Lion slow response - seems disk related

So yes, there is a slowdown problem associated with Lion as indicated in the troubleshooting forums.

Dave Calhoun2 wrote:

So yes, there is a slowdown problem associated with Lion as indicated in the troubleshooting forums.

For a handful of users and for various reasons. Yes.

Yes, it is slower for that handful of users who use their computers for more than email. Why are you hanging out in the support forum if you won't even recognize there is a problem?

Dave Calhoun2 wrote:

Yes, it is slower for that handful of users who use their computers for more than email. Why are you hanging out in the support forum if you won't even recognize there is a problem?

Lion is in daily use by millions of people who use it for more than e-mail. With any system that has this many users there are many who have issues. When taking the total number of Lion users into consideration and comparing that to the total number of reported problems here on Apple Support Communities, Lion is 100% problem free. All we do here is help fix the individual outliers.

If you have a specific problem with Lion, it would be best to start your own question and describe the problems you are having and your machine's configuration.

So do you have a specific problem? Your posts so far are just letting off steam. Whatever your issue is it may be able to be addressed very easily. But we have no idea what it is. Many people who come here find that their issues with Lion are more than often self inflicted and often easily fixed. These same 'issues' have been raised everytime a new OSX has been released if you check previous forums. So basically start a new thread and give details of your problem or else continue working with a Mac that is action abnormally.

Cheers

Pete

Pete, I appreciate your viewpoint, I just don't agree with it. We have an OP saying Lion is slow. We have lots of other posts in this forum saying Lion is slow. I'm saying Lion is slow. You say Lion is fast. Yippee, you must be the correct one.

Btw, all my posts have not been about letting off steam. As far as I can tell you haven't contributed to the thread in any productive way at all. On the other hand I've offered advice on what I did to speed up Lion and what I plan to do in the future to make it even faster on my computer. So I would say my contribution far outweighs yours where you simply say there's no problem.

Shall we keep this up or let it go?

Yawn. Ignore your own issues. It does not effect anyone else.

Bye

Pete

Hi,

I believe the best solution is to look at your other startup items and see if some might be causing slowness. If you have a lot of startup items, it could cause Lion to be slow.

Also, you could try doing a back up and try to reinstall from scratch. I just did an upgrade from Slow Leopard to Lion on a white MacBook and it's faster.

Hope this helps.

Wahoo, I think I found the problem. When using disk utility to repair permissions it does not repair the home folder. You have to boot into a special program to do that. I followed the instructions at http://blog.chron.com/techblog/2011/09/want-to-really-repair-permissions-on-your -mac-try-this/ and after rebooting the difference was immediately apparent. I highly recommend you try this.

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.

Have you tried it without the USB drives connected? Any time you access the disk, any disk, it has to spin up all of your external drives. You will then get a lockup until they are ready, with no CPU usage.

I had the same problem, and I'm happy to say that this thread helped rescue my ailing Mac. For me, the key was removing the Virtualbox drivers - uncovered by the kextstat command provided in this thread. As soon as I removed the Virtualbox drivers (using the uninstall command that comes with the Virtualbox dmg), my 2011 Mac was back to behaving like new. Thanks all for helping chase down a really thorny issue.