OS X Mavericks - Awful Performance

Patience may be a virtue. Spotlight is probably reindexing your Mac.

I would investigate all your drivers and apps to insure

that they are up to date and compatible with Mavericks.

Also, check and see what you have as far as start up items

and disable any to see if there is an improvement. Also,

try rebooting in safe mode. This will disable any non-apple

items and also clear caches and various other flotsam

that may have accumulated over time.

Another thing, try a repair permissions in Disk Utility.

FWIW, I have upgraded on a 2011 Mini, 2.0 GHz quad core i7

with 16GB of RAM and all seems well, as a matter fact a little

snappier.

So, something is amiss with your setup and the culprit needs to

be found.

I have a relatively vanilla Mac Pro (2008). OS Mavericks loaded fine (took about 2 hours), but the computer is now running a good bit slower. I would say starting an app takes about 40 seconds rather than the 20 seconds it took with OS 10.8.

My mac mini is running a lot slower with mavericks. It's painful...that beachball with every single thing I do.

make a clean install

My macbook pro 15 ssd 8gb early 2012..have same problems, with maverick is slow

It's on 4 macs and all running much faster

MacBook Air is much faster , faster boot time . amazing performance

My MBP Mid 2010 it's running horribly slower since I upgraded to Mavericks (yesterday I did a clean install but it didn't solve anything). I can't play games that in Mountain Lion worked well and I can't run any graphics application without a high CPU consume...

Check the console to see if there is something running that is zapping the response time. Run disk permissions from the recovery mode and check to see if spotlight is running. This may slow things down a bit while making the initial index.

I'm starting day 3 with Mavericks and it is running smoothly now. Initially, many of my apps were slow starting, but now all seem to be running and starting as they should.

mine is still running slow, and I'm indexed.

Same, 13" 2013 MBA - beachball everywhere I go, massive lagtime when using keyboard shortcuts in finder. Preview and Quicktime both hang requiring force quit. Its not indexing and I'm not running anything other than standard apps which are up to date. Very frustrated.

This User Tip should help you eiher restore your previous OS X verison or fresh install Mavericks which hopefully should resolve all issuesexcept hardware ones.

How to revert OS X back from Mavericks

My computer has also been super slow!

I got a notification saying the computer is "optimizing your mac." I closed the notification, but my computer has still been operating INCREDIBLY slow since I first upgraded to Mavericks when it came out Tuesday. Any time I open an application, or even a finder window, it takes a long time to process.

I've restarted my Mac several times since then, and made sure all applications were closed, but I don't know how or when my computer will return to normal (usable) speeds. I'll try a repair disk permissions and opening in safe mode, but it sounds like that didn't work for others?

I have a Late 2011 13" Macbook Pro with 8 GB Ram, 2.4 GHz Intel Core i5 and 20GB free HD space.

A properly operating Mac will perform better with Mavericks. I have Mavericks running on several iMacs, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air computers of various ages and configurations and they're all faster, so whatever is ailing yours ought to be fixable. Reports of incompatible third party programs and system modifications are common, as has always been the case with every OS X upgrade.

Back up your documents and everything else important to you, not that there is any reason to believe your hard disk may be failing, but the symptoms you describe may presage an impending disk failure, and you should have backups anyway. On occasion, an upgrade as extensive as Mavericks can reveal a hard disk on the verge of failure, so you must rule out hardware failures first.

To help determine the possible causes of this behaviour read the following. None of what follows is intended to fix anything, but it will provide the additional information required to advance troubleshooting:

Boot OS X Recovery by holding ⌘ and r (two fingers) while you start your Mac. At the Mac OS X Utilities screen, select Disk Utility. Select your startup volume (usually named "Macintosh HD") and click the Repair Disk button. Describe any errors it reports in red.

When it finishes restart your Mac and test again for operation. If it's still not behaving as you expect it should, please post the results of EtreCheck in accordance with the following instructions. EtreCheck will work with Snow Leopard and later OS X versions. If you are unable to run it, skip to the next section:

Apple Support Communities contributor etresoft wrote a very useful app to quickly gather certain system information that may help point to a cause of this problem. Go to his website, download and run EtreCheck:

http://www.etresoft.com/etrecheck

Etrecheck will be in your Downloads folder. Open it from there. You may see the following dialog box:

Click Open - etresoft contributes to this forum frequently and can be considered a trustworthy developer.

It will take a moment to run as it collects its data.

Copy and paste its output in a reply.

Do not be concerned about anything that says "Problem" or "failed".

EtreCheck was designed to remove any personal information (such as your computer's name and serial numbers) but if you see anything that looks like an email address or any other personal information that should not be divulged to others, please delete or obscure that information when you post the reply.

When you are finished with EtreCheck, quit the program. It occupies very little space, and you can keep it or drag it to the Trash as you wish.

After completing the above please determine if the prolbems also occur in "Safe Mode":

• Safe Mode or "Safe Boot" is a troubleshooting mode that bypasses all third party system extensions and loads only required system components. Read about it: Starting up in Safe Mode
• Starting your Mac in Safe Mode will take longer than usual, graphics will not render smoothly, audio is disabled on some Macs, and some programs (iTunes for example) may not work at all.
• Merely starting your Mac in Safe Mode is not intended to resolve the problem, it's to observe its performance without certain additional components.
• To end Safe Mode restart your Mac normally. Shutdown will take longer as well.

I've a Macbook Pro 15inch Mid 2010 with this specs:

Intel core i5(i5-520M) 2.4GHz

4GB 1066 MHz PC3-8500 DDR3 SDRAM by Samsung

GeForce 330M GT 256 MB / Intel HD Graphics

15.4" High definition glossy display (1680x1050)

256GB Samsung 830 SSD limited to SATA2 (TRIM enabled just like in ML without any third party apps)

I've done two clean installs since October 22 and Mavericks is running slow, i've seen people saying that their Macs, iMacs and Macbooks are so much faster than when running Montain Lion, Lion or even Snow Leopard.

So how can i fix this? its some kind of hardware incompatibility? remember this model had a faulty Logic board from factory causing graphical issues back in 2011 and almost all Mid 2010 had a Logic board replacement from Apple.

Can this be related?

I am running a 2013 iMac 27 fully loaded. The upgrade to Mavericks was as fast as can be expected. And the performance afterwards, is every bit as fast as it was before. I did not put a stopwatch on it before, so I can't tell you what it is later, but it is noticeably at least the same. The only negative thing I have seen so far, is that with a Magic Trackpad, swiping your fingers to go forward and back in a document is a bit more finicky that it was before.