OS X Lion is incredibly slow (even after index)

I spoke to soon, at first the 8gb upgrade seemed to do the trick and make Lion much faster but I am now getting Kernel Panics about every day or so, 3 today so far. I have bee to see an in store Mac Genius and he suggested running the hardware tests which I have now done and got no issues reported after two hours of testing which I hope rules out the RAM (Corsair RAM, which the apple guy said should be fine). He suggested waiting for the next upgrade/patch release to Lion which could come when icloud is released, not definite or confirmed though. I am close to doing a fresh install of Snow Leopard but I am a bit dubious how well time machine will restore my applications/files and settings. The genius's personal point of view was he was unhappy with Lion, as many of the people on this forum seem to be. It does not seem like a stable operating system for many users and I don't really like the new swipes and the look of the mail and calendar applications. Anyway not sure what to do now, will maybe remove the new ram and go with the old stuff for a week to see if it is harware related. Then next step to go back to snow leopard unless anyone has any great ideas.

😟

I feel everyones dissatisfaction here with OSX lion. I have recently upgraded to OSX lion after performing a complete drive mirror of Snow leopard onto a 760GB WD scorpio black 7200rpm drive. Prior to the upgrade my system (17-inch, early 2009 MBP, 2.93GHz, 8GB ram, NVIDIA 9600M GT 512BM) was running perfectly. With OSX lion, my system feels much slower. The text scrolling and graphics are no longer smooth. There is also no option to revert to the traditional up-down scrolling method. Instead, I have to alternate between the reveresed scrolling experience in OSX lion and other computers which I use. To me this is as confusing as attempting to alternate between left hand and right hands when writting. Personally, I don't beleive that the additional features present in OSX lion are worth the significant perfomance hit that I am experiencing. 😟 Furthermore I am currently too busy to tinker with returning back to snow leopard as this is a significant undertaking for those without time machine.

I hope this is not one of apples iphone-lile ploys to force consumers into early hardware upgrades!!!!

yogybear wrote:

I feel everyones dissatisfaction here with OSX lion. I have recently upgraded to OSX lion after performing a complete drive mirror of Snow leopard onto a 760GB WD scorpio black 7200rpm drive. Prior to the upgrade my system (17-inch, early 2009 MBP, 2.93GHz, 8GB ram, NVIDIA 9600M GT 512BM) was running perfectly. With OSX lion, my system feels much slower. The text scrolling and graphics are no longer smooth. There is also no option to revert to the traditional up-down scrolling method. Instead, I have to alternate between the reveresed scrolling experience in OSX lion and other computers which I use. To me this is as confusing as attempting to alternate between left hand and right hands when writting. Personally, I don't beleive that the additional features present in OSX lion are worth the significant perfomance hit that I am experiencing. 😟 Furthermore I am currently too busy to tinker with returning back to snow leopard as this is a significant undertaking for those without time machine.

I hope this is not one of apples iphone-lile ploys to force consumers into early hardware upgrades!!!!

To reverse the scrolling go here:

and uncheck Scroll direction natural.

Most of us are very happy with Lion, it seems as though you have not taken the time to find out how it's different and how you can change that, perhaps you should before you claim that your dissatisfaction is everybody's dissatisfaction. 🙂

Thanks for the useful tip Csound1.

You're welcome,

Darn, looks like that option doesn't exist for those with older model trackpads.

firewalk13,

The natural scroll direction option is available in my early 2009 MBP 17". Not sure about other models though.

I'm also having this problem on my brand new MBP that shipped with Lion on it. It was so slow that I couldn't do anything this morning and then I could barely log in. I've booted holding the option key as many have suggested and repaired disk permissions 3 times, each time it finds a ton of things to repair. This new MBP was set up from a time capsule backup using Migration Asst. and had been working ok until today, slow but ok.

And my version of Lion is 10.7.1 so thats not it.

I'm going to try looking at the startup items to see if anything should be turned off.

Here's another vote for the humongously slow Preview app in Lion. Most of the rest works pretty snappy (it would be ridiculous otherwise on this latest model MacBook Pro) but with Preview it is often as if it doesn't work at all. And then when I have almost given up on it, it does appear. I've learnt to use the Finder's quick look more often…

Fully agree. However, I solved my problem with this:

1. Reboot with option key, and REPAIR DISK. Just do it. Even if you don't have problems.
2. Reboot normally, take full backup of all data. Leave applications etc alone. In other words, not a Time Machine backup, just important documents, music, movies, etc. I left program settings alone too.
3. Then, reboot again with option key, and REINSTALL OSX LION WITH RECOVERY DISK. It doesn't need an actual recovery disk. OSX Lion comes with recovery stuff built in. This was painful and long (took 2 hours for me), but did it. It does NOT overwrite any software etc, all your settings will remain.
4. With this fresh OSX installed over the previous upgraded OSX, reboot. Do a software update, to 10.7.2 (as of this writing).
5. Reboot.

Done. You'll be surprised how fast the system works.

When you all are talking about a clean install, does that mean:

Formatting/erasing the drive and installing a fresh copy of Lion, and then:

(1) Using a Time Machine backup to restore your data (migration assistant?), --or--

(2) Manually reinstalling each app and manually copying all docs piece-by-piece from the backup

I'm not sure about this because it seems like a Time Machine recovery would undo all the benefit of your clean install... wouldn't that just muck up the drive the way it was before?

Oddly though I only had the slowness when I updated to 10.7.2, 10.7.1 ran great on my MBP 17 2.4 Core 2 Duo with 4Gb of Ram. Once I updated to 10.7.2 to enjoy the pleasures of iCloud; my system started running like sh*t, I mean rainbow wheel constantly, all programs hung and\or froze. Bootup took about 5 mins and so on and so on.

Here is the link to the full article I found, this has actually worked and now my system is running like it should.

http://blog.chron.com/techblog/2011/09/want-to-really-repair-permissions-on-your -mac-try-this/

These are the steps I followed:

Apparently, when you use the Disk Utility in Repair Permissions – a standard troubleshooting maneuver in OS X – it doesn’t actually repair the permission settings on folders and files in your Home folder. That’s where your documents and many applications reside. There’s another Repair Permissions tool hidden away in Lion, and Jeff directed me there.

This tool is squirreled away for some reason inside an obscure password reset feature. Here’s how you use it.

1. Restart Lion, and before you hear the chime, hold down the Command and R keys.

2. You’ll be at the Repair Utilities screen. Click the Utilities item in the Menu Bar, then click Terminal.

3. In the Terminal window, type resetpassword and hit Return.

4. The password reset utility window launches, but you’re not going to reset the password. Instead, click on icon for your Mac’s hard drive at the top. From the dropdown below it, select the user account where you’re having issues.

5. At the bottom of the window, you’ll see an area labeled Reset Home Directory Permissions and ACLs. Click the Reset button there.

The reset process takes just a couple of minutes. When it’s done, exit the programs you’ve opened and restart your Mac.

I hope this helps someone.

Oddly though I only had the slowness when I updated to 10.7.2, 10.7.1 ran great on my MBP 17 2.4 Core 2 Duo with 4Gb of Ram. Once I updated to 10.7.2 to enjoy the pleasures of iCloud; my system started running like sh*t, I mean rainbow wheel constantly, all programs hung and\or froze. Bootup took about 5 mins and so on and so on.

Here is the link to the full article I found, this has actually worked and now my system is running like it should.

http://blog.chron.com/techblog/2011/09/want-to-really-repair-permissions-on-your -mac-try-this/

These are the steps I followed:

Apparently, when you use the Disk Utility in Repair Permissions – a standard troubleshooting maneuver in OS X – it doesn’t actually repair the permission settings on folders and files in your Home folder. That’s where your documents and many applications reside. There’s another Repair Permissions tool hidden away in Lion, and Jeff directed me there.

This tool is squirreled away for some reason inside an obscure password reset feature. Here’s how you use it.

1. Restart Lion, and before you hear the chime, hold down the Command and R keys.

2. You’ll be at the Repair Utilities screen. Click the Utilities item in the Menu Bar, then click Terminal.

3. In the Terminal window, type resetpassword and hit Return.

4. The password reset utility window launches, but you’re not going to reset the password. Instead, click on icon for your Mac’s hard drive at the top. From the dropdown below it, select the user account where you’re having issues.

5. At the bottom of the window, you’ll see an area labeled Reset Home Directory Permissions and ACLs. Click the Reset button there.

The reset process takes just a couple of minutes. When it’s done, exit the programs you’ve opened and restart your Mac.

I hope this helps someone.

I am glad the upgrade was cheap to buy though. I'm not going to bother losing all my apps and finding all my disks and downloads reinstalling and reconfiguring everything just to see if Lion works then. I tried the upgrade and I lost some good apps and the rest was intermittently horribly slow. Mail and Safari would stick and it reminded me of before I upgraded to 8GB of memory, but maybe worse.

I thought my hardware just couldn't hack Lion, a Core 2 Duo. After reverting I am reminded Snow Leopard works great. People have given some good suggestions but it should not be that much work restoring a semblance of performance on a decently powerful computer after upgrading. A clean install might work but I'm not sure if Lion offers enough to make it worth it plus the apps I lost since they were "PowerPC" based, though they ran fine on this Intel chip system before. My next computer I'd give Lion another chance since I liked a few things about it.

I think I found the solution.

Since the problem started with the 10.7.1 Upgrade and the 10.7.2 did not solve it, I decided to do this:

- A clean re-install of Lion but directly from the servers of Apple, that way I would not have any trace of the 10.7.1 update in my MacBook Pro.

If you Update from 10.7.1 to 10.7.2 you will still have the lag issue because it lives in the 10.7.1 update, so you have to go deeper to get rid of it, and that means as I said before, that you hace to do a clean install directly to 10.7.2 (apple servers) ..

That solved it for me! =)