OS X Mavericks - Awful Performance

MichelPM wrote:

With less the half a GB of free RAM, I am going to say that perhaps, depending on how many apps you run simultaneously while working in another app, that it appears your MBPis starved for RAM.

Plus, newer versions of OS X use a lot more computer hardware resources than earlier versions of OS X.

Your MBP year and model can take up to 16 GBs of RAM.

Correct and reliable Mac RAM can be purchased from online Mac RAM sources Crucial memory or OWC (macsales.com).

Good Luck!

I think you are including cached ram on the salad.

While there isn't much free ram you can see that the "wired" and "active" RAM usage are within healthy thresholds. The rest is used for file system cache and other functions. When an application needs that RAM the system should and will free it. A good operating system is always using all of its RAM.

And thats what happening since Activity monitor shows 0 swap usage.

At the time I've ran etrecheck I was using only Safari (less than 5 tabs), iTunes, Terminal and Mail.

Thanks for the help again.

When the index is corrupt, it will definitely hog the system.

I don't know of any other disk evaluation software. When I had a disk problem, disk utility and SMART didn't report anything until failure. I only eventually noticed the excessive disk access after wiping and restoring from Time Machine a second time.

The Apple Hardware Tests might have something that evaluates the drive more than DU.

BTW I just had another "iTunes hiccup".

11/3/13 21:00:54.565 com.apple.usbmuxd[26]: _heartbeat_failed heartbeat detected detach for device 0x2-fe80::1410:d2db:6107:d730:0!

Always with usbmuxd involved. Oh and hey thats a friggin ipv6 address? Guys there _is_ something fishy here.

Is it talking to your iPhone or iPad?

A iPhone 4 is connected through USB. Wifi sync is disabled.

4 GBs of RAM is NOT an optimal amount of RAM. Especially for the most recent OS X versions.

Both OS X Lion, Mountain Lion and, to a great extent, Mavericks utilize almost 4 GBs of RAM, for itself.

Apple only installs the minimum RAM needed for basic, acceptable operation of the Mac.

Apple leaves the end user to install enough RAM needed for more reliable and stable computer operation.

IF you are aware, that is why newer 2012 and 2013 model Macs now ship with 8 GBs of base installed RAM.

One of the issues you are, definitely, having is a lack of sufficient RAM resources.

How many and what kind of apps do you run simultaneously while working in another app?

This is another "tell" that more RAM is needed.

I don't think 4GB RAM is the root of the issue. I disagree with the statement that is not an optimal amount of RAM and according to http://www.apple.com/osx/specs/ the minimal requirements are 2GB of memory.

A memory upgrade is in order but I'm not convinced thats the problem. As you can see the swap is untouched and the new "memory pressure" indicator shows a steady value of 30% or less.

As for the usage I never use anything out of the ordinary. My work involves messing with ssh connections all the time through terminal and to a lesser extent Safari web browsing. I like to keep my Mac as pristine as possible even to the point of repudiating third party "plugins" such as Flash and Silverlight.

My company's webmail is barely useable because of the typing delay. Sometimes I can just go on typing for 10 seconds straight before seeing the letters appearing on the screen.

So did you ever run

http://www.etresoft.com/download/EtreCheck.zip?

And if so what were the results?

Cheers

Pete

Do you guys know a better way to test disk problems on OS X besides the smart status on system information? I've already fsck'd and repaired permissions a lot of times with no errors encountered.

Disk Warrior will report on the state of the catalog (& repair it). It is not clear if to me if it is also reporting on fragmentation too, it gives an abstract graph that highlights the 'out of orderness' of the data. Sorry its a bit amorphous, but it recovers disks really well.

http://alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/index.html

Disktester will evaluate performance & attempt to improve it.

http://diglloydtools.com/disktester.html

Ubuntu's Disk Utility has the option to do a speed test, but you need to have no partitions or data on the disk. You can run it from a live boot.

http://www.ubuntu.com/

I'm sure there must be a suite of open source tools, but I have yet to find it.

Do you have any antivirus software installed or have OS X's own software firewalls active?

Do you run any "crapware" like Mackeeper or any other type of "crapware" like so called hard drive "cleaning" apps?

I didn't see anything listed from Entrecheck, but need to double check as you are correct.

Do not see any excessive page in/outs, either.

petermac87 wrote:

So did you ever run

http://www.etresoft.com/download/EtreCheck.zip?

And if so what were the results?

Cheers

Pete

Right here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5471343?answerId=23653975022#23653975022

Also no crapware, no "active" antivirus (I have Clamxav installed from the App store but it does not have a real time mode so I use it to check suspicious files on demand), no funky daemons, no brew, no ports, no gems, no crapware, no ms office nothing. Also no virtual machine monitor installed.

OS X firewall is up with default settings. No third party firewalls installed.

I pride myself of having a very clean installation and I always do the dirty work on my older macs. This one is for working.

I'm going to max the memory to 16GB. I was planing to do this before but as I've said its probably not the issue here. Instead I hope it will help to aleviate the problem.

Apple did a very good work with the memory usage of applications such as iTunes and Safari and right now both stay under the 300MB mark.

Disk Warrior will report on the state of the catalog (& repair it). It is not clear if to me if it is also reporting on fragmentation too, it gives an abstract graph that highlights the 'out of orderness' of the data. Sorry its a bit amorphous, but it recovers disks really well.

http://alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/index.html

Disktester will evaluate performance & attempt to improve it.

http://diglloydtools.com/disktester.html

Ubuntu's Disk Utility has the option to do a speed test, but you need to have no partitions or data on the disk. You can run it from a live boot.

http://www.ubuntu.com/

I'm sure there must be a suite of open source tools, but I have yet to find it.

I'll look into it. I highly doubt its fragmentation since I've wiped everything, reinstalled and restored only iTunes and iPhoto libraries from TM.

There should be an internal command to query all the other SMART stats just as smartctl does.

ulzeraj wrote:

petermac87 wrote:

So did you ever run

http://www.etresoft.com/download/EtreCheck.zip?

And if so what were the results?

Cheers

Pete

Right here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5471343?answerId=23653975022#23653975022

If you look at the post I was replying to the Original Poster of this thread that you have hijacked for your own benefit, instead of starting one of your own!!!

Pete

Oh I am really sorry. You can say that I was adding to the chorus since we seem to share the same problem that is unexplicable slowness of the system.

Hardware Information:

MacBook Pro (13-inch, Late 2011)

MacBook Pro - model: MacBookPro8,1

1 2.4 GHz Intel Core i5 CPU: 2 cores

4 GB RAM

Disk Information:

TOSHIBA MK5065GSXF disk0 : (500.11 GB)

EFI (disk0s1) <not mounted>: 209.7 MB

Macintosh HD (disk0s2) /: 499.25 GB (424.02 GB free)

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

I too have a MBP 13" Early-2011 although it's a 2.7GHz i7 with 16GB RAM and a 256GB SSD. There are two areas that will substantially change the experience you get from your MBP with Mavericks…

1) RAM - 4GB IMHO no longer cuts it. You can see by your page outs that the memory manager is having to toss RAM contents to HDD. This will send system performance into the toilet. Upgrade your RAM to at least 8GB and you'll see a marked improvement.

2) HDD - the HDD in your MBP blows chunks. Before replacing my HDD (the same model as yours) with an SSD (Samsung SSD 840 EVO) the performance of the MBP with Mavericks was far from pleasing, or even acceptable, even with 16GB RAM. The HDD just seems to slow things down no end. If you swap the HDD out with either an SSD or an SSHD you'll get a big performance lift here too.

Basically, Mavericks pushes hardware in different and unexpected way (compared to Mt Lion and prior) and there are ways to overcome them with a small spend. Whether it's right or wrong with the decent hardware you have is another matter but it is what it is. I was rather surpised how much this MBP was dragged down by Mavericks but this has, for me at least, been overcome.

If you don't mind Linux there is also the cli tools hdparm (sequential speed), seeker (random read write), phoronix test suite (many system tests not just disk). Ubuntu should have most of them or they will be a sudo apt-get away.

Were you thinking of smartmontools? That has the smartctl command…

http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/