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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

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288 replies

Nov 13, 2011 5:27 PM in response to jswin

I am currently experiencing a problem with startup and shutdown time .... with Snow Leopard it used to be around 3-5 s to turn on / off the system , now after upgrading to Lion , the starup and shutdown time have increased significantly ....15-20s .. what a pain !!! Can anyone please help me with that ...


I have tried to repair the HD with disk ultilities but it didn't solve the problem. 😟

Should i do a clean install and please can anyone show me how to do a "clean" install since i couldn't find the installer for Lion in my MBP.


MBP15 inches Early 2011 version

Nov 13, 2011 6:25 PM in response to thanh phongfromlondon

Did you see my post about reset password and resetting the permissions on the home directory? You MUST reboot using the recovery partition, go to terminal, type resetpassword, use the dialog and restore permissions. The disk utility does not reset permissions there, only on system files. That should fix the shut down speed. No need for a restore.

Nov 14, 2011 1:04 AM in response to thanh phongfromlondon

If you want to do a clean install anyway, it is also done through the recovery partition. Reboot and either hold command-R directly after the startup chime or hold the ‘alt’ (option) key and select the recovery disk in the menu that appears.


I'm also having lots of problems, not only with slowliness but also many apps crashing randomly. I have tried every suggestion in this thread aside from a reinstall, which I may end up doing if it continues like this… Despite all of Apple's efforts, doing an ‘upgrade install’ between major OS X versions never seems to produce a flawless result.

Nov 15, 2011 10:53 AM in response to APierce24

Wow!!


This totally worked, APierce24!!

I postponed "repairing" my disk cuz the last time it didn't work and it told me to create a Lion Startup Disk, etc.

But the | Restart --> Holding [option key] --> disk repair | totally worked!! Thank you so much!


My computer feels like new! It's so much faster now. I was beginning to really dislike Lion due to how slow it made my computer after the upgrade. I realized it was just a repair I needed to do. 🙂

I'm so stoked!!


Thanx again!

Nov 21, 2011 2:28 AM in response to jswin

I had a similar problem but just with Finder, Default Folder, Mail and MsgFiler, even after repairing HD and permissions via Recovery Mode. Today I found this thread and had a look at the start-up items. I found an app named "CNQL2410_ButtonManager.app", probably related to a Canon Scan and probably not working under Lion. I turned it off in the start-up iterms and then Finder, Default Folder, Mail and MSgFiler speeded up. It's not perfect yet but a major improvement.

Nov 27, 2011 5:11 PM in response to APierce24

Wow! Thanks APierce24!. I held out of Snow Leopard until OSX Lion came out. It wasn't till last week that I decided to give Lion a shot and it was running all kinds of slow when opening programs and looking through my files. I did exactly as you said and sure enough it showed my hard drive has some issues. Once I did everything you said and let the spotlight do its indexing it's running much much better. Thanks again!

Nov 29, 2011 5:04 AM in response to jswin

My MAC Pro has been driving me NUTS ever since I upgraded to LION. Laggy performance (as has been stated virtually all over the web) and particularly long lag connecting to websites.


I've checked DNS, done Disk Verify, repaired permissions and everything recommended by everyone on the web.


Finally, yesterday, I bit the bullet and did a CLEAN INSTALL of LION.


Holey moley, what a difference. My machine runs like freaking LIGHTNING!


In my Windows days I learned a valuable lesson about doing upgrades vs clean installs. I don't blame Apple for this since I did an upgrade on my MacAir and it runs like a top. But...I don't have but about 1/3 of the applications I've got on my MAC Pro.


Point is...with something like this...major upgrade...IMHO, clean install is the only way to go!


I simply installed LION on a USB drive. Booted to the USB drive. Then I used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my System Drive to an External Firewire drive. Then I installed LION to my MAC Pro after first repartitioning the hard drive to completely clean it. I'm in the middle of restoring stuff now, but the difference is nothing short of amazing. This is how LION is SUPPOSED to work!

Nov 29, 2011 6:04 AM in response to tcsadmin

I agree with your comments. I have had the same issues on a new i7 MacBook Pro which i had cloned my previous HD to and updated. Hence I was bringing along a lot of old stuff. Curiosity made me want to drill down to why it was so slow and eventually I discovered Little Snitch was at least one major problem. Once I updared to the Lion version of Little Snitch I saw a major speed increase. That said, I know it isn't as fast as it should be still so there are other issues in there. I am thinking of cloning what I have now to an external and doing a 100% clean install and putting back what I need. I just never have the time as I am using it for work. Maybe over the holidays ... 🙂

Nov 29, 2011 6:45 AM in response to Digitalclips

Same excuse here - but, thankfully, I also have a MacBook Air - so I was able to work with that in the meantime. The longest part of the whole process was creating the USB version of LION - but that's a limitation of USB speeds. Trust me, it's worth the time.


It does give me pause as to how I'm going to upgrade teacher laptops this summer. I think I'll just clone their laptops to an external drive, drop a new LION image on their laptop and then migrate their settings over. Will be time consuming more than anything.

OS X Lion is incredibly slow (even after index)

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