Q: Is Mavericks making your machine run slow?

You kids today need a video to show you how so look at the video How to Clean Install Mac OS X 1.9 Mavericks . Just pay attention to the expanded show notes for links to create the bootable USB thumb drive.

thanks grandpa

I have the same problems, and im not alone.

I installed on others computers the upgrade to 'Mavericks' too and they all have the same issues. Programs opening slow, not responding for a while, and the best of all. Mac mail loads everytime my whole content of emails (+4000) before it opens the actual email i was asking for and i have mavericks since 2 weeks now. Even feels its getting worse. Yes in the beginning was slow cause of indexing the spotlight. But never went so much better.

It feels to me a memory thing. Lack of it. (iCloud? actual load of memory? 4GB not enough?)

I didnt run mavericks as a clean instal, but im thinking this has nothing to do with anything.

E v e r y thing is running 50% slower then before. Work that i do becomes so frustrating you wanna slap the 'book'.

(2.4 Ghz intel core duo 4GB DDR3 ,etc macbook pro 13" more then enough free storage left) coming from snow leopard (still the best option in my believe).

1st i thought it must be my huge typography library (wich run great before) but after cutting it down to just what i needed. Still no improvement. Then i saw that all this things happens on all different computers, with different settings, specs, etc. Its all the same. and can't figure out W H Y?

I hope they/or someone comes up with a solution or will go back to too previous version. Can't work like this. Free yes, but if it doesnt work i realy don't care.

Studio Engineer wrote:

 

Mavericks is a huge disappointment here. Erraticness across the board. Safari, Mail, Note, Adobe - you name it... Nothing seems to work as I have come to expect it. Mavericks & iOS7 are marking a boarder where I am a very unhappy camper.

 

I have spend 2 weeks on trying any solutions / Workarounds etc etc etc. Today, I am downgrading to Mountain Lion.

Same boat here. I'm pretty pee'd off with apple right now. All these issues have been eating away at my work time and earning money time! >.< Might be wise not to upgrade an osx update straight away next time.

Apple shouldn't have released what seems to be a half baked, slow and mega buddy os x upgrade just to fit in with their release calender. Lift your game apple please and get fixing!

Any E.T.A on an bug fix update?

Rather odd then that many millions of others are not complaining about this. I dare say it may well be software you are running that may be conflicting with or is not comparable with the new OS.

You can always post an etrecheck report. The link is scattered through these forums. A quick search will bring it up.

Good luck

Pete

Whats that for a reply? @petermac87

What do u mean millions? Think 70% doesnt even know how to post an issue, or go somewre with there question/issue. Last but not least can't be bothered and just buy a new one. Or get persuaded by the apple store "theres nothing they can do". Why do you think i installed an as easy update as 'mavericks' on untill now 7 computers! Cause people have most of the time no clue and just try to deal with it.

Wish i didnt do this instals cause will have to 'restore' them all back again to previous OS's.

If its software, why does all computers i installed, who has nothing to do with each other, have all the same problems? Have even issues with the latest new iMac 27" who running 'hot' the whole time.

Not everyone needs a flying computer, but just wants his older version to run on the latest apple update, doing his emails, opening his word and type text. That are basic things to do on a computer. If that even stucks and run super slow. Even to go to switch to another program?.

And even if its is ur programs, so what. You expect it to work, even if you upgrade. Its not such a major change then Lion that it will be an issue of your word, or email or safari. Sorry bad comment reply.

Mavericks has been downloaded many millions of times, in fact is breaking the record for the most downloaded OSx. This is a troubleshooting forum so you will only see a tiny amount of users here with issues. The rest have no need to look for help they are not needing. You can try to find what is causing your issue or continue using your installs which are not working properly for any number of reasons. Your choice,a choice everybody has.

Cheers

Pete

Congratz, maybe many people have a computer wich is not older then a year (wich is quite probable) + the fact a 'download' is counted = u run it from app store so u can with same apple id download this thing many times AND maybe try a few times. Or is it the fact its free?

"or continue using your installs which are not working properly for any number of reasons."

There all coming from the persons own App Store. Nothing to do with me.

Im not questening apple as a company, im questening this upgrade. Thats WHY im here, isn't it?

I never ever have to post something on here (in 8years). Cause i always found solution own problems. This time its different. Cause it has no solution then the OS itself. Viola.

In stead of questening peoples post on this issue, should better post something usefull instead defending whats crearly not your problem.

So you are simply here to rant and stomp your feet. Good for you. That should get things fixed for you. Post an etrecheck report if you serious wish to investigate the issues you are having.

Pete

Cedricfromspace wrote:

Apple shouldn't have released what seems to be a half baked, slow and mega buddy os x upgrade just to fit in with their release calender.

All I can say is that this has been a lot smoother than any previous release of a 10.x.0 version for most users I've been dealing with.  I, too, see many of these issues, but they seem to come and go with time and I don't know any more than anybody here as to why that is.  I did have to do a Recovery Partition reinstall once when it became totally unusable and that completely fixed it for several days.

Any E.T.A on an bug fix update?

Only what the rumor mill has said: Apple Seeds Two New Mavericks Updates to Employees for Testing.

It has been rumored that the evaluations and user recommended pre-release fixes were not implemented in the this final release version of Mavericks. Beta testers and developers had this product for a while and it's disappointing that their recommendations for Mavericks were apparently not implemented in this Gold Master.

There is a version coming that is supposed to incorporate those changes and it can't be soon enough for me. I tried to fill out a FedEx on line shipping form in Safari on a solid connection and got so frustrated with Safari jammed up performance (lack of), I had to switch to Chrome where it let me complete the form. Safari just couldn't get anything done... Type a letter...Wait...Type a letter... Ridiculous.

Sorry to rant, but really Apple. REALLY!?!

MadMacs0 wrote:

 

Cedricfromspace wrote:

Apple shouldn't have released what seems to be a half baked, slow and mega buddy os x upgrade just to fit in with their release calender.

All I can say is that this has been a lot smoother than any previous release of a 10.x.0 version for most users I've been dealing with.  I, too, see many of these issues, but they seem to come and go with time and I don't know any more than anybody here as to why that is.  I did have to do a Recovery Partition reinstall once when it became totally unusable and that completely fixed it for several days.

Wierd. Previous releases have been flawless for me. This is the first time I've had any issues. Hence my frustration. To make things worse the release coincided with my purchase of a brandnew top of the line iMac–which currently runs slower than my old 2009 macbookpro. I can't help feeling jibbed right now.

Any E.T.A on an bug fix update?

 

Only what the rumor mill has said: Apple Seeds Two New Mavericks Updates to Employees for Testing.

Can't wait

Thanks.

It has been rumored that the evaluations and user recommended pre-release fixes were not implemented in the this final release version of Mavericks.

Me thinks knows your rumors to be false.

There are thousands of "fixes" recommended. Not many are implemented.

The two major issues on this forum, WD's software and Gmail's crappy IMAP implementation, were never an issue to my knowledge.

Barney-15E wrote:

 

It has been rumored that the evaluations and user recommended pre-release fixes were not implemented in the this final release version of Mavericks.

Me thinks knows your rumors to be false.

 

There are thousands of "fixes" recommended. Not many are implemented.

The two major issues on this forum, WD's software and Gmail's crappy IMAP implementation, were never an issue to my knowledge.

Barney,

While I'm no expert, just a simple user, it seems clear to me that the nature of the issues of THIS TOPIC (the whole forum would be ridiculous to sum up in a few words) includes the OS, the native apps supplied as part of it, in the Mavericks install.

Hope we realize that there are many aspects of this OS "Package" that are quite nice and improved over the previous (e.g., the unification of function with iOS iterations, the many new features I'm just discovering). That said, there are issues, at least in the upgrading to Mavericks. Many of us can't get past "go." Do you want to focus on those from a user's perspective or just continue the rant? Want to start a list? Feel free to contribute to this...

• Pull downs in Safari web pages like on the FedEx site or any other site that use scripted pulldowns- whether they are scripted in Jave or otherwise, the scripts that require the users' browser do the 'heavy lifting' or even in PHP where the server does it. All seem to have an issue in Safari getting the screen to update the first time (at least).
• Opening applications - watch them bounce, time them, or just wait. The first time an app opens is interminable. The second is pretty speedy. Something loads and saves it into memory. So memory mangement may be the issue. I'm not saying that background programs or other components that shouldn't be there are not a factor (as has been suggest in this topic by others), clearly they are, but this seems a newer, deeper problem for this OS and maybe caused by a new way of thinking about how apps load, one inherited from iOS, where memory management is much more critical.
• Delays in opening dialogs in Finder or in an app, or for a drop doen menu to appear? How long does it take to open a print dialog in an application? I tried to open a print dialog in Safari as an example. Interminable wait, spinning beachball.

By trimming the fat (old incompatible portions of the OS) improvments can and likely will be made, on a single user basis. However the fact that the delay is SO APPARENT to many us when upgrading should be a reason for reconsideration of migration issues, as well as overall OS performance. That seems ongoing at Apple and was where I was attempting to direct your attention.

As to what the users can do, I go back to my experience with a clean install of Mavericks, before I attempted to migrate my own data to the new OS. A clean install seemed to work much better than it does now, loaded down. So I have no doubt that the baggage of previous installs horribly affects this one. If there's an app or a method to put stuff back (migrate) one at a time or a group at a time from the backup, plus turning off a group of migrated apps if problems are revealed in testing the MIGRATION, that would certainly be a welcome TECHNIQUE to use (hint, hint!).

There are a lot of folks out there who might be willing to support a nicer migration method that would leverage the power of Mavericks into a cleaner upgrade. I know I could use the help. So maybe this topic should be... "Is Your Stuff making Mavericks run slow?"

If I could successfully use MA from my previous install group-wise or some other way to test/weed out/migrate 'safe' apps and data, I would certainly do it. C'mon devs, step up! If you guys want to direct this thread otherwise, then I'll move on. I'm not the author of the thread so I yield to him/her.

Message was edited by: HenryS

I have no idea why anybody has issues with slowness on this OS. I don't have a lot of crud on my Mac.

I don't need a little meter in my menu bar telling me when its hot, cold, wet, or dry.

I don't need the color of the Dock to change.

I don't need colored icons in the sidebar.

I don't install any software provided by a peripheral device manufacturer (except the bundled printer drivers).

I don't get my internet from my USB port--that's for keyboards and mice, not ethernet comm.

I don't use a mouse and keyboard that requres a kernel extension to run--yeah, that may be one fabulous keyboard, but if you can't make it work without wedging yourself into the kernel...

I'm not an audio engineer, so I don't have lots of MIDI devices and the software to support them.

I have learned over the years that there is not a single "maintenance" program that should be used--most shouldn't be used ever. Some have some good one-click routines to solve individual problems, but I haven't used one since Leopard.

I'm not a heavy email user. I've got several accounts, but none are life-critical or profession-critical.

I don't need to easily update my "status" as I have no status to update.

While my account is somewhat spartan, my wife has an enormous iPhoto and iMovie Library. We're close to filling a 1TB startup drive, and I've got almost 3TB of movies on externals, and they are backed up on various drives.

I never install anything unless I know how to uninstall it. If it doesn't come with an uninstaller (for those that need an installer) or simple to follow instructions, then I don't install it in the first place. Way back in the early days of both Mac and Windows, software developers felt they needed to provide a unique operating experience for their customers. That wasn't The Macintosh Way. If a piece of software didn't use the built-in UI, I (and apparently many others) didn't buy the software. Why developers feel they need to "roll their own" UI baffles me. I understand there may be some unique piece of software that requires it, but it ought to be rare.

I don't remember if it is on this thread, but I have seen posts where the kernel_task is using upwards of 4GB of memory. That makes no sense for any OS, yet people believe it is normal and blame it solely on Mavericks, like Apple put out an OS that uses twice as much RAM as the recommended minimum.

I realize not everyone cares (or needs to care) about that. However, a computer is not a toaster. You don't just stick in a slice of bread and push down the lever. However, much like a standard toaster, you can't put in a piece of bread with the jelly already larded on. You can't add lox to your bagel until it pops out. If you do that, it won't work very well in the future.

While it may look bad here in the trenches, there really isn't that much going wrong for most people. I'll throw in the slowness thing and we have three major issues affecting a very small subset of the user base. Mavericks is being installed at a faster rate than previously seen. If the problems were soleley due to the OS, there would be a lot more individuals posting here with problems. I am certain the changes to the OS are part of the problem, but it's going to take the third-party developers to address the changes that affected their software. So, waiting for a "patch" from Apple isn't a logical solution to any of these problems. However, it may work out because by the time Apple releases 10.9.1 or .2, the third-party software may also get updated. On the other hand, if your Mac is mission/life-critical, and you don't have the time to tinker, then you should revert back and wait.

The bottom line is we can only offer suggestions on where to look for trouble. Without experiencing it first-hand, we can only guess at what is causing the problem and at what to do to try to alleviate it. A lot of that guessing is enhanced by seeing how things have affected the OS in the past, as reported here, and in our own personal experience. There isn't a "magic" command we can suggest that will repair the problem. However, sometimes, just reinstalling over the current install will fix some things. Even if we isolate a "problem child" and remove it, it may have caused enough damage that a re-install is necessary.

For what it's worth, here is the my output from EtreCheck. I just restarted last night to get iTunes to not forget my iPhone, so there is not much going on memory-wise.

Hardware Information:

          Mac mini - model: Macmini6,2

          1 2.3 GHz Intel Core i7 CPU: 4 cores

          16 GB RAM

Video Information:

          Intel HD Graphics 4000 - VRAM: 1024 MB

Startup Items:

          MySQLCOM - Path: /Library/StartupItems/MySQLCOM

          VirtualBox - Path: /Library/StartupItems/VirtualBox

System Software:

          OS X 10.9 (13A603) - Uptime: 0 days 10:15

Disk Information:

          APPLE HDD HTS541010A9E662 disk0 : (1 TB)

                    EFI (disk0s1) <not mounted>: 209.7 MB

                    Macintosh HD (disk0s2) /: 999.35 GB (79.12 GB free)

                    Recovery HD (disk0s3) <not mounted>: 650 MB

USB Information:

          EFI (disk6s1) <not mounted>: 209.7 MB

          Delorean 1 (disk6s2) /Volumes/Delorean 1: 999.86 GB (49.7 GB free)

          EFI (disk4s1) <not mounted>: 209.7 MB

          Video 2 (disk4s2) /Volumes/Video 2: 2 TB (1.6 TB free)

          BarneyGo (disk3s1) /Volumes/BarneyGo: 500.11 GB (293.24 GB free)

FireWire Information:

          Apple Computer, Inc. iSight 200mbit - 400mbit max

          Seagate Backup+ Desk Mac 800mbit - 800mbit max

                    disk2s1 (disk2s1) <not mounted>: 209.7 MB

                    Video Backup (disk2s2) /Volumes/Video Backup: 3 TB (607.65 GB free)

          Seagate GoFlex Desk Mac 800mbit - 800mbit max

                    EFI (disk1s1) <not mounted>: 209.7 MB

                    Video (disk1s2) /Volumes/Video: 2 TB (13.16 GB free)

          PI-367 USB2.0 & 1394 & eSATA combo Drive 800mbit - 800mbit max

                    EFI (disk5s1) <not mounted>: 209.7 MB

                    DeLorean (disk5s2) /Volumes/DeLorean: 3 TB (565.68 GB free)

Kernel Extensions:

          org.virtualbox.kext.VBoxDrv          Version: 4.2.18

          org.virtualbox.kext.VBoxUSB          Version: 4.2.18

Problem System Launch Daemons:

Problem System Launch Agents:

Launch Daemons:

                 [loaded] com.adobe.fpsaud.plist

                 [loaded] com.barebones.authd.plist

                 [loaded] com.barebones.textwrangler.plist

                 [loaded] com.bombich.ccc.plist

                 [loaded] com.bombich.ccc.scheduledtask.9C5D17DD-1161-46AB-8647-D821BBBC4724.plist

                 [loaded] com.bombich.ccc.scheduledtask.E5CD5CC7-1DD7-41CC-88FA-B41172639B6F.plist

                 [loaded] com.microsoft.office.licensing.helper.plist

                 [loaded] org.macosforge.xquartz.privileged_startx.plist

Launch Agents:

                 [loaded] org.macosforge.xquartz.startx.plist

User Launch Agents:

                 [loaded] com.adobe.ARM.202f4087f2bbde52e3ac2df389f53a4f123223c9cc56a8fd83a6f7ae.plist

                 [loaded] com.bombich.ccc-user-agent.plist

                 [loaded] com.google.keystone.agent.plist

                 [loaded] com.valvesoftware.steamclean.plist

                 [loaded] org.blacktree.quicksilver.plist

             [not loaded] org.virtualbox.vboxwebsrv.plist

User Login Items:

          Quicksilver

          VirtualBox Menulet

          Dropbox

          MicrosoftKeyboardHelper

          MicrosoftMouseHelper

3rd Party Preference Panes:

          Flash Player

          Flip4Mac WMV

          MySQL

          Perian

          Secrets

Internet Plug-ins:

          Default Browser.plugin

          Flash Player.plugin

          FlashPlayer-10.6.plugin

          Flip4Mac WMV Plugin.plugin

          GarminGpsControl.plugin

          iPhotoPhotocast.plugin

          OfficeLiveBrowserPlugin.plugin

          QuickTime Plugin.plugin

          SharePointBrowserPlugin.plugin

          Silverlight.plugin

User Internet Plug-ins:

Bad Fonts:

          None

Top Processes by CPU:

               3%          WindowServer

               2%          EtreCheck

               0%          hidd

               0%          softwareupdated

Top Processes by Memory:

          328 MB          mds_stores

          262 MB          Xcode

          229 MB          iTunes

          180 MB          Safari

          180 MB          com.apple.IconServicesAgent

          164 MB          softwareupdated

          147 MB          WindowServer

          115 MB          storeagent

          98 MB          installd

          98 MB          Maps