Lion + 2008 8 Core Mac Pro

[SDAVE]

My MP is a 2008 8 Core (3.2Ghz) w/ 16GB of RAM, so it's fairly decent in speed, albeit older.

So I had upgraded to Lion a few months ago (when it came out) and it is very very slow. I had Snow Leopard before this. Mission control, Adobe Applications are slow and disrupt my workflow.

Should I just reinstall SL? I don't see Apple fixing the slowdowns as Lion is on 10.7.3 now.

 

[derbothaus]

Upgrade the GPU or re-install 10.6. Those are the best options. I feel the same way in regards to performance. All the new eye candy is better served with a more robust graphics card.

 

[Check 6]

Did you do an upgrade to lion or a clean instal? I have an '09 Mac pro and I did an upgrade things started running slower and I got random software errors. Bit the bullet and whips the drive, did a clean install of lion, re-installed my aps and it is running like a young horse again.

 

[derbothaus]

FWIW I have done over 20 "clean" installs of Lion and they all function below 10.6 on the same hardware. I wont put it on anything lower than a 9600GT - 8800GT Desktop for GPU power.

 

[ashman70]

Sdave, what is the GPU in your MP?

 

[SDAVE]

Upgrade the GPU or re-install 10.6. Those are the best options. I feel the same way in regards to performance. All the new eye candy is better served with a more robust graphics card.

The GPU's are quite expensive so that might not be a choice for me at the moment. There isn't even that much eye candy to constitute the downgrade in performance. It's just mission control, and we had expose before, which was fast even on older hardware.

Did you do an upgrade to lion or a clean instal? I have an '09 Mac pro and I did an upgrade things started running slower and I got random software errors. Bit the bullet and whips the drive, did a clean install of lion, re-installed my aps and it is running like a young horse again.

Was an upgrade of a Snow Leopard install. I might try reinstalling Lion very soon. I figured with Macs you don't have to do fresh installs.

FWIW I have done over 20 "clean" installs of Lion and they all function below 10.6 on the same hardware. I wont put it on anything lower than a 9600GT - 8800GT Desktop for GPU power.

I might as well go back to Snow Leopard, then, until Apple fully optimizes Lion. Things are just EXTREMELY snappy in SL. I thought other people were just kidding when they said SL performance is better.

Also my MBP is slower than it was in Snow Leopard. It came with Leopard so I have to do a complete reinstall of the MBP. I'm ok with Lion on the MBP though.

Sdave, what is the GPU in your MP?

It's an 8800GT with 512MB/ram. I have a 30" Cinema Display so I was thinking this might be an issue of trying to feed the big monitor. But SL was super smooth for years. And Lion before that.

I'm not even gaming or anything, just doing productive work. Lion is weak.

 

[derbothaus]

Also my MBP is slower than it was in Snow Leopard. It came with Leopard so I have to do a complete reinstall of the MBP. I'm ok with Lion on the MBP though.

My MBP shipped with 10.5 as well. 10.5 to 10.6 was a boost to performance. 10.7 seems stilted. And I don't know if the GPU would make things any better anyway as my 2008's 9400m vs. 9600GT makes little difference to important visual clues like animations and window transitions. If every time you hit a button a window seems to shake and reluctantly do the animation, you get a very sour experience. Especially because the processors aren't even being taxed when you perform the action. Even if they did tax to perform the smooth animations what good is 60-90% processor usage to move from panel to panel? 10.7 appears to really have been meant for the newer breed of Mac. And the heat generated is extremely unfortunate. 10-15ºC hotter than 10.6 doing everything. No excuse for the the piss-poor optimization Apple did with 10.7. You should not ever need a quad or dual+HT to use your basic OS elements. I thought after at least 10.7.3 things would calm down and get "snappy". Uh, excuse the rant.