Spinning beachballs in Finder, Safari, etc. Delays in responding to commands. As if the computer can only think about a single thing at once.

Very slow application startups too.

I've used Disk Utility and Onyx to check my drives and they seem to check out OK. Also restarted from my back up system, and the behavior was pretty much the same.

This is intermittent: right now I'm typing along ok but there is an occasional delay of a second or two or longer.

Bad RAM perhaps? I have 10gb. Mac Pro running 10.6.8.

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[www.flickr.com] [picasaweb.google.com]

keep Activity monitor open and sort it by processor usage - see if anything is running wild...

dying hard drive - disk utility is extremely limited in it's diagnosis abilities

full hard drive

WAY too much virtual memory (check activity monitor for memory usage), but this shouldn't be a problem right after restart

bad ram seems unlikely to be intermittent like this

any recent hardware changes? any new USB devices?

Thanks. Of course now it's running normally. Posting the question seems to have fixed it.

I also ran Onyx to check the disks, and use SmartReporter and they all say no problem.

Right now, Activity Monitor shows Safari Web Content using about 565 MB virtual memory, and Safari using 548.

Must have been ants.

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[www.flickr.com] [picasaweb.google.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/09/2012 05:16PM by Uncle Wig.

I saw you restarted from a backup, but did you just do a normal restart? or a shutdown, wait 5 minutes, then restart?

That fixes about 99.99% of every issue...

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The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs [www.fakesteve.net]

I ran into a similar problem and it turned out that Drobbox was putting everything into slow motion when it was synching. Paused the synching and everything was back to normal.

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jdc
I saw you restarted from a backup, but did you just do a normal restart? or a shutdown, wait 5 minutes, then restart?

That fixes about 99.99% of every issue...

Why would a shutdown, wait 5 min, then restart make a mac run faster? Is it a test for overheated parts?

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All I ever really needed to know, I learned from watching Star Trek.
Nassau County, NY

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wowzer

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jdc
I saw you restarted from a backup, but did you just do a normal restart? or a shutdown, wait 5 minutes, then restart?

That fixes about 99.99% of every issue...

Why would a shutdown, wait 5 min, then restart make a mac run faster? Is it a test for overheated parts?

Works like a PMU reset. Sometimes an unplug, then wait, works as well.

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The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs [www.fakesteve.net]

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jdc

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wowzer

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jdc
I saw you restarted from a backup, but did you just do a normal restart? or a shutdown, wait 5 minutes, then restart?

That fixes about 99.99% of every issue...

Why would a shutdown, wait 5 min, then restart make a mac run faster? Is it a test for overheated parts?

Works like a PMU reset. Sometimes an unplug, then wait, works as well.

The latter being a SMC reset, the modern equivalent of the PMU reset, which expired with the PPC Macs.

Other than letting components cool off and drives spin down there's not much that a shutdown accomplishes that a restart does not.

But the SMC reset might accomplish something.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/09/2012 06:29PM by Chakravartin.

The fact that it behaved the same way on two different boot drives may be pointing to a heat problem, or RAM,or a video issue. Were the fans running all the time the sluggishness occurred?

You might try compressed air can to blow out what you can, or at least re-arrange the dust bunnies. Since it is a Mac Pro, you should be able to get a vacuum crevice tool into most areas, and then use the compressed air.

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Mr. Curmudgeon, on Mountain Lion.

.....it just had some 'special' brownies.....??

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____________________________________________________

I reject your reality and substitute my own!

It means you are ready for next week's announcements, of course!

Or did you really want tech support?

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sekker
Or did you really want tech support?

No, it really was acting weird. The system log was showing a lot of errors with my Wunderground widget, so I disabled that. But I don't know if that was an issue.

The last thing I want right now is to have to buy a new Mac!

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[www.flickr.com] [picasaweb.google.com]

Chrome goes crazy on my machine, making it slow even with the SSD.

Activity monitor tells the tale.

Alas, a reboot is the only way to fix. But that's not too bad a price to pay for bleeding edge software.

My black Macbook early 2006, was extremely slow.

Everyone said It was lion,and it was too much for it. Had 4 gigs memory, using the 3.


Finally had to replace HD. IT had bad blocks, that Disk Util will not recognize. Need to use a utility that will find these bad blocks., If at the end it list the number, then you have too many to correct for the few that it can correct for.

Since new drive, my Macbook, has been very speedy. And just installed Parallels and WINDOWS 7 and it goes pretty fast as well.

I'd vote for the OS NOT releasing RAM when it should. Try "Free Memory" at the App Store.

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sekker
Chrome goes crazy on my machine, making it slow even with the SSD.

Activity monitor tells the tale.

Alas, a reboot is the only way to fix. But that's not too bad a price to pay for bleeding edge software.

That is really surprising as Chrome is absolutely flawless on my 2008 MacPro running Lion with a SSD boot drive, I currently have at least a dozen chrome windows open each with anywhere from 10 to 20 tabs and system is very quick and chrome is using under 500MB of RAM (for the main application, obviously there are forty or fifty chrome renderer entries each consuming a bit over 100MB but with 16GB of installed RAM they have no discernable impact). I should add that the machine has been up for at least a week and all those windows have been up for the entire time. I could never dream of doing that with either Safari or FireFox, and in fact it was problems with Safari slowing down my machine about a year ago that drove me to Chrome and I have never looked back.

Tortoise, chrome largely behaves itself. And I still use it as my primary browser. But on my SR MBP, there is clearly a conflict from time to time that survives any attempts to address gracefully. Sucks up CPU like candy.

Even force quitting the chrome-related CPU hogs is only temporary solution. Once I relaunch Chrome, the nefarious chrome helper and related take control of my CPU.

Restarting makes this all go away.