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Slow Macbook Pro (Early 2011, 15 in), Help?

My macbook pro has been extremely slow as of late (last six months) to both start up the machine and launch applications (including OSX apps like mail and safari). This behavior was present before my upgrade to mavericks, thus I upgraded to OSX 10.9 and installed all updates trying to resolve the issue (unsuccessfully). It can take upwards of 5 minutes to startup the machine, and nearly 10-15 seconds to launch some apps, especially after a fresh boot. The startup issue is more alarming, as yesterday I had to boot using safe mode to keep the machine from locking up on startup before reaching the login welcome screen. My machine has 8gb of ram and over 50% free space on the HD. I have run both verify disk and repair disk to no avail (they come up clean). I have also removed all login items from system preferences. I have Free Memory monitoring my ram which never drops below 2gb of free memory. At this point, I am puzzled as to what could be causing this issue. I will emphasize that the behavior was present before upgrading to 10.9, so I am not concerned with issues involving the newest iteration of OSX. Any help is much appreciated.

MacBook Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9)

Posted on Dec 4, 2013 7:06 PM

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3 replies

Dec 4, 2013 7:08 PM in response to LoneWolf28

Things You Can Do To Resolve Slow Downs


If your computer seems to be running slower here are some things you can do:


Start with visits to: OS X Maintenance - MacAttorney;

The X Lab: The X-FAQs;

The Safe Mac » Mac Performance Guide;

The Safe Mac » The myth of the dirty Mac;

Mac maintenance Quick Assist.


Boot into Safe Modethen repair your hard drive and permissions:


Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions Pre-Lion/Mountain Lion


Boot from your OS X Installer disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list. In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive. If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the installer.


If DU reports errors it cannot fix, then you will need Disk Warrior and/or Tech Tool Pro to repair the drive. If you don't have either of them or if neither of them can fix the drive, then you will need to reformat the drive and reinstall OS X.


Repair the Hard Drive - Lion/Mountain Lion


Boot from your Lion Recovery HD. When the recovery menu appears select Disk Utility. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list. In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive. If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported, then click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the main menu. Select Restart from the Apple menu.


Boot to the Recovery HD:


Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.


Restart your computer normally and see if this has helped any. Next do some maintenance:


Suggestions for OS X Maintenance


For situations Disk Utility cannot handle the best third-party utility is Disk Warrior; DW only fixes problems with the disk directory, but most disk problems are caused by directory corruption; Disk Warrior 4.x is now Intel Mac compatible.


OS X performs certain maintenance functions that are scheduled to occur on a daily, weekly, or monthly period. The maintenance scripts run in the early AM only if the computer is turned on 24/7 (no sleep.) If this isn't the case, then an excellent solution is to download and install a shareware utility such as Macaroni, JAW PseudoAnacron, or Anacron that will automate the maintenance activity regardless of whether the computer is turned off or asleep. Dependence upon third-party utilities to run the periodic maintenance scripts was significantly reduced since Tiger. These utilities have limited or no functionality with Snow Leopard or Lion and should not be installed.


OS X automatically defragments files less than 20 MBs in size, so unless you have a disk full of very large files there's little need for defragmenting the hard drive. As for virus protection there are few if any such animals affecting OS X. You can protect the computer easily using the freeware Open Source virus protection software ClamXAV. Personally I would avoid most commercial anti-virus software because of their potential for causing problems. For more about malware see Macintosh Virus Guide.


I would also recommend downloading a utility such as TinkerTool System, OnyX 2.4.3, or Cocktail 5.1.1 that you can use for periodic maintenance such as removing old log files and archives, clearing caches, etc.


For emergency repairs install the freeware utility Applejack. If you cannot start up in OS X, you may be able to start in single-user mode from which you can run Applejack to do a whole set of repair and maintenance routines from the command line. Note that AppleJack 1.5 is required for Leopard. AppleJack 1.6 is compatible with Snow Leopard. There is no confirmation that this version also works with Lion.


When you install any new system software or updates be sure to repair the hard drive and permissions beforehand.


Get an external Firewire drive at least equal in size to the internal hard drive and make (and maintain) a bootable clone/backup. You can make a bootable clone using the Restore option of Disk Utility. You can also make and maintain clones with good backup software. My personal recommendations are (order is not significant):


1. Carbon Copy Cloner

2. Data Backup

3. Deja Vu

4. SuperDuper!

5. SyncTwoFolders

6. Synk Pro

7. Synk Standard

8. Tri-Backup


Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQs on maintenance, optimization, virus protection, and backup and restore.


Referenced software can be found at CNet Downloads or MacUpdate.


Additional Hints


Be sure you have an adequate amount of RAM installed for the number of applications you run concurrently. Be sure you leave a minimum of 10% of the hard drive's capacity as free space.


Add more RAM. If your computer has less than 2 GBs of RAM and you are using OS X Leopard or later, then you can do with more RAM. Snow Leopard and Lion work much better with 4 GBs of RAM than their system minimums. The more concurrent applications you tend to use the more RAM you should have.


Always maintain at least 15 GBs or 10% of your hard drive's capacity as free space, whichever is greater. OS X is frequently accessing your hard drive, so providing adequate free space will keep things from slowing down.


Check for applications that may be hogging the CPU:


Open Activity Monitor in the Utilities folder. Select All Processes from the Processes dropdown menu. Click twice on the CPU% column header to display in descending order. If you find a process using a large amount of CPU time, then select the process and click on the Quit icon in the toolbar. Click on the Force Quit button to kill the process. See if that helps. Be sure to note the name of the runaway process so you can track down the cause of the problem.


Often this problem occurs because of a corrupted cache or preferences file or an attempt to write to a corrupted log file.

Dec 4, 2013 8:15 PM in response to LoneWolf28

First, back up all data immediately unless you already have a current backup. If you can't back up, stop here. Do not take the steps below.

This diagnostic procedure will query the log for messages that may indicate a system issue. It changes nothing, and therefore will not, in itself, solve your problem.

If you have more than one user account, these instructions must be carried out as an administrator. I've tested them only with the Safari web browser. If you use another browser, they may not work as described.

Triple-click anywhere in the line below on this page to select it:

syslog -k Sender kernel -k Message CReq 'GPU |hfs: Ru|I/O e|find tok|n Cause: -|NVDA\(|pagin|timed? ?o' | tail | awk '/:/{$4=""; print}' | open -ef

Copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C.


Launch the Terminal application in any of the following ways:


☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)


☞ In the Finder, select Go Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.


☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the icon grid.


Paste into the Terminal window (command-V).


The command may take a noticeable amount of time to run. Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign (“$”) to appear.


A TextEdit window will open with the output of the command. Normally the command will produce no output, and the window will be empty. If the TextEdit window (not the Terminal window) has anything in it, post it — the text, please, not a screenshot. The title of the TextEdit window doesn't matter, and you don't need to post that.

Mar 12, 2014 10:09 AM in response to Linc Davis

Hi,


i'm experiencing the same problems with my MBP early 2011 13" (Version 10.9.2, 2.7GHz Intel Core i7, 4GB 1333 MHz DDR3) i tried a lot of stuff to fix it, but nothing really worked.


So I did as you told and got this message in TextEdit:


Mar 6 09:05:03 kernel[0] <Debug>: nspace-handler-unblock: did not find token 457

Mar 8 13:19:40 kernel[0] <Debug>: nspace-handler-unblock: did not find token 99

Mar 8 13:19:40 kernel[0] <Debug>: nspace-handler-unblock: did not find token 98

Mar 8 13:35:24 kernel[0] <Debug>: nspace-handler-unblock: did not find token 181

Mar 8 14:19:33 kernel[0] <Debug>: nspace-handler-unblock: did not find token 606

Mar 8 15:18:38 kernel[0] <Debug>: nspace-handler-unblock: did not find token 172



What does that mean?

I know this is in an old thread, but maybe you could help me anyway... Thanks

Slow Macbook Pro (Early 2011, 15 in), Help?

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