Applications soooo sloooooow to close?

[kirkbross]

I'm a full time web developer and the Mac Pro (4,1) at my work has 10GB of RAM. Two 1GB sticks and two 4GB sticks.

I typically have these applications open all day: Dreamweaver with 10+ files, Photoshop, Illustrator, Terminal, iChat, Mail, Chrome and Safari.

When I try to close apps and shut down at the end of the day it's like molasses... it sometimes takes 30 seconds for each application to close, even the smaller applications like iChat. I do them one by one too and it just seems like it's slower than my older MP at home with less memory.

Tips, suggestions for fast, safe shut down? I almost want to just do a hard power down every day... Press, hold, BAM! Done

 

[bsbeamer]

Do you have an SSD or HDD? Is it a dual CPU or single CPU configuration? Do you ever have to force quit the apps in order to shut down? What versions of Adobe are you using?

I personally have not mixed RAM sizes like that, but it could be contributing to your issues.

I do have a slow time shutting down some Adobe products on occasion though, generally it's due to a hangup "Adobe-Wide" related to one of the applications crashing. Last time I looked into it, there was something with dynamic linking causing the issue, but the problem was so random that I just deal with it honestly. Mostly notice the lingers with Dreamweaver if it sits idle for a significant amount of time while being open.

 

[kirkbross]

Platter drive, single quad core 2.66GHz, CS5.

I usually want to force quit when an application is hanging during closing, but the irony is that I can't even get into the force quit dialogue while an application is hanging.

In the grand scheme it's a minor irritant...

 

[Tesselator]

I get this occasionally. It usually seems to be caused by one or more apps file-locking (access locking?) and then it grinds to a slow sludge till it's resolved on it's own or I get to the force-quit thru ctrl+option+esc.

It happens a heck of a lot less since I turned off the dynamic pager tho! Like, I used to see that condition 2 or 3 times a day but now only about once a week.

You can try the same thing to see if it makes a difference for you by entering

• sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist

in the terminal window - followed by a reboot. And you can turn it on again with

• sudo launchctl load -wF /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist

if it ends up not doing anything for ya.

 

[kirkbross]

I have my ram sticks like this:

DIMM 1-4GB
DIMM 2-4GB
DIMM 3-1GB
DIMM 4-1GB

Should I maybe stagger them 4, 1, 4 ,1... can't remember which channels are which slots and how MPs enjoy their RAM inserted.

EDIT: I just realized my machine is a 4 core MP with a max of 8GB... I took out the 1GB sticks and it's back to normal. Odd how too much RAM made it tweak out (vs. just not utilizing it) so if anyone knows the technical reason, I'd love to understand.

 

[kirkbross]

I've traced the problem to Apple Mail. For some reason it was building up RAM usage every time it fetched mail from my work's mail server. I had it set to check every minute and it was adding roughly 20MB every refresh and not going down, so after several hours, Mail was up to 7.8GB of Real Memory usage, crippling the system.

I deleted the com.apple.mail.plist file from user:Libraryreferences and restarted Mail... now it seems to stop accumulating RAM at around 240MB.

We'll see if that does it...

 

[Tesselator]

LOL, I wouldn't doubt that's the culprit. Apple mail is by far the most unstable poorly coded app on my HDD. I open it once every 3 days, check for messages and then close it immediately. I suppose it's only laziness that I don't change to a better app. What is better anyway, thunderbird or something?

 

[kirkbross]

LOL, I wouldn't doubt that's the culprit. Apple mail is by far the most unstable poorly coded app on my HDD. I open it once every 3 days, check for messages and then close it immediately. I suppose it's only laziness that I don't change to a better app. What is better anyway, thunderbird or something?

I was about to ask the same question. What's the better / best OS X email client besides Mail?

 

[Tesselator]

I was about to ask the same question. What's the better / best OS X email client besides Mail?

I've had a few people in the past tell me Eudora was best but I dunno these days - that was a couple years back. This site says a few things: http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/download-email-client-for-linux-mac-osx-windows.html but that's even older info (2009). <shrug>