Performance Issues

Question

Performance Issues

Hello,

Ever since the switch to Mountain Lion, I have been experiencing some crazy performance issues. My computer should be fully capable of running smoothly when playing YouTube videos and listening to iTunes, but that's not always the case.

My first problem is with YouTube. I watch videos very frequently, and ever since Mountain Lion, I have been having many problems with them. Mountain Lion seems to have fixed the problem that YouTube videos ran in fullscreen at a terrible fram rate, but now I get bursts of lag instead. A video will be running fine, then a few minutes in, I get a lot of lag. The video will stop and start usually over and over in half a second or less intervals. Sometimes the audio will "fizzle" and static out until I can't even hear it. The video also lags along with the audio, but doesn't completely stop. To get the audio back, sometimes I have to actually go into system preferences and switch the audio output to something else and then back to my headphone jack. This happens regardless of the output device. I can also keep the video paused for a minute and then play it again and it will be fine for another few minutes. Oddly enough, everything works fine most of the time when I'm in full screen. I also have these audio problems with iTunes, especially when streaming music previews in the store. It's not my internet, though, because I am sure the videos have finished loading, and my internet is relatively fast at 25mbps up and down.

I am also having problems with Quicktime and Final Cut Pro X. Quicktime occasionally skips parts of the audio and video when doing a screen recording, and FCPX is giving me loads of problems that are detailed in this forum: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4187303

Also I'm having issues with the UI in general. Sometimes the smooth transitions between desktops become laggy, and I get beach balls when loading web pages or not very intense things. I rarely had beach balls in the past. I also have moments when the cursor does not respond, something that has never ever happened to me before on this Mac. My Mac even crashed for the first time a day after the update. I walked away from my computer, heard the startup sound, and turned around to see that it had crashed and rebooted. It also crashed on me yesterday as I was shutting it down.

I should add that I'm using Flash player for YouTube, not HTML5, and shockwave has been crashing and freezing up. I use Chrome, but the same happens on both browsers. Not the crashes, but the YouTube problems happen on Safari too. My Mac is a year old, and it has been upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion, and now from Lion to Mountain Lion.

Please help me! This is turning into a nightmare of an upgrade. Thanks in advance.

-FutureInventions

iMac, OS X Mountain Lion, 2011 27" 3.4GHz, HD 6970M 2GB, 12GB

Posted on Aug 7, 2012 4:24 PM

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Answer 1

Kappy

Level 10

361,741 points

Aug 7, 2012 4:26 PM in response to FutureInventions

Reinstalling Lion/Mountain Lion Without Erasing the Drive

Boot to the Recovery HD: Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.

Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions: Upon startup select Disk Utility from the main menu. Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions as follows.

When the recovery menu appears select Disk Utility. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list. In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive. If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the main menu.

Reinstall Lion/Mountain Lion: Select Reinstall Lion/Mountain Lion and click on the Continue button.

Note: You will need an active Internet connection. I suggest using Ethernet if possible because it is three times faster than wireless.

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Answer 2

Aug 7, 2012 4:44 PM in response to FutureInventions

Before reinstalling your OS (c'mon, Kappy...) fire up Activity Monitor and see if there are any processes that are hogging lots of CPU, that you don't expect. Ensure you show "all processes" in the picker at the top.

After that, see if there are any 3rd part kernel extensions which could be causing problems. You can see what you have installed by running this from Terminal:

kextstat -kl | awk ' !/apple/ { print $6 } '

Paste the results here and maybe there's something obvious we could point to.

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