Mac slow after installing Maverick

OK...so update on my experience. I had updated from Mountain Lion and after the install...the mac was dead slow. Everywhere. Most noticable when opening a simple folder on the desktop. It would stall for 15 seconds, then give a spinning wheel, then open a blank folder, and 5-10 seconds later populate the folder. It was Awful. Anyways, first call to Apple Care...had me resetting PRAM, delete cache, a 45 MINUTE process. Did not do a thing to help it.

Ended up doing a time machine backup to be safe. Then did the Cmd R while powering up and doing a reinstall of Mavericks. It took about hour or two. It stuck on less than a minute for 30 minutes. Thought it had failed, then it finally rebooted. I am back and running, it is back to normal. I assume alot of people are dealing with this. Because I have nothing special on a fairly new imac. 28G of RAM. Something was definitely wrong with the first install, file structure problems I am guessing.

Anyways, painful but I am back.

For everyone complaining about 10.9 using all the RAM, take a look at this…

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/17/#compressed-memory

The memory management system changed so much in 10.9 that looking for free memory is a bad idea.

Free RAM is a wasted resource. If the OS can be predicative and store the files you use the most in RAM it will make the OS behave quicker.

For example you may open this website a few times a day, closing the Safari windows between sessions (or even quitting it). Holding the same images & css files in RAM is better than hitting Safari's disk cache. If you use memory cleaners you simply force the OS to hit the disk again or get it from the network.

The same is true for every app you use throughout the day.

The memory based 'file cache' is purged as more memory is needed, so it won't stop other tasks using it when they require it.

The one factor you should look for is 'swap used' (in Activity Monitor), if that figure grows beyond a few MB it may indicate you need more RAM (or do less tasks).

I don't deny you are all having issues, however take a look at the third party software via an EtreCheck report. Especially if you haven't clean installed the 10.9 or have accumulated years of installed & semi removed/ updated software. Migration Assistant brings over all the old apps, so they may still be running years old code inside the system.

http://www.etresoft.com/etrecheck

Also Safe mode can help to isolate the system from 3rd party extensions, can you reproduce the issue in a safe boot?

https://support.apple.com/kb/HT1455

Apple Hardware Test will also verify the installed RAM modules. See using Apple Hardware Test…

https://support.apple.com/kb/HT1509

Tresdigital wrote:

Hi Linc,

thanks for the help - my mid 2011 iMac has been quite slow at start up since installing mavericks, and i ran terminal as you mentioned above in step 1 and got the following text file:

--- last message repeated 50 times ---

Nov 9 11:50:56 Bens-iMac-6 kernel[0] <Debug>: disk2s1: I/O error.

Nov 9 11:51:26 Bens-iMac-6 kernel[0] <Debug>: disk2s2: I/O error.

--- last message repeated 147 times ---

Nov 9 18:02:02 Bens-iMac-6 kernel[0] <Debug>: disk2s1: I/O error.

Nov 9 18:04:02 Bens-iMac-6 kernel[0] <Debug>: disk2s2: I/O error.

--- last message repeated 86 times ---

Nov 9 21:40:36 Bens-iMac-6 kernel[0] <Debug>: disk2s1: I/O error.

Nov 9 21:42:36 Bens-iMac-6 kernel[0] <Debug>: disk2s2: I/O error.

--- last message repeated 56 times ---

A problem with my disks it seems. I'm also not sure if this has something to do with the fact i had the logic board replaced last week (probably has!).

Thanks again for your help 🙂

Tresdigital,

That looks like the disk is having serious issues. I'd suggest a backup followed by a boot into recovery mode & use Disk Utility to verify & repair the HD.

I don't think it is related to this topic, so maybe open a new thread that uses the messages you are seeing in the title.

Thanks Drew Reece,

You are absolutely right about it being normal for RAM to be fully used in Mavericks. But not everyone at Apple seems to know this. On Friday I called Apple and spoke with someone about this issue. The employee there wasn't even aware that the new Mavericks was supposed to use all of the RAM. He was as surprised as me. But about 15 minutes more of research after I got off the phone showed me that this is normal for Mavericks. So buying more memory would not solve this problem.

I did a ton of restarts of both of my computers and then.. stupidly... realized that there was a Thunderbolt Firmware Upgrade for Mavericks. So I've updated that and my computer seems to be doing a bit better! If I notice anything acting slow again, I'll consider a full reinstall of Mavericks.

So everyone, check your system and see if there is an upgrade available first. I think Apple realized the issue and is trying to fix it.

mernissa wrote:

Thanks Drew Reece,

You are absolutely right about it being normal for RAM to be fully used in Mavericks. But not everyone at Apple seems to know this. On Friday I called Apple and spoke with someone about this issue. The employee there wasn't even aware that the new Mavericks was supposed to use all of the RAM. He was as surprised as me. But about 15 minutes more of research after I got off the phone showed me that this is normal for Mavericks.

🙂

I'm glad I'm not the only one having a hard time learning this new OS. Applecare should all have to read John Siracusa's review.

I can see how the firmware update can help, I had similar issues many years ago with OS & firmware updates.

If you do decide to reinstall backup 10.9, erase and start over from scratch. Personally I think Migration Assistant could be bringing over too much old stuff, at least for people who only every use that to move & upgrade Macs.

Otherwise use EtreCheck, it will let you see what is active to remove or update.

Thanks Drew for the advice about trying safe mode ...

I have 2 macs. A 2010 iMac with 16GB of RAM and a 2010 MacBook Pro with 8GB of RAM.

I upgraded both machines from Snow Leopard to Mavericks a few weeks back and have had a lot of slow or never-ending startups. My MacBook I have left on almost constantly for the last few weeks so haven't really noticed until I tried to restart it this morning but the iMac is stopped and started everyday by various family members. The iMac has been so difficult to work with that 3 out of 5 user accounts would not login at all and would just freeze requiring a reboot. We would leave the iMac for over an hour with it trying to login.

Anyhow I've fixed both machine in the last couple of hours by doing the following:

a) Login in safe mode by holding down the "shift" key immediately after the startup bell (as per your suggestion).

b) Once in safemode Install the following 3 software updates from the AppStore

- ITunes 11.1.3

- Mail Update for Mavericks 1.0

- IBooks Update 1.0.1

That is the only changes that I've made on both machines. I didn't uninstall 3rd party software or try disk repairs. Both machines are now blindingly fast. The iMac has gone back from being a door stop to a seriously fast machine again 😎

Incidently after the updates I logged out of safe mode and logged in normally. There was a lag of about 20 seconds but everything started ok. Mavericks then started Mail, Safari and iTunes automatically as these had been open when the user was last logged in ... interesting! I then closed all applications and checked under "Force Quit" that everything was stopped and did a normal restart. This tidied up the user's disk space and on the next start the user logged in with no lag at all.

Safe mode also clears the kernel extension caches so a slow login after using it is normal.

It's odd that Apple updates appear to have resolved this. If it comes back post back here & we can consider taking a report & looking at what else is running.

Anyway, I'm glad it seems better for you now.

Well I spoke too soon! My MacbookPro was ok initially after applying the updates I listed above but then went AWOL this morning. I couldn't login to my account for over 3 hours ... sigh! Anyhow I did some thinking and began to suspect that Filevault was part the problem. On Snow Leopard I had setup 2 accounts on my MacbookPro with Filevault. Not a problem before now however after upgrading to Mavericks I kept getting a message on bootup saying that my Filevault password didn't match my user password. This was odd as I hadn't changed my password in over a year and this message appeared "before" I actually logged in.

So after finally logging into my main account I went to "Security and Privacy" and chose the option to Disable Legacy Filevault. This took over 3 hours as my home directory is huge and disabling Filevault basically means the OS has to decrypt your home directory. Anyhow after this process was complete my account returned to a normal healthy state. I've logged out and logged back in over 5 times since Legacy Filevault was disabled and all is well. For good measure I had another account which also had Legacy Filevault and I disabled Filevault on that account aswell. The home directory there was tiny and the update took seconds. At some point in the future I may try the new version of Filevault provided with Mavericks which encrypts the whole hard disk instead of just a single user's home directory but I'm not going to take that risk yet!

So suggestions so far based on fixes I've applied to 2 computers are:

a) Login in safemode and Install the following 3 software updates from the AppStore as well as any other updates available ... obviously if there are more recent updates than those listed use those!

- ITunes 11.1.3

- Mail Update for Mavericks 1.0

- IBooks Update 1.0.1

b) Disable Legacy Filevault on any user accounts.

I really hope that is it. One thing's for sure I'm glad it's not my work laptop!!!

Ok, my memory that I ordered from Amazon arrived today, and I said I would report the results. After reading all of the posts this week, I was really doubting my husband, when he said it was a memory issue. He just installed 8GB of memory, so I now have a total of 12 GB on my mid 2011 imac. It is running faster than ever, and running perfectly. And, Mavericks is still on the system, and we haven't made any changes other than downloading updates...which we did last week.

No spinning wheels. Nothing hanging up. Safari opening and closing perfectly. I even opened Safari, Outlook and iMessages at the same time, and they opened in record speed.

So, for me, memory was the issue. 4GB of memory just isn't enough.

Well since my iMac won't address more than 4gb I guess I have a problem!

Maverick did you just boot into recovery console and restore from a date before Mavericks?

Will recently created files still appear in TM after restore in case I need them?

Thanks in advance. I think I'll do this tonight.

I removed my Anti Virus and everything is fine with my MacBook Pro ( mid-2012 / 4GB).

[]´s

Neto

After Maverick installation my iMac became slow as noted by several others. The trick I applied was to put the many, many desktop files I had saved into just two New Folders. I don't know why but after having done so my iMac became substantially more responsive with fewer beach balls.

Thanks Rich.

TM restore went perfectly, iMac is like new again. Anyone not using Time Machine is crazy. I would be trashing this computer if I didn't have it.