I installed El Capitan and my MacBook Pro got much slower and I'm not happy about. I reverted to Snow Leopard by reformating my HD and using Time Machine backups. Now I have a much way faster machine. Why Apple newer OS are getting slower and slower the more advanced they become ?
I suspect that I will keep using Snow Leopard that is much solid, stable and way much faster
RF
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
El Capitan is much faster when you have the hardware to run it properly. If 2 GB of RAM is all you have (the bare minimum), El Capitan will be very slow. 4 GB is passable. In reality, you need at least 8 GB of RAM for good performance. More than any other version of OS X, El Capitan is also geared towards the use of SSD drives.
In many cases, El Capitan speed problems are related to the 3rd party additions installed on the older OS X release that were inherited, and are no longer playing nice.
You could post the EtreCheck output, and someone is sure to express an opinion about what is shown.
<https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-6174>
NOTE: a lot of times anti-virus, Mac cleaners, and memory cleaners are at the root of many performance problems. If you have any of these, you might consider removing them.
You can also try booting in Safe mode, which does not load the 3rd party additions. If the system performance improves, you again should look at cleaning house.
You should also look at Applications -> Utilities -> Console logs and see if there are any processes that are throwing lots of messages into the log very quickly. Especially, start process, process dies, start process, process dies, start process, process dies, start process, process dies, etc... These kinds of problems do not tend to show up other places.
My machine is a MacBook Pro bellow. As you can see I have a processor of 2.53, I5 and 8 G memory. I've got no anti-virus programs, no mac-cleaners ... etc. The El Capitan is way much much slower vs. Snow Leopard.
Hardware Overview:
Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro6,2
Processor Name: Intel Core i5
Processor Speed: 2.53 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache (per core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 3 MB
Memory: 8 GB
Processor Interconnect Speed: 4.8 GT/s
I'm currently running El Capitan on a mid 2010 Mac Pro (purchased early 2011). It is very fast and runs smoothly. It also helps I'm sure that it has 16 GB of RAM, dual Zeon CPUs and an SSD drive. While the Core i5 isn't one of Intel's speediest chips, it should still perform better than that. If you have room, create a separate partition and install El Capitan clean. Compare that to installing over an older OS.
Did you *just* install it and are comparing speeds after your first boot?
For various reasons, the OS is going to be slower at this point - amongst other things it does a complete rebuild of the spotlight indexes, which is very CPU and disk intensive, and notably degrades performance until the indexing is complete.
Also, El Capitan's caching takes a little while to populate the cache with the data that you want, so more data is being pulled off disk than would ordinarily be the case.
My advice - give it a little while and see how it feels once the OS has settled in.
Along the lines Camelot is suggesting, if you also choose to allow iCloud to have access to your pictures, it could be uploading your Pictures to iCloud fighting your for network bandwidth.
But it would still be very useful to see the EtreCheck output
<https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-6174>
With 8GB of RAM and an i5 processor, you should be able to handle El Capitan. So I'm thinking it is something installed on your system, or the possibility your disk is starting to do lots of silent retries (always hard to diagnose).
How come Snow Leopard is much much faster then El Capitan?speed
