Is Mavericks making your machine run slow?

petermac87 wrote:

If you check back in these forums when Lion and Mountain Lion were released, in particular, you will read of many many more users screaming that it was the end of Apple as we know them, for both OSXs were claimed as disaters y more than are complaining about Mavericks. It has happens with the realease of every new OSX ever.

This phenomenon extends well before Lion and Mountain Lion, and goes back to Tiger at least.

That's why I said 'in particular'. You are correct and I have posted the links to the OSX tragedies since the dawn of time on many occasions. I think I am just getting lazy now! 🙂

You are absolutely correct, though.

Cheers

Pete

This is going to be a long post that will "potentially" give you an idea about many things -- but not make folks happy. So here goes:

"The Apple Way" -- this is the way in which Apple recommends to developers to create Apps and WHERE to store various "parts" and what NAMES to use with them. I haven't been a "develper' now since pre-Tiger, so much of what I"m puting forth is based on assorted conversations with active developers and the like.

Also, keep in mind these comments are very general and not particularly technical.

I cannot tell you exactly what "things" are supposed to be in what files, just the structure. Apple wants all developers to use the "Domain style" name for identifiying "things' which belong to specific applications and developers. It is actually quite simple to understand.

"Lock" files are exactly that -- they represent a mechanism by which an application can identify that it is "in use" and typically contains a "pid" -- program id.

Most?Many?All? Apple applications (like preview) are "robust" -- that is to say, if they go to access a file (like a plist) and that file does not exist, the application will create it "fresh" using some set of parameters hard-coded into the application. It's kind of a "fail-safe" mechanism. If you find you need something in a parameter (plist) file and it is undefined because the file does not exist - don't crash, simply use a pre-defined default and create the file new.

Part of all of this relates to how and were "apps" store information in the file system. User related apps are supposed to store information in the User's Library directory; while system relatd apps use the System Library directory. There are many apps, especially those ported from Windows, Linux, Unix or other non OSX environments.

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Now an important thing about OSX Mavericks. Apple, like many other vendors (including Microsoft) ASSUME that you have a HIGH SPEED connection to the Internet active AT ALL TIMES when you are trying to use OSX.

I have not put up WireShark or similar, but if I could, I would undoubtedly see that in that first 15-90 seconds at strartup, OSX and various individual Apps are communicating (one might call it syncing) with iCloud -- even if you don't have it configured. If you have it configured, some things will happen quickly; if you don't things wind up waiting for "time-outs."

"Time-outs" are problematic. If you optimize them based on Cable Modem Speeds (20meg bits per second) a request made will be answered very quickly. But ii that request is made over a DSL line (2meg bits per second) that timer will expire and require a "retry'.

On top of this, there is a little discussed concept in Networking -- "Guaranteed MINIMUM response time." This means that if two users one on a FAST link and one on a SLOW link perform the same action at exactly the same time, INSTEAD of the fast link getting done quicker than the slow link -- both links take the same amount of time to complete. This is part of the concept of "engineering expectations."

Those of us who are used to HIGH-PERFORMANCE desktop computers EXPECT certain levels of fast response to our keystrokes. Other folks either "don't know any better." Or have "learned" to "live with certain characteristics." Yes, this is serious social engineering. This issue is quite common to MMOs.

So, not only do we find the OS itself "syncing" with the iCloud for various reasons, but so do individual apps. AND we have the comparison between OSX on a desktop, and IOS on various generations of iPhone and iPads.

Then last of my comments -- Mavericks has a new memory management scheme. Many different "speed-ups" in OSX and in IOS are accomplished by "pre-loading." These "pre-loads" are particularly "speedy" for folks who "open-up" (note, I did not say power-up) their lap-tops and go to Mail and Safari and then close their laptops (note I did not say power-off). By not powering down, the "state" of your computer is retained for the next time you use it... a FAST recovery. But if you shut your system down and DO NOT save all those pages you had open in Safari and all those apps you had open; when you next power-up your system, you have to "pre-load" Mail and Safari BACK into memory. I hope you can see the pattern here. You have to take a BIG step back and pay attention to some serious Computer Science theory here to understand what is happening and why things seem a bit unpredictable. And all of this sort of thing relates to the speed of you disk drives, etc. Computers are "Systems." Their individual components interact with each other and all contribute to the final display on your screen.

There ARE issues with Mavericks; Spotlight takes "forever" to index disks and while it is running, response to other things, especially any activity which utilizes disk activity (like launching an app) will suffer. There are undoubtedly "timers" which need tweaking. --- just a couple of things which cross my mind at the moment.

However, this is much to long. I hope I've helped folks understand what is happening and how to sort the real Bugs from the "expectation" ones.

I've run disk repair on my late 2008 MacBook and things improved immediately, and considerably. Let's hope it stays this way.

John, I'm not posting here in the hope of getting my problem solved. As I said, nobody knows what the root of the slowdown is, yet. I'm posting here to reassure others that it's not their fault unless they've installed something incompatible. You know how it goes - people being advised to do everything including wiping and reinstalling when it won't actually help.

So my machine seems to be working reasonably well now after some tinkering....

The apple mail/sync contacts/find address programs were deffinately hogging resources. And hanging the whole desktop.

Here are the steps I took....

. Disk utils permisions and repair from recovery. No chg.

. Disk warrior clean up. Lot of improvement in overall speed and stability. But mail etc still major problem as before.

. Delete all icloud accounts and all internet accounts then reinstate one at a time carefully noting progress.

Vola problem seems to have been cured. mail works and puter running I would say just as fast as before for the last 1hr. Hopefully this is it.

Oh I have left FB acc off for the time being also so thats worth mentioning. Twitter was added back in.

I have the same opinion of Mavericks as jvanhuys.

Installed Mavericks to days ago and, quite simply, my 2011 Mac is running at about the same speed as a 1980s Classic. As with Mountain Lion which was also rubbish when it was first inflicted on unsuspecting customers, I will have to find my original discs and reinstall 10.6.7 which came with the machine.

Apple need to realise that to an awful lot of their customers, trying to work round new OS system problems is about as much fun as having an endoscopy. Also, probably 90% of their customers who are not computer savvy, the suggested fixes may as well be in Chinese for all the sense they make.

If I get an upgrade of Quark, Photoshop, Filemaker, Illustrator, they may have very minor niggles when they come out but the programs 99.9% work. When you are releasing something that can badly effect everything else on the system it has to work.

Another couple of days chargeable wages lost sorting out another problem inflicted by Apple on a once 25-year customer.

Everyone using this thread has the same problem that can be safeguarded against in the future by not downloading any OS update from Apple until it has been out for a year or so. Mountain Lion was rubbish and cost me nearly a day getting rid of it back to my old system. Now, ditto for Mavericks.

Sad to say but it is not now safe to believe anything Apple say in their product blurbs without checking with a lot of users that the thing actually works.

Brian Campbell3 wrote:

I downloaded Mavericks this afternoon and installed it on my iMac i7 24GB RAM Everything seems to be slow in transitions from one app to another and many apps stall for severeal minutes as if the processor is playing catch-up. Thoughts? Should I just reinstall the update?

It's an easy answer to say just wait, and probably a very generic one, too. The reality is that not much will change about the updates to the OS, except perhaps making it easier and more automated to migrate to a new version.

Thanks to those comments and tools shared here and elsewhere in the Discussions, I learned how to inspect the OS installation for issues that are going to be difficult, whether before upgrading (best method) or after upgrading Here's my hope for the future... Learn from past mistakes!

In my particular case, over time, since the intro of Mavericks the OS has settled down quite nicely after some manual repairs, some app repairs and some tweaks and rebuilding permissions. The background bookeeping tasks quietly performed by the OS seem to have cleared up many of the long start-up issues that some people on this thread (myself included) complained about at the outset. That's not to say that the rainbow spinning wheel (S.W.O.D.) isn't still with me. However, now it appears for a very short time and not often.

The dire warnings about upgrades here have been grossly overstated. As with anything on a computer, having a method of installing that works for your systems is the primary goal before you actually go ahead with a operating system upgrade. I contend that we've gotten lazy in doing all these "automatic" upgrades Apple warns us about, yet makes it easy to do. Pay heed.

Apple's OS migration is definitely going to improve with time.

I have had a completely different experience when clean-installing Mavericks. I ut it on my previous iMac (4GB< Early 2008) after completely wiping it, and it runs like a dream. I'm not calculating how to do the same thing to my Late 2012 iMac. Will let this thread know if it works, but it looks like a good option. The only problem is I may put something back that makes it run badly again. Obviously I will avoid restoring anything from the old /Library folder.

Boltonjohn1947 wrote:

Installed Mavericks to days ago and, quite simply, my 2011 Mac is running at about the same speed as a 1980s Classic.

Quite simply, my 2011 iMac is running faster than it did with Mountain Lion or any previous OS X version.

As has already been mentioned numerous times in this thread alone, if you want to fix what's wrong with yours you need to start a new Discussion. There are many knowledgeable people who can provide assistance in a number of languages including Chinese.

I upgraded to Mavericks the day it became availble and have noticed consistently slower performance in my 3.2 GHZ Core i3 iMac. Mountain Lion was very zippy in comparison.

Specifically, I notice a lot of lag when waking up from sleep and when trying to access an open program or when opening a new program...the beach ball pops up quite a bit and there is a constant hesitation, like the computer is having to wade through molasses. Perhaps the new OS is processing a lot in the background or perhaps shuffling things around in memory constantly?

In any event, this is not the upgrade I expected.

Try cleaning it up with disk warrior. If the delays are related to mail, icloud and internet acc syncs then remove all acc and reenstate them. Worked for me. And a couple of other people I know.

The other issue you are seeing when waking from sleep is the OSX "Power Saver" feature called "AppNap"

http://www.apple.com/osx/advanced-technologies/

To turn it off for an iMac (i.e. powered by a wall outlet) -- select the Application and click "get info" at the top in the "General" section check the box "Prevent App Nap."