Macbook Pro suddenly became incredibly slow for no apparent reason.

Question

Level 1

6 points

Macbook Pro suddenly became incredibly slow for no apparent reason.

Hiya!

So, about 2 days ago my Macbook Pro late 2010 became incredibly slow, especially with (and several minutes after) videos in safari/firefox. The problem seems to affect the whole operating system though, mail/other programs/slow boot-up/lagging graphical animations/etc, all not as severe but none the less independent of each other.

If i shut down every program the Macbook will seem sort of fine after a while, but programs do take a long time to start and if I for instance open safari then go to youtube and start a video, 20 seconds in it freezes, the cursor becomes "barely movable" and everything is choppy. After that every program will remain choppy and barely usable for about 5 min and then back to sort of ok. Same thing happens if i browse a forum. Fine for a few minutes then it gets choppier and choppier.

As I'm writing this question there's a 2 second delay between keyboard and screen so it's actually kind of difficult . 😝

Upgraded to El Capitan 2-3 weeks ago with a complete reformatting of my SSD and everything has been working very well up until just now.

RAM usage typically never go above 2.5GB out of 4GB available.

Specs:
Macbook Pro late 2010
Intel Core 2 duo 2.66ghz
4GB 1067mhz DDR3
Nvidia 320m
OCZ Vertex II 60GB SSD

I've tried:

- SMC + PRAM reset
- Unistalled Adobe Flash
- Cleared Mac Mail logs
- Removed browser cache/history/etc.

- Cleared Space on SSD (40% free)

- 1000 reboots
- Checked for weird programs / plugins (didn't find any and haven't recently installed any)

Could this be a failing SSD? From my knowledge SSDs are supposed to be sort of binary, either they work perfectly or not at all?

It does get pretty bad speed results (TRIM activated!) but it's still on par with a mechanical HDDs read/write results.

Any ideas?

Regards,
/Hampus

MacBook Pro, OS X El Capitan (10.11.1), Late 2010

Posted on Nov 8, 2015 10:19 AM

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Answer 1

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,547 points

Nov 8, 2015 3:46 PM in response to Irrationell

When you see a beachball cursor or the slowness is especially bad, note the exact time: hour, minute, second.

These instructions must be carried out as an administrator. If you have only one user account, you are the administrator.

Launch the Console 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 and start typing the name.

The title of the Console window should be All Messages. If it isn't, select

SYSTEM LOG QUERIES ▹ All Messages

from the log list on the left. If you don't see that list, select

View ▹ Show Log List

from the menu bar at the top of the screen.

Each message in the log begins with the date and time when it was entered. Scroll back to the time you noted above.

Select the messages entered from then until the end of the episode, or until they start to repeat, whichever comes first.

Copy the messages to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.

The log contains a vast amount of information, almost all of it useless for solving any particular problem. When posting a log extract, be selective. A few dozen lines are almost always more than enough.

Please don't indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.

Please don't post screenshots of log messages—post the text.

Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

When you post the log extract, you might see an error message on the web page: "You have included content in your post that is not permitted," or "The message contains invalid characters." That's a bug in the forum software. Please post the text on Pastebin, then post a link here to the page you created.

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Answer 2

OGELTHORPE

Level 9

57,305 points

Nov 8, 2015 3:52 PM in response to Irrationell

Download and post an Etrecheck report:

http://www.etresoft.com/etrecheck

Ciao.

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Answer 3

Irrationell Author

Level 1

6 points

Nov 25, 2015 10:08 AM in response to Irrationell

Tried reinstalling OSX, and it helped a little but not much.
Then replaced SSD and reinstalled OSX on the new SSD and now the macbook is both fast and quiet again.

Most likely it was a bad SSD, knew it was singing on it's last verse, 3 years old and with an increasing number of failing sectors and all, but there is a possibility that it might have been some sort of combination with an old and strained SSD + intense indexing service after upgrading to El Capitan that caused a temporary problem. Possible it would've gone away after indexing is all I'm saying.

Posting in case someone else has same issue.

New SSD and OSX reinstall solved the problem.

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