying to connect to Time Machine and Time Capsule and was using up all the memory...Anyways my problem is solved...If you have the same set-up- it's worth a try!

APierce24's suggestion helped me resolve an issue with lion, where finder wouldn't list files anymore, when I would have to browse and select a file, for things like selecting a file to upload etc.

Good work.

My slowness + overheating problem is solved!

Here is what happened:

Bought MBP13 on Feb 15. Right away things weren't going right, but not so bad as to suspect hardware problems. Finally a month later it just died completely. Took it to Apple store. The guy tested and said the logic board was dead. Also that the slowness and the over heating I was experiencing was due to the failing logic board.

He went back and found a new logic board, told me to come back next day to pick it up after he replaces the thing. Next morning I get an email asking me to call a Genius Administrator. This dude tells me, "Since your MBP is just a month old, how about a new one?" I said of course a new! Also, I said since I have my creative music and photo works on the HDD, they must swap the HDDs. He said, "we can copy all the files then erase the old one or just let you have the old one too". I said awesome!.

So I went to the store. Genius asks me what is to happen with your MBP, seemed like he didn't know what the Admin had told me. I told him some Admin here offered me a new MBP and my old HDD. He went back, brought out a new sealed MBP box and my old HDD, carefully packed in a static-safe bag.

Since I took only my MBP to the store, now I have two HDD and two sets of power cords and adapters. Thats like $150 in retail price. I swapped the drive myself and installed my freshly arrived Crucial 8GB RAM. Now my Lion is running like how OS X should run. Zero issues.

This forum knows I have many issues with stupid Lion features but my first customer support with Apple couldn't have gone any better.

If your Mac is slow, get it checked. Logic boards can suffer for a long time before it dies completely. If your Mac is new you just might get a whole new one right away.

well i brought the machine to apple authorized reseller, but they're kinda confuse what is the error. none of the system report shows any error, hd looks fine, i've tried resintalling os twice, and its still not working even from the beginning when nothing is installed, no cpu spike, no full memory on the activity monitor. nothing!

right now my mac mini is seriously slow! i ocasioanally use itunes, word, xcode, safari and mail. the lag happens a lot especially after 1h+ usage. i told the apple (not-so) genius to check the hardware all around but it require it to stay for at least a week. I'm not sure i am able to do that.

Is there any way I can check my hardwarre by myself? probably checking the logic board or hd? is there a program to do that? perhaps test-running the hardware thouroughly, checking for errors and stuff? I am really desperate here!

If you are under warranty then they must do something about it. Take it to a real Apple store even if you have to drive a couple of hours. But you have to let them keep it for testing. Tell them they must test it by using it for 1+ hours.

I don't know about testing all the hardware yourself though. You will need the right equipment and the know-how. But this slow down after 1+ hour use means something is wrong for sure. If you are not under warranty then I guess you just have to wait and see if it fails completely.

If your machine is very new then a real Apple store will give you a new one if they cant figure out what is wrong with it. But do it soon!

Good luck.

i am under warranty, its 2 months old mac mini. the problem is there is no apple store in my country (which is extremely weird considering apple sells like hotcake in here). there's one apple authorized reseller and they do perform service under waranty. its just bother me a lot not to have my mac for a week since my work depends on it a lot.

anyway, i think this discussion wont give a solution for my problem since i've tried every single thing posted here. but thx for the info. lets hope apple fix this problem before i put my attention to the 'other'.

Oh thats too bad. I guess your best bet is call Apple directly about the problem and make them realise how useless the new machine is for you. You should not have to swallow a bad apple just because there are no Apple stores who can offer to give you a new one. Hopefully Apple has telephone support for your country. I think you can't solve this without direct contact with Apple.

The "Mac OS X Lion Being Slow Issue" has nothing to do with the Hardware.

My MBP Unibody was lightning fast with Snow Lweopard , I have never seen the "Beachball Of Death"

After formatting the Drive and installing Lion anything got slow and I am waiting all the time and seeing the "Beachball Of Death".

I really consider going back to SnowLeopard or even better install Windows 7, ....RIP OS X

After a lot of work and following the suggestions here, I "bit the bullet" and did a clean install. This, I think, rid me of all the old "overhead" from many previous OS-X installations. I can't recall having done a clean install in several years.

I also added an SSD for the system software and applications, and while that does improve the boot time, I don't think it's responsible for any improvement in Lion.

But Lion is definitely faster now than before the clean install. Reinstalling my software was a pain and took a full day to accomplish, but it was worth it. The computer feels faster and reacts faster - and that has nothing to do with the SSD - my user folder is still on a conventional HD so fetching and writing data doesn't get the advantage of the SSD.

Lion is now acceptably fast - but let's face it - it will never be as fast as Snow Leopard. However, I now am a happy Mac user once again.

Since Apple has decided to end software updates for the Mac Pro 1,1 I guess this is the last OS I'll have for a long time. I'm glad it worked out OK, and thanks to all the users on this topic who provided so much support and so many ideas.

By the way - moving the user folders to a different disk than the OS is not all that difficult. I didn't have to use Terminal or do any cloning. It just worked (haven't I heard that somewhere before?).

After I had the slow down initially after I updated Snow Leopard to Lion I almost did what you did. One last idea I tried though worked. It was a lesson I learned in the pre OS X days. I removed the entire preference folder from my ~/Library (user) and rebooted. It was like night and day. I then replaced preferences, one application at a time and logged out and in again until I had all the ones I actually used. It was amazing how many were left from things long ago that I didn't replace. I had updated several OS X versions without clean installs. To this day Lion has been as fast as Snow Leopard. Something in those old prefs were screwing with my set up for sure. This is on a MBP i7, 1TB internal HD and 8 GB RAM.