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I have a Macbook pro, both of which are evincing awful performance for day to day tasks. I'd like to know what is causing it, or failing that, how to diagnose this performance issue more effectively. I'll describe the main problem and what I think may be related effects, and hopefully someone here can lead me down the right path to an answer.
When I open my machine and it wakes up from the suspend state, the password dialog comes up, but often my keyboard input does not appear in the dialog for some time (this morning, for example, I typed my password and waited 45 seconds for the first character to appear, followed by a perceptible lag for each subsequent character). At the same time, I can hear what I believe to be the disk thrashing away madly.
The disk thrashing continues for a long time (today, 7 minutes). During that time, my computer is nigh unusable; cmd-tab takes ~10 sec to display the task switcher, typing anything into my terminal results in a wait for the command to echo, followed by slow runtimes. Chrome just beachballs for no reason.
I am running:
- OSX Lion 10.7.1
- Chrome 15.0
- Emacs 24
- Quicksilver
- Growl 1.3
- Sparrow
- Adium 1.5
- Dropbox
- Google Music Updater
- iStat Menu (installed after this started, to try diagnose the issue)
- Watts
- iTerm
- iTunes
- iCal
I do not have any remote volumes mounted; I had thought that perhaps the issue was with Quicksilver indexing AFP volumes, but evidently that's not the case.
My hardware is a Late 2010 17" MBP, 4Gb RAM, 1TB 7200RPM HD.
What tools can I use to track this down (remembering that I don't have a terminal when it's most prevalent, and in fact am not even logged in) or what's happening?
1Looking at the output of
/Applications/Utilities/Console.app
, do you see anything relevant? After logging in and the ~7 minutes, does the system work normally? – slhck – 2011-11-14T15:45:13.577Open Activity Manager and check your RAM usage. Or use a console and
free -m
. I have a mini that I upgraded to 8GB ram and usually idle around 5GB used (with significantly less open than you have). Macs use massive amounts of memory. – Kevin – 2011-11-14T15:49:16.017My Macbook Pro running Mountain Lion was very slow. I quit Dropbox and instantly the speed was normal. I don't know why or if there is a solution to run Dropbox. – None – 2013-01-04T02:42:01.507