Q: Is Mavericks making your machine run slow?

Hi, For what it's worth I will tell you my experiences. I have a 2009 iMac 27" and a 2011 MB air 13".

After upgrading to mavericks the MB air was fine! no problems at all. The iMac however was painfully slow at everything.

I read this post and tried everything here and sometimes I would think there was a slight improvement and other times there was no difference.

I tried a clean install and then restored from a time machine backup. Still running slow.

So as a last resort I reformatted my drive, installed mavericks and then added my software one at a time back on to my machine. A slow process but it also emptied my machine of software I no longer use.

The result, the machine is now working absolutely fine, running as fast sat ever did.

It took a long time for me to make the decision to do this, but was well worth it.

Good luck.

I had to do a similar process. Takes a while... Worth it! Especially on older machines with older iterations of software, upgraded over the years with prior simpler upgrades overwriting previous versions. There are some tool you could have used to predict and/or weed out defective content, but that is over the bridge for you now. Probably the method of upgrade that you chose is the best overall choice. I made the same one in the case of most of my machines, except the iMac 2013, of course. It was recent so  it came from a clean install of ML to Mavericks.

Good Luck, Merry Christmas

OS Mavericks totally slowed down my Mac mini 2.5GHz i5 with 8 gb RAM, it seems like running a Windows XP on a very old PC, such a downer... Tried everything that seemed reasonable: checked at all forum posts and google.

Really don't know what to do! Probably I'll have to backup everything and uninstall the OS, and try a clean install.

If it still don't work, i'll have to find a way to downgrade to an older version... :/

PauloRMV wrote:

 

Really don't know what to do!

Start a new Discussion rather than reply to one that Brian Campbell3 solved over two months ago.

Hi , I had taken in all and went to apple store Geni bar , they did a thorough test . And found nothing wrong ? and so did a clean install . Mavericks runs fine and at last I have an iMac that runs very smooth . Gone are the long boring balls of death , speed is good , and doing rendering at an expected rate of time . All I can say for my iMac is the download of OS X 10.8.3 was screwed up and an update for Aperture 3.4. Happy to report , and hope you guys that are suffering can get yours sorted to . I did , install the 10.9.1 through the download and again ok, with ball of death only lasting 1-3 seconds and not 10- 30 mins .

Good luck to others and a happy new year . .

did you do a check disk to make sure your main partition is active and healthy?

What do you mean by a clean install?

A clean install is to erase a disk and then install an OS to it.

Command-R to the rescue, indeed!!!

Thanks for this suggestion! I installed Mavericks on my old-ish iMac a few months ago and had been cursing the OS (and myself) ever since. It made my computer virtually unusable, since the machine spent most of its time showing me the spinning beachball, especially during processor-intensive tasks such as pulling down the File menu.

Restarts, program updates, turning off indexing, trying to minimize the number of processes running at once… nothing seemed to help at all. Even say, opening "Mail" and checking a single mail account took about ten minutes.

Then I restarted in Recovery Mode and ran Disk Utility from there (I had already run it multiple times in the usual fashion, of course). Five or ten minutes later, I had a usable computer again. Mavericks doesn't even seem significantly slower on my machine than Mountain Lion used to be.

I updated my OS to Maverick (iMAC, midd 2011, 4G RAM). The imac performances (speed) were considerably down. It was horribly slow.

I justed upgrade my RAM to 12G and now imac is very fast (back to business). When I checked the activity monitor, I found that all OS and apps are using 4.7G of RAM that's why it was slow with 4G RAM. However my imac was pretty fast before the upgrade so it looks that maverick is consuming a lot of RAM.

I think if you notice a considerable decrease in your apple computer performances after the upgrade, that's mean that you are running out of RAM, you have to upgrade it too !

Apple should let users know about this issue before the upgrade and let users know that computer performances can considerably be reduced or at least they should recommend 8G of RAM! For sure some will say that this is because you are running other applications but the fact is that before the upgrade my imac was pretty fast and after the upgrade it was slow (I did not change anything)!

I hope that it helps!

How do I do any of these things you mentioned?  My computer is so slow!

bigtreble wrote:

 

How do I do any of these things you mentioned?  My computer is so slow!

Start by upgrading to 10.9.2 and see what that does for you.

I have an Early 2010 MBP.  When I installed Mavericks I had all kinds of problems.  This was one of them.  It is either a cache problem, a spotlight problem, or an update problem. 

1. Cache.  When you upgrade to mavericks or restore from backup after mavericks install alot of the cache files do not match up.  Clear all of the caches system wide.  If you do not know how to do this, go to the mac app store and download Disk Diag.  Install and run it.  It will advise you of what files you can get rid of.  Save what you want to save ( pictures, photos, downloads, etc.) but make sure you let it clear all of your caches.  Things should run faster, but you will have to re-enter most of your passwords.  Make sure that you write them all down.

2. Spotlight.  Spotlight is a pain in my....... well you get the picture.  Spotlight is a program to index your mac so that you can search for files easily.  It indexes your mac every time you start up your machine.  It makes every thing run slow and choppy until it is done.   I for one know where I put my files.  I guess some people need help searching for things.  But most people that own a mac have a basic knowledge of the file tree and can find what they want in a finder window.  So here is how you speed up the Spotlight problem.  First off.  DO NOT ATTEMPT TO DELETE OR UNINSTALL SPOTLIGHT.  Spotlight works with the App Store and Apple to deliver important updates.  So don't get brave and think you can just delete it.  It causes more problems than its worth.  What you can do is to adjust the Spotlight preferences.  Go to the system preferences.  In the top row click Spotlight.  You will see a list of places for spotlight to search.  Uncheck everything.  Seriously, Uncheck everything.  Spotlight will still index your mac when you start up, But it will not take near as long as before.  A minute tops. 

3. The never ending update.  This will seriously slow down your mac.  I explained how to stop the never ending update in another thread, but it can be quite confusing.  It is easy to tell if you have an update problem.  Go into the App Store and click Check for updates. Attempt to do the updates first.  If the updates finish and restart, you have a problem.  If you have updates in your Application folder or Launchpad that will not download all of the way, you have a problem.  The Mavericks OS has a slightly different file tree.  So some things dont match up during updates.  You can successfully update an application and then the system continues to update the same app over and over.  Why?  Cause the source of the update is the outdated application.  When the app updates it installs the new updated app in a different place then the original app.  So good ol' Spotlight detects the old outdated app and downloads the update and installs it again and again and again.  I am going to try to describe how to get rid of this problem as best as i can with parts of my posts from another thread. 

I was plagued with iPhoto, iMovie, iWork, and a few third party apps that kept updating over and over and over. 

• 1. First thing. Skip this if you do not have any of the iWork components ( Pages, Numbers, Keynote).  Attempt to update 1 full time through the App Store. Once the update is complete if it starts again do this.
• Go to the system preferences. 
• Click spotlight in the first row. 
• Click the privacy button at the top. 
• Click the + plus button.   
• Select the Applications folder. 
• In the Application folder select the iWork folder.
• Click the Choose button on the bottom right of the window. 
• This will take away the iWork updates, but not fix the problems. 
• Next go to your Application folder in the finder.  You will see an iWork folder.  Normally your iWork programs are contained in an iWork folder in the Applications folder.  These files are the problem.
• Mavericks installs the new iWork programs directly into the Applications folder. 
• Just find these files and drag them into the iWork folder.  Over write the old files. 
• Go back to the system preferences. 
• Click Spotlight. 
• Click privacy. 
• Select the iWork folder.
• Click the - minus button.

2.  You will most definately have this problem. 

• Next go to the system preferences. 
• Fourth row down.  Click App Store. 
• Unchecked everything.  This will stop the horrible update loop for all of the other programs.
• Open iPhoto and iMovie individually from the applications folder.
• They will update when you start them up.
• Any other Applications that were stuck in a loop now need to be deleted. You must also delete the incomplete update files.  They will be either in the Applications folder or your Launchpad.  They will have a download status bar under them.
• Recheck all of the App store preferences except Automatically download apps purchased on other Macs.
• Reopen the App Store and check for updates.  
• You can reinstall any apps you had to delete from the App Store as long as they are compatible with Mavericks.

I Hope this helps. 

I have an iMac mid 2011 27", I made a jump from Snow Leo to Maverick, did a clean install, on an erased (0s) drive, with 12Gb of RAM. The only thing was that I made a migration of my previous user stuff. Maybe it is that, but what a difference... the performance and speed drop by 50%. It is slow like an old PC. I will have to start from scratch, and reinstall all my softwares, etc... I try everything, cleaning cache, permissions, etc., etc., etc.

Don't know which older Mac you're using for your Mavericks OSX. But on my Macbook 2009 it would take literally around a Minute and a Half to boot up Mavericks on a normal Hard-drive. When I installed an SSD Harddrive it took only 28-30 seconds to boot up my Macbook. However shut down time is a bit slow on Mavericks and I don't know why. It takes about 10 seconds for Mavericks to fully shut down... While on Snow Leopard on my Macbook 2009 it took like 2 or 3 seconds to shut down(almost immediately).

Macbook specs: Macbook white 2009 mid 2.13ghz with 4 gigs of ddr2 ram.