My Mac OS X 10.9.4 is running very, very slow

Does the Time Machine drive show in System Preferences/Time Machine. In the Time Machine menu bar, hold down the option /alt key and choose Browse Other Backups. Can you select your backup?

Activity Monitor - Mavericks

Activity Monitor in Mavericks has significant changes

Performance Guide

Why is my computer slow

Why your Mac runs slower than it should

Slow Mac After Mavericks

Things you can do to resolve slowdowns see post by Kappy

Please start your own, new discussion.

Too many users post to someone else's posting and issues and it gets way too confusing for anyone to be able to anyone when multiple users post with multiple Mac issues that may or may. not be related to issues the Original Discussion Poster has posted.

Hey Dave,

I have your exact same problem. The upgrade to OS X 10.9.4 has crippled my computer.

Spotlight is constantly indexing. The mdworker is all over the place on the Activity Monitor—4% and then it explodes to 85% of CPU usage. Systemstats kicks in randomly (connected to spotlight perhaps?) and eats up 90% of my CPU and 3gigs of RAM. My Time Machine takes AGES to backup. It is constantly 'Preparing Backup...'.

I've run disk repair. First, I repaired permissions. Then I verified and attempted to repair the the hard drive—mind you, this is very first issue I've ever had with the hard drive since I first bought the computer. There is a missing file apparently. I therefore must reformat. However, Time Machine is running so slowly, I cannot backup my files before I attempt the reformat.

I have heard of numerous people having problems with Mavericks. All similar problems concerning missing files, haywire spotlight, systemstats devouring any remaining CPU power and memory space. What an awful update.

I have a late 2008, 15inch MacBook Pro., 2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 8 GB 1067 MHz DDR3, running OS X 10.9.4 (13E28).

Ah, thanks for the added info.

First bit of info you need - Time Capsule is a hardware router/backup hard drive combo. Time Machine is the backup-controlling software in your Mac.

The hard drive in the Time Capsule will have been formatted correctly.

I don't have a Time Capsule, so I don't use the software for setting it up. I know you need it to join the router's network, or, connect it via ethernet, and turn off router functions.

Hope someone else comes along.

Basically Maveriks has gone by way of Windows in Performance.

Snow Leopard is the a more stable and fast OS much like Tiger.

It doesn't matter if you upgraded or did clean install the results are the same. core 2 or intel i7.

Problem is that there are many nice apps that will only run under Mavericks, which is a good thing, as we don't want a 15yr OLD OS like Windows.

One thing you might notices:

Create a new account, login to it, it will be much faster than your current account. Sometime you can delete the old "do not delete the directory" and recreate the account and use existing directory. (note you have to rename the directory back to original first).

It is sad to say ML and L are also faster than Mavericks and Yes as you saw the evolution of the OS from M ML to Mav - the beach ball became more and more dominate on your screen.

Lets just hope 10.9.5 will remove the OS performance issue which will most like require them to remove some features they thought were great.

Again we are all still looking for that rogue app or service that is causing all the performance issues.

Many time it is not CPU, it is other things like disk access, apps slow to initialize and unfortunately multitasking application.

Best option might be to wait for Yosemite and hope that it will not lock you out of legacy Machines even once that fully support 64bit but Apple feels they should not support it anymore. Issue with Mavericks will cause many to question weather to go to Yosemite, but time will tell.

"Always make sure you have a backup of your data"

Best option to test Apples New OS version or even return to old: External Firewire or USB (boot to drive).

In the past T, L, SL performance from an external disk are not bad at all. NOTE: USB 3.0 has bugs so make sure if you do USB it is 2.0.

Firewire 4 and 8 no issues as yet that I have experienced.

If you install SL back on external, you might see how fast your system is again and no beach ball.( ok will not any where near the level that ML and Mavericks produces it).

Please confirm you have a Time Capsule which has your Time Machine backup on it. If it isn't a Time Capsule, what brand of drive is it. Need to get the drive and software separated so we can provide better suggestions.

I am also having the same problem. I wish I had been able to stick with 10.4.x but not able to with Adobe cloud. Upgraded and since then it has all been very slow:

MacPro station

2.8 GHz Quad

6 GB

10.9.4

I did run the Activity Monitor and curious about this Switchboard (not responding).

As I type this (G Chrome) I can hear one of my externals working away though I am not currently accessing it. I notice all the things listed in previous threads:

• pinwheel of death often
• slow slow slow
• possible (not sure) USB port issues? seems slow (at least the two on the front of my box).
• everything seems slower...from G chrome to my Adobe software.
• Safari? Well, they should rename it SLUDGEFARI

So...has anyone heard if Apple is working on fixes?

By the way...here is this switchboard thing...

Going to do a full reboot and check again.

So my last post as expected was deleted by apple because it did not put maverick in good stands as an upgrade.

I am sorry I did keep a copy of the thread.

But again performance things to consider are plugin turn it off if your a looking at safari. It even sometimes effect the desktop.

Well I am sorry my other discussion point got deleted by apple, next time I will keep a copy.

I have an older powerbook and only 2GB ram, beach balls everywhere. Manually emptying out the /Library/StartupItems folder of junk inserted by some apps turned everything around for me. Works just like snow leopard used to now. Phew.