Laggy animations Mavericks

Top Priority is to be sure you have adequate Backups, as those symptoms could indicate your Boot Drive is failing.

Next, check the memory readouts:

Using Activity Monitor to read System Memory and determine how much RAM is being used

If you can screenshot that with Command-Shift-3, it will save the image you drag across to the desktop (by default) you can then post that screenshot in a reply on the forums with the little camera icon.

Or answer the questions:

How much total RAM memory?

How much is Free (Green)? How much is Free + Inactive (Green + Blue) ?

How many PageOuts??

Runaway applications can shorten battery runtime, affect performance, and increase heat and fan activity

Here are some ideas for why animations are may be slow:

• Competition for the Boot Drive --

If everything you are manipulating and all the System and Program information is on one drive, it can induce a "traffic jam" around that drive. The drive heads are sent all over the drive getting a little of this and a little of that, and everything slows down.

The easiest way to speed up a Mac Pro is to have the Boot Drive (with only System, Library, Applications, and the hidden unix files including Paging/Swap on one drive, and all User data on another drive. If the Boot drive is a low-latency SSD, that gives an even bigger improvement.

• A failing Boot Drive--

Disk data are recorded with an error correcting code that can fix a few bits in a burst. When a data block cannot be read on the first try, you may suffer up to 1,000 re-tries in an attempt to get correctable data. If it eventually does get correctable data, everything proceeds. If not, you get I/O error.

• Competing processes --

Web-based synchronization, such as iCloud photo sync or DropBox are notorious for using up bursts of compute cycles doing un-needed synchronization.. You may find you get better results if you shut those off while trying to run animations

always want a 2nd boot drive that you can run more than just ML Recovery Mode.

If the drive goes so too does the recovery partition

It could be bad sectors in the partiton table. ML does do two repairs now, clicking on raw drive name (WDxxx) and the user partition(s). The only way to repair a disk is booting from another partition, like Recovery, but another drive lets you run more utilities.

2GB RAM is not enough. DIMMs do fail. And while 8GB is enough, even Safari + iTunes + iPhoto and the system can eat up 7.8GB or more. I couldn't tell if your sort was for real memory, shared, virtual or not.

Safari - reset it. Boot it in safe mode. Delete all the history cache web previews, cached bookmarks. Maybe even move the safari preference folder aside for awhile. Or try a test user account.

Having Disk Utility create a sparse disk image of your system is handy. When you get it working.

I would replace the system disk drive. Go buy an SSD. Otherwise same price almost for hdd but zero it before using. A 3-way write erase is best way to deal with bad sectors on disk drives.

download carbon copy cloner and read the help instructions and settings so you can create a clone which is a bootable copy of your system.wwere you using Disk Warrior, that too should be run from hdd to repair, though have to say I stopped using it once I was using 10.6.8

Someone else mentioned it in a previous post:

try to run Autocad 2013, it's a technical drawing programme, you can find the trial software on the website of Autodesk. Somehow this has solved everything for me.

I have no idea why, but starting Autocad helped (I already had it installed).

I had the same thing work for me. Would really like to understand the underlying cause.