Q: OS X Mavericks - Awful Performance

Mavericks ran decent on my computer i5 Quad Core, 4 gigs of ram but I switched back to Lion because the Dock is eye sicking in Mavericks. But Lion software loads a lot faster for me. I get better performance then I did with mavericks.

P.S. The main reason why I switched back to Lion was because of the dock. I cannot stand the glassy dock, and the 2d dock command doesn't work on Mavericks for some odd reason. So I plan on staying on Lion until Mavericks is completely done.

I'm the opposite. I could not stand the do k in Lion and was very pleased to see they changed it to something decent in Mavericks.

Cheers

Pete

I found 10.9.2 to have much better performance then any versions of Mavericks, Mountain Lion or Lion that I have run.

I especially noticed a significant performance increase in Aperture with reduced RAM usage.

I guess we each notice different things on our computers. Personally I never noticed much of a change with the Dock. Certainly not enough to even consider downgrade OS X because of it anyway.

Allan

I'm finding Mavericks to be a terrible upgrade! I previously ran Snow Leopard and reluctantly upgraded. Luckily I installed a brand new HDD to test out mavericks and i find to be much slower for browsing the internet. I'm not even doing any instensive tasks I just have a bout 10 tabs open and one the the USP's at the time was memory performance in mavericks. I'll be using Snow leopard day to day until the updates fix this problem.

Mac mini Early 2009

Processor  2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

Memory  8 GB 1067 MHz DDR3

Graphics  NVIDIA GeForce 9400 256 MB

Software  OS X 10.9.1 (13B42)

There are no fixes needed. Either you have failing hardware or incompatable third party software. Coming from SL to Mavericks I would be strongly leaning towards the latter. No issues here with Mavericks. All our Macs are flying faster than ever.

Pete

As anticipated, our Macbook Pro's performance was great for about a week, and then it rapidly degraded. Turning Airport off and then back on once again solved the problem. Bear in the mind, the performance problems that arise are not network related. It's the mere fact that airport has been running for about a week that clobbers the systems performance.

I too was experiencing poor performance with 10.9.  Upgrading to 10.9.2 seems to greatly improve performance for my older MacMini.

I gotta chime in here. First, Apple refusing to LISTEN to the public caused me to chunk my iPhone 5 in favor of a Nexus 5, as Apple refused to increase the screen size. Now, I am considering getting rid of both my MacBook Pros (One new retina and one slightly older model) after the release of Mavericks. Here is a short list of the problems I have seen WITH FRESH INSTALLS AND ABSOLUTELY NO THIRD PARTY SOFTWARE INSTALLED:

(1) I download something from the internet, a file. Then I close the app used to download the file. If I try to delete the downloaded file with finder (finder is crap), I cannot because I am told the the file is locked by another app. WHAT APP? This never happened with Mountain Lion.

(2) Let's say that I rename that downloaded file; not a problem, it gets renamed. I still cannot delete it. Now if I try to copy it locally, it works. If I try to copy it with finder over SMB it fails again; file locked by another app. WHAT APP. Again, this never happened with Mountain Lion.

(3) I use screen sharing quite a bit. Discovered it using Mountain Lion. Now under Mavericks, when I screen share, application scrolling freezes all the time. It will work then it will not. I am forced to restart screen sharing.

My Windows friends have always told me two things. One, never buy a laptop that has no choice other then to sleep when you close the lid, and two never put a GUI on top of UNIX. Not sure about them being right but I just ordered a Lenovo W540 with 32G of RAM. Another gripe of mine is why are we limited to 16G on MacBooks?

I am done with Apple. By the way I am a UNIX Architect with almost 30 years of UNIX/Linux experience. Good thing because mostly I despise finder and move to the command line on OSX. I will not completely abandon my Apple products, but until they become totally obsolete, like all laptops do, they will run Mountain Lion.

You have one seriously messed up Mavericks install, dude. Otherwise every other user would be seeing this. The many, many millions of them. Can't say I have seen more than a few. You should troubleshoot your issues. Even turning to Windows in desperation will not cure ill-informed software practices. But you are welcome to try.

Cheers

Pete

Stephen,

You're absolutely right. Or, at the very least, you have the solution that worked for me.

I was experiencing similarly dramatic lag-times as most everyone else in this forum. Then I took your advice and turned off WiFi and then turned it on again. Boom. Smooth as silk. No spinning beach balls. No pauses. Not a hitch.

I'm running a Mid-2011 Mac Mini with 2GB of RAM. I thought the poor little thing was trash (especially with so little RAM) now that I had upgraded to Mavericks. Now it roars after flipping the WiFi off and on.

My hat's off to you, Stephen. You saved my Mac Mini. You also saved me from shelling out a bunch of cash for new hardware in an attempt to fix a problem that--it turns out--is systemic with this version of OS X.

I'm sure Apple will soon release an update. No worries. I toggled my WiFi. Don't think I won't do it again.

Wasabi

Just toggled  my wifi eight times.,there was no noticeable difference to anything. What should I be looking for?

Here are a few details:

When I initially upgraded to Mavericks it was slow. I was disappointed but gritted it out for awhile. Then my roommate told me he had found the upgrade process to be the sticking point. He had used a USB drive (needs to be 8GB or larger) to wipe the drive and re-install Mavericks. This had resolved all his issues. So I followed suit.

I bought a 32GB USB drive, prepped it as a Mavericks installer, pushed all my data to the Cloud, wiped my entire hard drive, and re-installed Mavericks. A noticeable improvement. But not the same result as my roommate.

Still sluggish. So I started searching websites, blogs, and forums for the answer. Skimming through the angry comments, I read about Stephen's experience, toggled the WiFi, and am cruising along.

This may not be the right path for everyone. I just know it worked for me.

Wasabi

No. Sorry. No relevance to my five Macs. All flying along well after initial l

Install and update. But thanks anyway.

Pete

I may have been misunderstood.

I'm not implying that it happens everytime I toggle the WiFi. The sluggishness disappeared after the first time I toggled it off and then on again. It hasn't come back.

Or you are still just a happy mac fan hooting for an OS that truly ***** and has many unhappy users, try doing a simple search on Google.

I have been in level 2 support communication with Apple since my original post, no sucess, my MacBook Pro still has serious performance issues under Maverick, even with the latest update to 10.9.2.

Mail still writes thousands of changes to disk, then sometimes it just stops getting new mail, applications looses settings etc. etc.

I have been trying many suggestions in these various blogs, no success.

Apple has simply released a non finished product on the market, so nothing that is "free" is truly free.