Q: Is Mavericks making your machine run slow?

I understand, William, but normally my permissions repair experience seems to be a very reliable average of no more than five minutes. This, other method, however, did not complete after nearly an hour. As I said, when I have time ( probably today) I'll rerty and lea ve the coomputer on overnight. If it hasn't succedd then, I'll be a little puzzled!

Many thanks for your contribution.

My machine is the latest iMac, i7, with 32 GB of RAM, so, it's pretty much as good as it gets, in iMac terms.

William H. Magill1 wrote:

 

@michaelvee Keep in mind -- Repair permissions is HORRIBLE in estimating time to completion. Always has been.

 

The time it will take to accomplish its taks is dependent upon two things -- the size of the disk you are scanning and the number of files being scanned.

 

My      iMac (27-inch, Mid 2010)

          iMac - model: iMac11,3

          1 2.93 GHz Intel Core i7 CPU: 4 cores

          8 GB RAM

 

Repair permissions starts at less than a minute and increases over the next 15 minutes to 4 minutes remaining; until it finally completes.

I found another thing that may be causing your system to appear to run slowly, esp. when opening Apple branded apps. In my case, after migration I had bad performance in Preview when opening files (pretty much any file). I found the support file,

/Users/your_user_name/Library/Preferences/Application Support/Preview/TrustedBookmarks.plist
to be causing the issue. I deleted the file because the calls inside the file were outdated and probably the reason for the long startup of the app. I can always recreate the bookmarks if needed. Thereafter the app opened just fine.

So, I retried your suggestion, MM. I left the iMac overnight to see what happened. Unfortunately, nothing. In the morning the DONE button was still greyed out. I was rather surprised, not to say disappointed.  This leaves me with two quesions: why? And: is there something wrong with my computer / OS?

Anyway, thought people might want to hear of this.....

Many thanks.

Interestingly, my version og Mavericks -- upgraded from a whiped disk install of Mountain Lion -- contains no such folder -- ~/Library/Preferences/Application Support." -- which is another way of saying "Preferences/Application Support" is a clear artifact of the past.

The current "Apple way" - is" com.apple.Preview.<...>"

    .plist

    .plist.lockfile

    .com.apple.Preview.SandboxedPersistentURLs.LSSharedFileList.plist

    .com.apple.com.apple.Preview.SandboxedPersistentURLs.LSSharedFileList.plist.loc kfile

I should add that the level above does contain Application Support

~/Library/Application Support/

Sorry. William, you're right. Don't know what I was looking at... It was previously at:

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.preview.plist

I deleted just that one file and that's all. It was NOT recreated in place on starting the app again, rather in a DIFFERENT spot. No reboot or anything else.

The file was recreated in a different place by the system when restarting the app:

     ~/Library/Containers/Preview/com.apple.preview/Data/Library/Preferences/com.appl e.preview.plist

Maybe someone smarter than I can explain why, but that is where the current version exists (and nowhere else anymore), FWIW. As to what is the "Apple way," I guess I'll wait for official clarification. That's what works for me and just passing it on as it may help others sort out why apps run slowly after a migration. The only other similar existing file currently in that /Containers/ location is the one ending in ".plist.lockfile"

The old .lockfile is perhaps redundant as well or maybe it is what caused the relocation?

My iMac is a Late 2012 model - the newest available when I bought it, only a month before Mavericks came out. I found Mavericks very slow. I am an experienced troubleshooter and tried everything to make it run at a decent speed. No go. Even in Safe Mode... computer startup time, login time, logout time, app launch time, Open & Save box generation time... I lost count of the number of things that were sluggish. I have not experienced anything like it since I installed Tiger on an iBook with 256MB RAM. That was a shocking slowdown from the previous Panther system, but was cured by adding more RAM. It's not possible to add more RAM to this iMac without prising the glued glass screen off it, and anyway 8GB should be plenty according to spec.

This issue, granted, has not affected everyone, but here I am with a bran-new Mac, lots of experience, a set of software which is tried and trusted in Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion, no "crud" - and I too got to the point where I risked breaking my desk with my fist.

I've just gone through the long process of Time Machine restoring the entire hard disk as it was when I last had Mountain Lion, then carefully restoring my stuff from the last Mavericks backup, and it is running like a dream.

So please, all those who are blaming people's "crud" or advising permissions repair, waiting for Spotlight indexing, focusing on Gmail or Chrome etc. etc. - that isn't it. Mavericks has a severe system-wide problem which is crippling performance of *all* apps for a substantial minority of users, and as far as I can see nobody has found the cause yet. But I would not be surprised if it were the fault of bugs in the new low-level memory and CPU optimisation routines, which despite being "invisible" have been a big change to the underlying OS.

Agreed.  Something like the widespread problems with the flash Safari plugin should have been caught by the QC process and some kind of workaround or at least warning provided.  My sense is that this OS didn't get sufficient testing prior to rollout.  The Windows world is used to caveat emptor with the user being responsible for getting everything to work but the Apple experience is supposed to be "it just works".  I've been using Apple products for a couple decades and this is the most trouble I've ever had with an OS upgrade.

Then why are only a few seeing these issues and not everyone?

Pete

I don't know. All I know is that it is not old/damaged systems that are responsible, because I know how to tell whether one of those problems is present and how to eliminate them, and there is still an unknown problem after fixing them. I have used every solution mentioned in all the forums I can foind, and others.

I have to agree with Steve Rogers. Mavericks seems to have this unpredictable, inconsistent agenda, that makes it work for some peoepl ,and not others. I've have problems, too, but not as bad as some. However, there is a dramatic downturn in the performance of Apple's own Apps. My concerne is can it be fixed with a future update?  aslk that becasue I'm aware that this is an OS with a different architecture to ML,etc. Can Apple unreval, so to speak, the issue ( s ), and iron out these mysterious problems. I say mysterious, becasue it's clear, rom reading many posts, that no matter how epstert the poster appears to be, there is no clear silution, as in the "old days."

In my case, it's certainly not for the lack of RAM ! My iMac was perfroming as sweet as the proverbial nut, until I foolishly installed M.

Do remember that Mavericks has been out for barely a month. Apple always release updates when required. 10.9.1 has been seeded to developers already. We wil just have to wait and see if it addresses the issues that some appear to be having.

Cheers

Pete

Of course, you're absolutely right, Pete. It's not the first time that I would have upgraded, wondering why certain issues appear without them being present in a previous OS. I'm banking on Apple coming up with the goods! It's just that I've not recalled so many people complaining before.....

I guess this is the transition to a coherent OS for both computer and mobile device. That's always going to be tricky

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. Always has and always will.

Cheers

Pete

Lol, I'm not in the habit of avidly reading all the posts, but I will say that Appple is still my favourite fruit.

Your's right about the release of new OS's, of course. It's the way of things.