Is Mavericks making your machine run slow?

I have a late 2008 mac book pro and updated to marvericks. My spotlight indexing first said that it would be 18 minutes for about an hour than this morning it was just frozen in the same space and saying that it is estimating the time. I did a premissions repair and found that java and the library preferences weren't right.

The repair was taking forever so I followed the advice to open console and found a repeated message about peer_server something running something else that is not allowed. I googled this and found that it was attached to 3rd party software that I don't even remember why I downlaoded. I did a great deal of searching in the library for all instances of the software and support information and am deleting all of that know. After restart I'll let you know how it worked but my guess is that people have 3rd party software that is incompatible.

I'm using Mavericks right now, didn't return to Mountain Lion. At the beginning (Upgrade), it works fine, anyway, I still wanted to do a clean-install to make sure that there will be no problem at all after some time of usage. For me, my machine runs fast although I do the Upgrade or the Clean-install.

I too downloaded mavericks & is running slower than with mountain lion.

sometime ago i changed from 2Gb to 4Gb & am now wondering would it improve the speed if i increased once more to 6Gb.

My monitor is showing physical memory 4Gb & Memory used 3GB.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Here are my specs:

Macbook Late-2009. 4Gb RAM. Previous OS: Snow Leapard (most updated).

What I did to install: (also had slow performance)

I preppared to update my OS to Mavericks using Macworld's article on How to Update to Mavericks (google it). This included running utilities, updates and getting rid of old apps I didn't use. I didn't do a clean install.

After Mavericks was up and running, I also had really slow performance and it was pretty horrible. The OS seemed really buggy and Notifications didn't work.

Here's what I did to fix it:

- Let Spotlight finishing indexing

- Aftewards, I noticed Chrome and Mail went super slow, but Safari was faster than in the previous OS

- Let Mail run to reload all my previous messages (took a long time, just let it run in the background while doing other stuff on my comp (took a few hours)

- Backed up Chrome using Chrome sign-in feature

- Deleted Chrome

- Restarted my comptuter a few times

- Got rid of all old software that didn't work with Mavericks anymore

- Cleared Trash

- Restart

- Updated all software

- Ran Disk Utility to "Erase Free Space" note: DO NOT USE ERASE (look it up if you don't know what I'm talking about) (takes about an hour)

- Restart

- Ran Disk Utility "Repair Disk Permissions" (also takes about an hour)

- Started using the new Mavericks apps, slow at first, but then the more you use them, the more your computer gets used to them

- Reinstalled Chrome and signed in to get back all bookmarks and apps

Now:

It's much better. I found that its still a bit slow when I first open or close an application. But then if I leave it running in the background, open another application in another Desktop (formely, spaces). Both will work fine.

I'm still having a few seconds delay for a few functions, but I hope it will continue to improve as I use the OS more.

Let me know if there are other things I can do to improve performance. But for now, this is managable and I'm not considering going back to the previous OS version just to improve speed.

Hope this helps.

- Daniel

I have a late 2009 iMac 8gb Ram 27" 2.8 GHz i7 256SSD. I upgraded from SL, to L, to ML, and now to Mavericks. After Mavericks everything was sluggish. I was planning to do a fresh install this weekend but after reading through this thread I tried running 'Repair Disk Permissions' in Disk Utility and voila! Blazing fast again right after it finished. Moving the mouse pointer is nolonger jerky, and window animations such as mission control are smooth and instant. I still may do a fresh install just to clear things out, but as for the speed issue, it seems fine now.

Mavericks runs VERY slow on my MBA Mid '12 1.8 GHz 2.7 GHz Intel Boost. So far, start up has been slower, Musescore(I'm an arranger) runs SLOW. Even the basic editing of Preview runs god forsaken slow on it. 2nd Day on Mavericks.

If this is TRUE then why is APPLE not providing us a way to do a CLEAN Install?

'Repair Disk Permissions' in Disk Utility

Green Meanie wrote:

If this is TRUE then why is APPLE not providing us a way to do a CLEAN Install?

What is your definition of a clean install? There are quite a few ways you can erase the drive and install the OS, if that is what you mean.

And, it is not true. Like repairing permissions, clean installs are just voodoo. If you've trashed your Mac with crapware, it might be easier to erase the drive and start over, but it is hardly necessary.

Green Meanie wrote:

If this is TRUE then why is APPLE not providing us a way to do a CLEAN Install?

APPLE has never applied such terminology to OS X, because it's vague and easily misunderstood.

Instead, they provide instructions to erase and reinstall OS X, which cannot be misunderstood:

OS X Mountain Lion: Erase and reinstall OS X

The procedure is mostly applicable to those who have chosen to download ill-conceived "CLEANING" software, the effects of which account for the overwhelming majority of Mac problems reported on this site.

Found out it wasn't actually Mavericks itself that was making my OS run painfully slow. Turns out my macbook pro is Indexing and using about 98% of cpu usage

i found mavericks made my imac 27" run really slow, have been trying to figure out why & today i think i found out. i use firefox as my default browser, shut that down & set my default broswer to Safari.. not only is Safari red hot fast, but by closing down Firefox it seems the rest of my mac is back to running fast too. maybe firefox is causing some issues

While I don't find that Firefox really slows down the rest of my system, I do find the new release of Safari much, much faster than Firefox. I don't know that I'll definitely switch after so many years, but I'm tempted to do so at least at this moment.

Clinton

Mavericks runs incredibly slow on my 2011 13inch MacBook Pro (2.4 GHz Core Duo CPU). Especially when switching between applications and mission control.

Hope Apple can fix it soon. Otherwise I have to roll back to mountain lion and sacrifice the great improvement in Mavericks.