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jswin Author

Level 1

10 points

OS X Lion is incredibly slow (even after index)

I've installed Lion on my iMac (24-inch, Early 2008, 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM) and it has become INCREDIBLY slow. I've heard many people saying that the machine would return to its typical blazing speeds after indexing finished, and it has — I've left it on overnight a couple of times to make sure everything finished, and it's still much slower than it was while running Snow Leopard. Virtually every application hangs — when typing in Finder (for example to rename a folder) the text lags several seconds behind what I'm typing. Mission Control is terrible — the graphics lag behind and it takes several seconds for the animation to finish. Often the animation doesn't appear at all, and it just flickers between frames awkwardly until the mission control display finally appears.

I'm working on backing up all my data and doing a clean install … I'll see what happens, but if it doesn't work I'm going to have to roll back to snow leopard, because this is ridiculous. I've never seen an OS change slow down a machine so much since Vista … hopefully it's fixable. Any thoughts on what might be the cause?

(Oh, and activity monitor scans look normal … nothing's hogging the CPU, and there's slightly less than 2GB of RAM free almost all the time.)

iMac Core 2 24, Mac OS X (10.7)

Posted on Jul 23, 2011 11:59 AM

288 replies

Csound1

Level 9

60,033 points

Sep 15, 2011 2:54 PM in response to firewalk13

firewalk13 wrote:

Unfortunately, mine only supports 3gb max (recognizes and actually uses). Bus limitations i believe.

I know those machines, but it seems that a clean install has taken care of your issue anyway, 🙂

Sep 15, 2011 2:57 PM in response to Csound1

Thnx, I sure hope it will!

Sep 16, 2011 2:14 PM in response to firewalk13

Wonderful, doing a clean install totally worked. My macbook is onceagain happy!

All I needed was to burn the lion DVD (after having to download the entire lion install again) it was easy as pie with a fresh backup on hand. Would have taken less than 2 hours if not for having to download lion again.

Snappy performance has returned thank fricking god...

rajo

Level 1

14 points

Sep 18, 2011 9:52 AM in response to jswin

It is very slow. I have run a little test on my iMac:

Final Cut Pro 7.0.3 app startup time in

a) 10.6.8 booted from slow external 5400 rpm USB drive: 18 secs.

b) 10.7.1, booted from fast internal 7200 RPM drive: 75 secs!!

Lion's a slow animal.

Pyro7i9

Level 1

0 points

Sep 18, 2011 10:54 AM in response to Pyro7i9

UPDATE: So repairing permissions worked for about a day and a half before my computer became slower than ever before. I decided to do a fresh install of everything and it is now blazing fast. I'm hoping that this is a permanent fix. If I begin having issues with this installation, I will be moving back to Snow Leopard. It has Rosetta support anyways.

rick1999

Level 1

0 points

Sep 20, 2011 5:17 AM in response to jswin

So after a LOT of fear, I decided to do the clean install followed by a Migration assistant import of all my applications, files, etc.

It WORKED. It's all zippy again. Just make sure your time capsule has the absolute latest copy of all your data, make the backup DVD, reboot and boot from the DVD, format, install, and then migrate.

Happy days are here again!

Sep 20, 2011 7:45 AM in response to rick1999

Does Time Machine remember *everything*? Like little settings and customizations inside programs such as Adobe tools, Firefox, Coda, and so on? How about the VPNs I have setup? All such minor things that take ages to personalize? Thanks.

rick1999

Level 1

0 points

Sep 20, 2011 7:49 AM in response to Cyberpundit

@Cyberpundit

I'm using MAMP w/20 vhosts, textmate w/custom bundles, versions, etc. All my bookmarks, itunes, SVN repose, and even .dotfile in my ~/ directory where recovered.

I haven't found anything missing... yet. But so far I've been able to pick up as if I hadn't done the reinstall (and it's much faster).

Backup many times... but you should be ok.

Sven1968

Level 1

0 points

Sep 23, 2011 5:04 AM in response to jswin

My iMac late 2009 (4GB, i7) was very slow after upgrading to Lion. The repair permissions worked well, now it's much faster. I work a lot with Aperture and it's much faster now.

In addition I switched off the option to open all windows again after a new start. Now the memory paging is lower.

Sep 23, 2011 5:17 AM in response to Sven1968

Sven1968 wrote:

In addition I switched off the option to open all windows again after a new start. Now the memory paging is lower.

Hi, how did you do this?

Thanks!

Sven1968

Level 1

0 points

Sep 23, 2011 5:22 AM in response to Cyberpundit

I'm working in German language so I can only guess the English words:

- System Preferences

- Personal / General ( the left icon in the top row)

- option box under "remember used objects"

Sep 23, 2011 5:24 AM in response to Sven1968

Thanks so much!

srrb

Level 1

8 points

Sep 23, 2011 3:12 PM in response to APierce24

Thanks for the tip! I was finding Lion quite sluggish until I followed these steps and now it is running very quick.

Sep 27, 2011 5:32 AM in response to xraydoug

Just wanted to add my vote to this answer which solved the slow performance problems I was experiencing after upgrading my Mid 2010 MBP from Snow Leopard to Lion. In Disk Utility I selected Macintosh HD and then chose Repair Disk Permissions. The repair process took some 4 hours to complete.

Stevep67

Level 1

0 points

Sep 27, 2011 11:52 AM in response to APierce24

This totally worked for me. Finder was c r a w l i n g, and I rebooted holding the "Option" key. Repaired permissions and now it's back to normal. Thanks for the tip.

OS X Lion is incredibly slow (even after index)