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My 8-Core Mac Pro is constantly slowing to a crawl - how can I figure out what's the problem?

Here's the stats: mid-2008 Mac Pro, 8-core x 3Ghz Xeon, 9 gigs of RAM, 2x2TB hard drives, 1x1TB hard drive.


I've swapped out the lame 8800 video card that came with this pig for a Radeon 4870, in the hopes that this would resolve my problems. Even when just running Mail, MS Word and a browser, my Mac sometimes just ... crawls. Trying to switch between windows. I click and click ... and nothing happens.


Try to close a program ... I click and click ... and after an eternity, a menu FINALLY comes up to close.


I have Activity Monitor running. It says I have 1.94 GB free, 4.93 GB active. CPU Usage is at 6%. Disk activity is jaggy, in the mid-range, not pinned. I've got 1.4 TB free on my boot disk (I have 3 disks installed because I had HOPED to be able to do video editing on this expensive workstation (sigh).)


I have the Adobe Creative Suite Cloud edition installed. Is this just a case of this Mac Pro being 5 years old, and so out-of-date and useless that to run modern video-editing software, I should just junk this thing and start over with a new Windows i7 machine? Because it doesn't look like there's going to be an update to the pro-end workstations any time soon...

Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.5)

Posted on Jan 30, 2013 8:49 PM

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1 reply

Jan 30, 2013 10:18 PM in response to wordyeti

First, back up all data immediately, as your boot drive might be failing.


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

If you have more than one user account, you must be logged in as an administrator to carry out this step.


Launch the Console application in the same way you launched Activity Monitor. Make sure the title of the Console window is All Messages. If it isn't, select All Messages from the SYSTEM LOG QUERIES menu on the left.


Select the 50 or so most recent entries in the log. Copy them (command-C) to the Clipboard. Paste (command-V) into a reply to this message. You're looking for entries at the end of the log, not at the beginning.

When posting a log extract, be selective. Don't post more than is requested.

Please do not indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.

Important: Some personal information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting. That should be easy to do if your extract is not too long.

My 8-Core Mac Pro is constantly slowing to a crawl - how can I figure out what's the problem?

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