El Capitan, Why So Laggy?

[jasnw]

I've explained what to do to correct El Capitan's problems in posts 8 and 15 above.

This makes El Capitan -FASTER- on my late-2012 Mac Mini than previous versions of the OS.
And I'm booting and running from an external drive connected via USB3.

If folks don't want to give my suggestions a try, what else can I offer...?

I personally am trying other avenues which appear to me less draconian than your suggestion. I have a screen-shot of your suggestion in the folder for ideas of how to deal with this issue, and if I'm not getting better response from the system from these other approaches I'll give it a try. Sorry, but I'm just not comfortable disabling part of an OS's memory-management system. Your experience with this approach looks to be OK, but I suspect there's a certain amount of YMMV in all this in terms of both performance improvement and wheels-falling-off. Two relatively minor things I've done have provided some relief on the GUI side, a large reduction in the number of icons on the desktop (something I needed to do anyway) and shutting off Dropbox unless I need it for something.

 

[MysticCow]

OP:

With 20gb of RAM you have plenty to try what I'm going to advise.

I would do the following (via terminal commands):
- Turn off VM disk swapping
- Turn off Spotlight indexing
- Turn off compressed memory
- Turn off hibernation
- Turn off app nap
- Turn off "cloud communications" as much as possible.
- Disable Time Machine (just run it "by user command" rather than in the background)

...and then run like that for 2 or 3 days, taking note of the speed difference.

If you do this, I predict you will see a BIG jump in overall performance.

I've been booting and running my late-2012 Mac Mini like this for while (using El Capitan), and it runs fast and smooth, and (most importantly) NEVER crashes. And that's with only 10gb of installed RAM.

My opinion only.
Others will disagree.
Some will disagree vehemently.

One of these can be done via Onyx for Mac. http://www.titanium.free.fr/onyx.html Through Onyx, you can turn off Spotlight (which I'll admit is the best thing you can do for speed). Spotlight will notoriously go berserk and index at the worst possible times. You can also hit a lot of cleaning options through Onyx and that does give a speed boost.

Time Machine can be turned off in System Preferences, although I'm not sure if that's a complete disable like Fishrrman is saying. All I know is that it doesn't run on my system, which saves resources.

I've had some degree of success with an app called Memory Clean from the App Store. It's a GUI for the memory purge commands.

Just those three options would make for a speedier system and it doesn't involve a single Terminal command.

Now for why I quoted here! I'd like to try a few of them and would like the Terminal commands to hit these. Could you be nice to me and post them? Please? Pretty please?

 

[jasnw]

I've long disabled Spotlight as much as I can and still be able to search in Mail (really?). I've not used TM for years, CCC does it better and I can control it better. I've turned off every little extra goody that Apple feels I gotta-have in the GUI that I can find. I only keep software active in memory if I'm using it (iTunes is OFF). Question is, why should this be needed? Mavericks was OK on this same hardware, and that was a Mavericks install that had three years of built-up cruft. This is a complete clean re-install of El Capitan with nothing copied over from the Mavericks systems except my own stuff (not anything in /Users/me/Library was copied forward). Yes, I'm sure disabling VM will make it run like snot through a goose, but WTF, Apple?

 

[SusanK]

Hi PO, Im using El Cap on a new MBA purchased three weeks ago. El Cap was preinstalled. Its laggy in so many ways. I used a MBA running ML earlier today. Amazing difference. I bought this MBA to avoid upgrading the ML units.

El Cap is slow.

 

[smacrumon]

Agreed. First impressions of El Capitan last, and they're not good impressions.

Running on an iMac purchased a couple of years ago. Mavericks- responsive. Yosemite- nice refresh of the interface, fairly responsive. El Capitan- total beast, slow and unhappy, spotlight searching is essentially useless, it locks up the system and doesn't find what I want anymore. Generally not as refined as previous OS X releases.

If it wasn't for Xcode wanting the OS to be the latest version, I would have stayed back on Mavericks or Yosemite and been quite content.

I get the feeling El Capitan could run great if Apple optimised it. It feels rather an incomplete OS in many regards. Maybe Apple can skip a release year and get it all just right for the following year. Or move the release from 12 months to 18 months, or focus on refining and refining instead of adding half baked goods into the mix.

Saying all this, Apple's work on continuity between devices has been a fairly good experience and a feature of recent Mac OSs I find useful moving from device to device.

 

[MysticCow]

Agreed. First impressions of El Capitan last, and they're not good impressions.

Running on an iMac purchased a couple of years ago. Mavericks- responsive. Yosemite- nice refresh of the interface, fairly responsive. El Capitan- total beast, slow and unhappy, spotlight searching is essentially useless, it locks up the system and doesn't find what I want anymore. Generally not as refined as previous OS X releases.

If it wasn't for Xcode wanting the OS to be the latest version, I would have stayed back on Mavericks or Yosemite and been quite content.

I get the feeling El Capitan could run great if Apple optimised it. It feels rather an incomplete OS in many regards. Maybe Apple can skip a release year and get it all just right for the following year. Or move the release from 12 months to 18 months, or focus on refining and refining instead of adding half baked goods into the mix.

Saying all this, Apple's work on continuity between devices has been a fairly good experience and a feature of recent Mac OSs I find useful moving from device to device.

Literally, Apple needs to work on optimizing for speed now. Windows 10 runs better (and hotter so that's why I don't use it all the time) than Mac OS X on a Mac. This should not be the case.

 

[Mcmeowmers]

Literally, Apple needs to work on optimizing for speed now. Windows 10 runs better (and hotter so that's why I don't use it all the time) than Mac OS X on a Mac. This should not be the case.

Win10 is definitely faster by far. It runs hot for me too even with a throttled CPU to 50% max. I think the issue is that the GPU is always on. I'm not sure how to throttle the GPU when using bootcamp yet.

 

[JoeRito]

I've explained what to do to correct El Capitan's problems in posts 8 and 15 above.

This makes El Capitan -FASTER- on my late-2012 Mac Mini than previous versions of the OS.
And I'm booting and running from an external drive connected via USB3.

If folks don't want to give my suggestions a try, what else can I offer...?

Do you need to input from the command line to turn these off? Sorry for my lack of knowledge here.

 

[robgendreau]

As a long time computer user you know that subjective comparisons are hard to assess, and that there are a bazillion variables to consider. And some of us can site contra anecdotal experiences and that won't do any good. Perhaps some specific examples of an operation in the system or an application that others could test and/or time?