My MacBook Pro is slowing down.

Disconnect all wired peripherals except keyboard, mouse, and monitor, if applicable. Launch the usual set of applications you use when you notice the slowdown.

Step 1

Launch the Activity Monitor application in any of the following ways:

☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)

☞ In the Finder, press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.

☞ If you’re running Mac OS X 10.7 or later, open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Activity Monitor in the page that opens.

Select the CPU tab. Select All Processes from the popup menu in the toolbar, if not already selected. Click the heading of the % CPU column in the process table to sort the entries by CPU usage. You may have to click it twice to get the highest value at the top. What is it, and what is the process? Also post the values for % User, % System, and % Idle at the bottom of the window.

Now select the System Memory tab. What values are shown in the bottom part of the window for Page outs and Swap used?

Step 2

Launch the Console application in the same way as above, and select “kernel.log” from the file list. Post the dozen or so most recent messages in the log – the text, please, not a screenshot. If there are repeats, please post only one example of each repeated message.

Perhaps there's some process eating up the CPU. You can notice this because the fans start running. To check which process is using the CPU, use Activity Monitor.

If it's slow, then perhaps you have too many processes running at the same time, and memory is being swapped to disk. What do the numbers in the lower-left corner of the Activity Monitor say? To see the biggest memory hogs, click on the "real mem" column to sort it from big to small.

Edit: heh, previous poster was quicker submitting an answer.

My Macbook Pro (late 2011 shipped with Lion) does the same thing. CPU usage never goes over 10% (It's a quad core) 8GB memory always runs out of memory, while my iMac runs iMac runs with 2GB ram and has no issues whatsoever.

quartotenore wrote:

What steps can I take to improve its performance?

Depends on which OS you are running which you did not provide.

I did remove a batch of dock items since entering my question since the dock was high on the process list.

page outs: 0 bytes

swap used: 0 bytes

Jun 30 07:41:21 Violet500 kernel[0]: IOSurface: buffer allocation size is zero

Jun 30 07:41:51: --- last message repeated 2 times ---

Jun 30 07:42:11 Violet500 kernel[0]: IOSurface: buffer allocation size is zero

Jun 30 07:53:50: --- last message repeated 1 time ---

Jun 30 07:53:50 Violet500 kernel[0]: utun_ctl_connect: creating interface utun0

Jun 30 07:53:50 Violet500 kernel[0]: utun0: attached with 0 suspended link-layer multicast membership(s)

Jun 30 08:09:36 Violet500 kernel[0]: IOSurface: buffer allocation size is zero

Jun 30 08:09:39 Violet500 kernel[0]: utun_ctl_connect: creating interface utun0

Jun 30 08:09:39 Violet500 kernel[0]: utun0: attached with 0 suspended link-layer multicast membership(s)

Jun 30 08:30:52 Violet500 kernel[0]: utun_ctl_connect: creating interface utun0

Jun 30 08:30:52 Violet500 kernel[0]: utun0: attached with 0 suspended link-layer multicast membership(s)

Jun 30 08:39:55 Violet500 kernel[0]: IOSurface: buffer allocation size is zero

Jun 30 08:40:39: --- last message repeated 1 time ---

Jun 30 08:40:39 Violet500 kernel[0]: IOSurface: buffer allocation size is zero

Jun 30 08:41:16 Violet500 kernel[0]: utun_ctl_connect: creating interface utun0

Jun 30 08:41:16 Violet500 kernel[0]: utun0: attached with 0 suspended link-layer multicast membership(s)