Installed Tiger on Powermac 450 AGP - SLOW!!! - HELP!

[ASP272]

I am running a 450mhz AGP PowerMac with 512mb RAM. This computer soared under 10.3.9. As soon as I installed Tiger, it's SUPER slow. I mean, you'd think I was working on a Compaq Presario! I've seen little bug warnings here and there, like some USB hubs slow down Tiger, but I unplugged mine with no help. The "Mac Genius" at the Apple Store couldn't offer any suggestions at all. I can't believe that Tiger is that much of a processor hog compared to Panther. But maybe it is. Does anyone have any tips for speeding things up? I'm running 10.4.2.

Thanks!

 

[Benjamin]

Whats your activity monitor say is eating up your cpu? And did you leave your computer on for enough time to have spotlight index your hds? Spotlight will make a huge performance hit when you first restart (70% cpu and like 4.5MB I/O for an example).

 

[wdlove]

You might want to think about adding another 1 GB of Ram. I have a dual 450 with 1.25 GB of RAM. Still running 10.3.9 though. Often memory can make a real big difference.

 

[taeclee99]

Did you upgrade from panther or do a clean install? My powerbook was sluggish when I upgraded to Tiger from Panther. Someone suggested that i do a clean install and now my powerbook runs much quicker.

 

[xsedrinam]

I'm reading this thread with interest, since I plan to upgrade to Tiger in a week. I will probably do an erase/install or an archive/install though.
X

 

[VanNess]

I'm reading this thread with interest, since I plan to upgrade to Tiger in a week. I will probably do an erase/install or an archive/install though.
X

When I upgraded to Tiger, I just used the normal update method. I figured that since 10.3.9 was working perfectly on my machine, there were no haxies or other mods installed; I didn't move or otherwise fiddle with Apple installed apps and files; a basic upgrade should do the trick and it did. No problems.

Spotlight creates an index of all your stuff on your hard drive when you first boot into Tiger and reach the desktop. Technically, you can use the machine while Spotlight is creating it's index, but indexing is pretty processor-intensive, so it will be slow going until Spotlight is done. In my case, I just let Spotlight have the processor's undivided attention until it was done. My thinking was that letting Spotlight hog the processor might help get the index get done faster. My half-filled 80gig drive was indexed in less than 45 mins. Not bad.

Don't forget the 10.4.2 update. A ton of bug-fixes and improvements, notably for dashboard, finder, and memory management in general.

 

[Mord]

what graphics card do you have? tiger relys on core image allot and slows down when your cpu has to do something which a quartz extreme card would be doing.

 

[killmoms]

"At first" sluggishness is Spotlight indexing your drives. You can see it's doing this because a small dot will be flashing in the Spotlight magnifying glass in the Menu bar. If you click it, you'll see progress indicators for any drives attached. Wait until this process is done to start using your computer, as it is very disk and processor intensive.

 

[za9ra22]

I am running a 450mhz AGP PowerMac with 512mb RAM. This computer soared under 10.3.9. As soon as I installed Tiger, it's SUPER slow. I mean, you'd think I was working on a Compaq Presario! I've seen little bug warnings here and there, like some USB hubs slow down Tiger, but I unplugged mine with no help. The "Mac Genius" at the Apple Store couldn't offer any suggestions at all. I can't believe that Tiger is that much of a processor hog compared to Panther. But maybe it is. Does anyone have any tips for speeding things up? I'm running 10.4.2.

Thanks!

I installed Tiger on my G4/450 which has 512Mb RAM and a standard Rage 128 Pro graphics card, and while I can't say it's any faster than Panther was, it's certainly no slower. The only poor performance I see is when dragging an open window around where the result is a very jittery image rather than the smooth movement and smoothly rendered window contents that I see on my G5. Given the slow processor and the 16Mb Rage, that's not all that surprising of course.

I should also say that this was an 'upgrade' install from Panther not an archive or erase and install.

So, the speed issue is not normal, and not caused by the nature of Tiger or the manner of installation.

I'd say the easiest way to set about dealing with the problem is to download a copy of YASU from http://www.versiontracker.com and run every task (maybe exlcuding deleteing cookies). Chances are that the system will run rather better afterwards as a result of the repaired permissions, prebinding or clearing of system caches.

 

[ASP272]

I installed Tiger on my G4/450 which has 512Mb RAM and a standard Rage 128 Pro graphics card, and while I can't say it's any faster than Panther was, it's certainly no slower. The only poor performance I see is when dragging an open window around where the result is a very jittery image rather than the smooth movement and smoothly rendered window contents that I see on my G5. Given the slow processor and the 16Mb Rage, that's not all that surprising of course.

I should also say that this was an 'upgrade' install from Panther not an archive or erase and install.

So, the speed issue is not normal, and not caused by the nature of Tiger or the manner of installation.

I'd say the easiest way to set about dealing with the problem is to download a copy of YASU from http://www.versiontracker.com and run every task (maybe exlcuding deleteing cookies). Chances are that the system will run rather better afterwards as a result of the repaired permissions, prebinding or clearing of system caches.

We have the same system and did the same type of install - 'upgrade'. My machine ran about 5 times faster of Panther than it does now. I've already removed caches, but I'm sure there are other things I can do with the software you suggested to try and 'clean up' the system. I have the standard graphics card, but I was told by Apple that CoreImage effects are turned off automatically by Tiger if you don't have a card that can handle it. The worst part of that is that you can't even install a CoreImage compatible card in a 2X AGP slot. I think the lowest end card that handles CoreImage is 4X AGP. I'll try the YASU software and let you know what happens.

Thanks!

 

[ASP272]

"At first" sluggishness is Spotlight indexing your drives. You can see it's doing this because a small dot will be flashing in the Spotlight magnifying glass in the Menu bar. If you click it, you'll see progress indicators for any drives attached. Wait until this process is done to start using your computer, as it is very disk and processor intensive.

Both of my installed drives - the standard 27gb and the 120gb I installed - are completely indexed by Spotlight. So I know that's not my problem. I've had Tiger installed for at least a month (forgot to mention that in opening the thread).

 

[ASP272]

Did you upgrade from panther or do a clean install? My powerbook was sluggish when I upgraded to Tiger from Panther. Someone suggested that i do a clean install and now my powerbook runs much quicker.

I'm hoping to avoid a clean install. I have a LOT of applications with plenty of files spread throughout the system. It would be a real pain to do so. I'm hoping to find a culprit elsewhere, since everything went so smoothly with Panther. I just bought a USB 2.0 upgrade card to try and alleviate the possibility it is my USB hub (which I noticed was a problem with Tiger on Versiontracker). Even with my USB hub detached, though, I get the sluggish system. I may just end doing the clean install in the end though.

 

[ASP272]

Whats your activity monitor say is eating up your cpu? And did you leave your computer on for enough time to have spotlight index your hds? Spotlight will make a huge performance hit when you first restart (70% cpu and like 4.5MB I/O for an example).

Thanks for asking that question, I totally forgot to check my activity monitor when I got bogged down last night. What's freaky is that the sluggishness can happen even when I only have Mail and Safari open, or similar apps. It's REALLY slow. I think I'll keep my activity monitor on for a few days and watch it when I get the sluggishness. Not that it's intermittent, just REALLY bad sometimes.

 

[mklos]

Well it shouldn't be very slow. I have Tiger running on a 500 MHz iBook G3 with 320MB of RAM and it doesn't run any slower than Panther did. I would try swaping out the RAM just to test.

If it comes down to it, I would just do a clean install of Tiger. I know its a pain in the arse, but it just might solve the problem, if it doesn't, well at least you have a completely clean system.

Give the Activity Monitor a check like someone else mentioned. You might have an app running in the background that is using up a ton of RAM and CPU cycles. There are some apps that aren't Tiger friendly until you install the update for them. If you can narrow it down to just one app, then you could just delete that app and reinstall it with all the updates.

 

[ASP272]

Well it shouldn't be very slow. I have Tiger running on a 500 MHz iBook G3 with 320MB of RAM and it doesn't run any slower than Panther did. I would try swaping out the RAM just to test.

If it comes down to it, I would just do a clean install of Tiger. I know its a pain in the arse, but it just might solve the problem, if it doesn't, well at least you have a completely clean system.

Give the Activity Monitor a check like someone else mentioned. You might have an app running in the background that is using up a ton of RAM and CPU cycles. There are some apps that aren't Tiger friendly until you install the update for them. If you can narrow it down to just one app, then you could just delete that app and reinstall it with all the updates.

I have suspected it could be a specific app causing the problem, an incompatibility with Tiger perhaps, but the sluggishness happens with any app open, not any one app in particular. Still, the activity monitor should tell me a lot. Thanks.

 

[leekohler]

I'm hoping to avoid a clean install. I have a LOT of applications with plenty of files spread throughout the system. It would be a real pain to do so. I'm hoping to find a culprit elsewhere, since everything went so smoothly with Panther. I just bought a USB 2.0 upgrade card to try and alleviate the possibility it is my USB hub (which I noticed was a problem with Tiger on Versiontracker). Even with my USB hub detached, though, I get the sluggish system. I may just end doing the clean install in the end though.

I'm afraid you'll have to suck it up and do the clean install. I had similar problems as you when I upgraded on my G4 Sawtooth. Did the clean install and four hours later I was a happy man. Oh- and you can get an ATI Radeon 9800 that will handle CoreImage just fine according to what I've read. I'm getting one soon and they are compatible with the G4 you have.

 

[mkrishnan]

I'm hoping to avoid a clean install. I have a LOT of applications with plenty of files spread throughout the system. It would be a real pain to do so. I'm hoping to find a culprit elsewhere, since everything went so smoothly with Panther. I just bought a USB 2.0 upgrade card to try and alleviate the possibility it is my USB hub (which I noticed was a problem with Tiger on Versiontracker). Even with my USB hub detached, though, I get the sluggish system. I may just end doing the clean install in the end though.

How full is your hard disk? There is definitely something strange going on with this install....

 

[ASP272]

How full is your hard disk? There is definitely something strange going on with this install....

My OSX drive (or master drive) is my 27gb that came from Apple, and it's only got 5 GB left on it. I noticed that in my system monitor the system is using 4.5 GB for virtual memory. I JUST noticed this about 5 minutes ago, and therein could lie my problem. The biggest problem is, I have a lot of apps (I am a graphic designer) but very few games (but I can't bring myself to uninstall Neverwinter Nights, which is taking up a few gigs). The biggest problem is that I have to keep multiple versions of my Adobe Apps and a few Macromedia apps in order to send files to different print houses. This, in turn, takes up a lot of disk space on my main drive. I don't like the idea of not having Applications in the designated Mac OS X applications folder, but at this point I may be in need of moving some apps to my 120gb drive (which still has about 40gb on it). You think the virtual memory on the main drive could be the problem?
One more note - in watching my system monitor tonight, I noticed that there were several times my processor was being maxed out (100% usage between "user" and "system" - and the "system" usage grew with my photoshop or illustrator usage - anywhere from 12%-25% of the processing. Don't know if that is irregular or not, just FYI.

 

[mkrishnan]

My OSX drive (or master drive) is my 27gb that came from Apple, and it's only got 5 GB left on it. I noticed that in my system monitor the system is using 4.5 GB for virtual memory.

Hmmm, well, the free space report for the drive takes virtual memory into account, doesn't it? Can I ask, knowing it would probably take a lot of doing, is it feasible to swap the drives so that the 120GB becomes your boot drive?

When you upgraded from Tiger, did you do an archive and install or an upgrade? If you did an archive and install, is there a way you can delete some or all of the archive folder? That's probably quite large as well....

 

[mklos]

My OSX drive (or master drive) is my 27gb that came from Apple, and it's only got 5 GB left on it. I noticed that in my system monitor the system is using 4.5 GB for virtual memory. I JUST noticed this about 5 minutes ago, and therein could lie my problem. The biggest problem is, I have a lot of apps (I am a graphic designer) but very few games (but I can't bring myself to uninstall Neverwinter Nights, which is taking up a few gigs). The biggest problem is that I have to keep multiple versions of my Adobe Apps and a few Macromedia apps in order to send files to different print houses. This, in turn, takes up a lot of disk space on my main drive. I don't like the idea of not having Applications in the designated Mac OS X applications folder, but at this point I may be in need of moving some apps to my 120gb drive (which still has about 40gb on it). You think the virtual memory on the main drive could be the problem?
One more note - in watching my system monitor tonight, I noticed that there were several times my processor was being maxed out (100% usage between "user" and "system" - and the "system" usage grew with my photoshop or illustrator usage - anywhere from 12%-25% of the processing. Don't know if that is irregular or not, just FYI.

I would buy a larger HD and then clone your 27GB HD to a newer, faster, HD. You can use carbon copy cloner to clone the drive to a newer drive, or you can also make an image of your HD, store it on your 120GB HD, and then restore the image on the new HD. Carbon copy cloner is your best bet though IMO.

 

[mklos]

what graphics card do you have? tiger relys on core image allot and slows down when your cpu has to do something which a quartz extreme card would be doing.

Well if the graphics card doesn't support core image/video then it won't use it. Same goes for Quartz Extreme. The nice effects built into OS X just don't happen if your graphics card doesn't support it. For example, my iBook G3 doesn't do the cube effect when switching users with fast user switching, but my iMac G5 does because it supports all of that stuff.

 

[ASP272]

Hmmm, well, the free space report for the drive takes virtual memory into account, doesn't it? Can I ask, knowing it would probably take a lot of doing, is it feasible to swap the drives so that the 120GB becomes your boot drive?

When you upgraded from Tiger, did you do an archive and install or an upgrade? If you did an archive and install, is there a way you can delete some or all of the archive folder? That's probably quite large as well....

I updated, so there is no archived system anywhere. The free space report doesn't take into account the virtual memory, as far as I can tell. I just noticed that my system library folder is 4.4 GB in size! Isn't that extremely overblown? If I can get that down to a decent size (deleting caches, extra printer drivers, etc.) it should help a little. My applications folder is only 9.9 GB, and the system folder itself is 1.43 GB. My users folder is 1.1 GB between my wife and I (I'm using fast user switching). Anyone know what the BEST app is for cleaning up the library folder? Is there a TIGER Cache Cleaner yet?

 

[acedickson]

I ran it on my B&W G3 and it was faster than Panther for me. I only had 320MB while running it. I just upgraded it to a gig a few days ago.

 

[ASP272]

Finally! After all the great tips and speculation about why my G4 is so slow under Tiger I discovered the culprit! It just so happens that I needed a USB 2.0 PCI card. I bought one on Ebay this week and got it today, and just installed it. When I went to install it into a PCI slot, I figured I would just replace my Adaptec SCSI card because I never use it anymore and it was just wasting space. After the swop I turned the computer back on to check that my USB 2.0 card installed properly.

Voila! Therein lie the problemo! The Adaptec SCSI card was the problem. It's the only thing I've ever installed in the PCI slots and apparently did not gel well with Tiger. I don't know if there is an updated driver or not, but I don't care and I'm not looking. I'm just glad my system is smoking fast again. And it even seems to be a bit faster than Panther! Oh yeah, and the USB 2.0 card works well too.

FYI. If you ever buy a ALI chipset USB 2.0 PCI card for your system, you'll want to make sure you find the driver first or get it from the person selling it (it wasn't easy finding the driver), but they do work just fine with a G4. If any of you watching this thread needs the driver by chance, I can email it to you.

Thanks to all for your helpful tips and advice. I think the many things I did to try and get this thing working smoothly helped out in the long run anyway. I'm just glad I didn't resort to a clean install! What a nightmare that would have been. And how I would have kicked myself if I had figured out the SCSI card was the problem immediately afterward! Thanks again! Aaron

 

[mkrishnan]

EDIT: Ooops, nvm.