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Mac Mini running slow... *Need help*

I have a suggestion, will certainly be different from others...

1. Download an app called "Deeper" from here:
http://www.titanium.free.fr/download.php?sid=c7909bfe068657b37d9fb67dab2c6480

2. Launch Deeper and go to the "Spotlight" panel.

3. UNcheck ALL checkboxes (you are effectively disabling Spotlight), and then click the "Delete Existing Index" button

4. Quit Deeper, power down, restart.

Any noticeable differences?

I have read reports that others seem to have problems with Spotlight "indexing" going on forever, and Spotlight repeatedly re-indexing drives. The result is that the Mac feels sluggish and disk access is delayed by the indexing processes.

I have never used Spotlight since its introduction (I keep it disabled and all index files deleted for all volumes), and never have problems finding things when I need to...
 
This is why I decided to let everyone else be the early Mavericks 10.9 release testers before I upgrade my mid-2011 Mini from ML. :D
 
ElectricSheep said:
I assume that you mean

Reads in: 260,642
Writes out: 202,910.

This doesn't have anything to do with not having enough installed memory. This is just a running total of how man I/O Reads and I/O Writes have been issued. Some processes read a lot of data, and some write a lot of data.

You need to be looking at the Swap Used and Compressed metrics in the Memory tab of Activity Monitor to draw any conclusions that you may or may not be running low on memory.
Click to expand...

Alright, thanks.

Ok I did what you said and I checked the 'Memory' tab and under 'Swap used' the number is 0. Under 'Compressed' it says 3.17GB. What does this mean?

----------
Jambalaya said:
This should be fine for most normal usage. What are you running on the machine ?

Can you check how much of the 500gb HDD you are using (graphic in "about this mac" under storage) ? My 2009 mini was 2gb ram and a 160gb HDD which was nearly full and it was very slow until I upgraded. Your machine is a far better spec (as noted better than my now upgraded 8/750) so something is a bit odd.

Also you said the hard disk seemed to be under pressure ? Does that means its noisy / being accessed frequently ? I do find from time to time there is quite a bit of disk access but it's fairly rare and machine performance is good.

There is a cheap utility on app store recommended which clears disk space, to be honest it doesnt seem to do much except delete safari downloads (so check you don't need any) and a few system logs etc but it might be worth a try for approx $2. E-mail logs and old attachments can take up a lot of space too.
Click to expand...

Ok thanks for your reply!

I've got 120GB free on the 500GB internal mac drive.

I can just hearing the HDD working really hard some of the time.
 
Fishrrman said:
I have a suggestion, will certainly be different from others...

1. Download an app called "Deeper" from here:
http://www.titanium.free.fr/download.php?sid=c7909bfe068657b37d9fb67dab2c6480

2. Launch Deeper and go to the "Spotlight" panel.

3. UNcheck ALL checkboxes (you are effectively disabling Spotlight), and then click the "Delete Existing Index" button

4. Quit Deeper, power down, restart.

Any noticeable differences?

I have read reports that others seem to have problems with Spotlight "indexing" going on forever, and Spotlight repeatedly re-indexing drives. The result is that the Mac feels sluggish and disk access is delayed by the indexing processes.

I have never used Spotlight since its introduction (I keep it disabled and all index files deleted for all volumes), and never have problems finding things when I need to...
Click to expand...

How can I disable spotlight?
 
Alright thanks, but I'll just leave Spotlight enabled in case disabling it causes problems.
 
Hey guys, I'm still having some issues.

It definitely seems to be the internal HDD's drive because the machine boots up slowly and whenever I'm 'loading' something it feels really slow.

I just did a 'verify disk permission' and 'repair disk permissions', and while this definitely helped, the machine is still slow!
 
I've read thru this thread and no mention of running "disk verify". You might want to try that and see if there are any issues with that drive. If so you can repair it afterwards.

OP, that 8GB of memory. Where did you get it from? Did it come from Apple with the machine or was this ram you purchased after for the upgrade? If you bought it to upgrade, you might want to put back the original 4GB of ram and see how the system performs. Bad memory could cause more disk activity.

I personally always do a clean install, install all apps/programs then restore just the data. I tend to have less problems that way.

You could also install CCleaner for Mac and see what's in the startup. You could clean cache files and logs.

Lastly if none else works you could try a program called iDefrag 2 and see how fragmented the HDD is. That's if nothing else works. I know defrag a Mac HDD is frowned upon but you might want to give that a try on last resort. :)
 
Rodster said:
You could also install CCleaner for Mac and see what's in the startup. You could clean cache files and logs.
Click to expand...
You don't need "cleaner" or "maintenance" apps such as CCleaner to keep your Mac running well, and some of these apps can do more harm than good. Most only remove files/folders or unused languages or architectures, which does nothing more than free up some drive space, with the risk of deleting something important in the process.
​
These apps will not make your Mac run faster or more efficiently, since having stuff stored on a drive does not impact performance, unless you're running out of drive space. In fact, deleting some caches can hurt performance, rather than help it, since more system resources are used and performance suffers while each cache is being rebuilt.
​
Many of these tasks should only be done selectively to troubleshoot specific problems, not en masse as routine maintenance. OS X does a good job of taking care of itself, without the need for 3rd party software. Among other things, it has its own maintenance scripts that run silently in the background on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, without user intervention.
Rodster said:
Lastly if none else works you could try a program called iDefrag 2 and see how fragmented the HDD is. That's if nothing else works. I know defrag a Mac HDD is frowned upon but you might want to give that a try on last resort. :)
Click to expand...
Defragging in OS X is not so much frowned upon as it's just unnecessary in the vast majority of cases.
 
GGJstudios said:
You don't need "cleaner" or "maintenance" apps such as CCleaner to keep your Mac running well, and some of these apps can do more harm than good. Most only remove files/folders or unused languages or architectures, which does nothing more than free up some drive space, with the risk of deleting something important in the process.
​
These apps will not make your Mac run faster or more efficiently, since having stuff stored on a drive does not impact performance, unless you're running out of drive space. In fact, deleting some caches can hurt performance, rather than help it, since more system resources are used and performance suffers while each cache is being rebuilt.
​
Many of these tasks should only be done selectively to troubleshoot specific problems, not en masse as routine maintenance. OS X does a good job of taking care of itself, without the need for 3rd party software. Among other things, it has its own maintenance scripts that run silently in the background on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, without user intervention.
Defragging in OS X is not so much frowned upon as it's just unnecessary in the vast majority of cases.
Click to expand...
OK, thanks for the standard OS X is so good it doesn't need fixing. Now rather than correct me, how about offering the OP a solution? ;)
 
Rodster said:
OK, thanks for the standard OS X is so good it doesn't need fixing. Now rather than correct me, how about offering the OP a solution? ;)
Click to expand...
If you take time to read the thread, you'll see that I've been answering the OP's questions all along. Correcting misinformation is part of the steering the OP toward a solution and away from things that will not help.
MacNoobGuy said:
I just did a 'verify disk permission' and 'repair disk permissions', and while this definitely helped, the machine is still slow!
Click to expand...
Verifying or repairing permissions is not the same as verifying the disk, which is a separate selection in Disk Utility. Also, how much free space is currently on your drive?
 
MacNoobGuy said:
Hey guys, I'm still having some issues.

It definitely seems to be the internal HDD's drive because the machine boots up slowly and whenever I'm 'loading' something it feels really slow.

I just did a 'verify disk permission' and 'repair disk permissions', and while this definitely helped, the machine is still slow!
Click to expand...
You never told us how full is the HDD, go to Apple/About this Mac/More info/Storage ?
 
120GB free out of 500 is pretty bad, my general rule if thumb is 55% use for HDD before I notice some serious serious performance degradation, and thats in large 7200 rpm drives. There's just a lot of struttering with HDD in a modern mac, see it all the time on one of mine before I put a SSD in.

Get yourself a SSD and be happy :cool:
 
GGJstudios said:
If you take time to read the thread, you'll see that I've been answering the OP's questions all along. Correcting misinformation is part of the steering the OP toward a solution and away from things that will not help.

Verifying or repairing permissions is not the same as verifying the disk, which is a separate selection in Disk Utility. Also, how much free space is currently on your drive?
Click to expand...

Shame you didn't read my comment thoroughly as I suggested several things other than the last 2 options I mentioned. I use CCleaner regularly to clean out my cache along with my logs, never had a problem. I'm also aware about HFS and auto defraging. All the suggestions on offer prior to my suggestions did not result in the OP fixing the problem. Which is why he updated the thread.

So you have anymore suggestions for him because yours haven't worked? :p
 
Rodster said:
Shame you didn't read my comment thoroughly as I suggested several things other than the last 2 options I mentioned.
Click to expand...
I read it all. I only commented on the parts that required correction.
Rodster said:
So you have anymore suggestions for him because yours haven't worked?
Click to expand...
You don't have to take it personally if someone challenges or corrects something you posted. It happens to all of us from time to time. Anyone with experience knows that troubleshooting frequently is a process of elimination, and we have only the information presented in this thread to go on. It's a much easier process with hands on the computer, but we do what we can to help those coming here for help. It's not a competition.
 
Check the devices you have plugged in to the Mac mini.

OS X gets very upset if there's a USB or FireWire device it can't identify. It can make a Mac take forever to boot, and cause a high CPU load and slow response while the machine is running.

Two personal examples:

I had a FireWire hard drive plugged into my iMac, but the hard drive's power supply wasn't plugged in. OS X knew there was something connected, but didn't know what it was. It took about 5 minutes for the machine to boot up, and the machine was unresponsive. As soon as I unplugged the hard drive, the machine was fast again and booted in 30 seconds.

I bought a cheap laptop cooler for my MacBook Pro. The kind that sits under the laptop, with a fan that's powered by USB. This cooler just draws power from USB, the data wires aren't connected up. However they've built the USB connector, it really upsets my MacBook Pro. CPU usage goes through the roof when it's connected, and it takes forever to boot. This makes it the worst laptop cooler ever.
 
Jambalaya said:
You never told us how full is the HDD, go to Apple/About this Mac/More info/Storage ?
Click to expand...

Right now I've got 100-100GB free... When I had more space I didn't notice a difference.

----------
iizmoo said:
120GB free out of 500 is pretty bad, my general rule if thumb is 55% use for HDD before I notice some serious serious performance degradation, and thats in large 7200 rpm drives. There's just a lot of struttering with HDD in a modern mac, see it all the time on one of mine before I put a SSD in.

Get yourself a SSD and be happy :cool:
Click to expand...

Yah SSD would be great, but I'd lose too much capacity... I could only afford a 250GB SSD.
 
MacNoobGuy said:
Right now I've got 100-100GB free... When I had more space I didn't notice a difference.
Click to expand...
OK that's plenty and not a cause of slow running (I don't agree with earlier poster who said more than 55% usage is an issue). I only used to get an issue on my Mini when HDD got to 140+ out of 160 and that was with 2GB RAM.

I put in a WD Black 750GB HDD running at 7200 and the machine performs very well. As per yourself I couldn't afford a larger SSD (I wanted 500GB storage min)
 
So... did you ever try the "verify disk" option in diskutil? As previously stated this is not the same as the "verify permissions" option, and it may require you to reboot into recovery mode since I think this is your boot volume.

I have the exact same vintage mac mini, with the exact same model disk and it was exhibiting the same symptoms - slow boot, slow application load, general sluggishness.

Running "verify disk" from the recovery mode showed that my disk was failing, massive retries on read operations were slowing things way down. Replacing the drive solved all my problems...

-JimJ
 
MacNoobGuy said:
Right now I've got 100-100GB free... When I had more space I didn't notice a difference.

----------



Yah SSD would be great, but I'd lose too much capacity... I could only afford a 250GB SSD.
Click to expand...

Save yourself a little money and get a ~120gb ssd, and keep the original drive in there as well. You would keep the os and apps on the ssd for fast performance and larger files that you don't always need on the hd.
 
jimj740 said:
So... did you ever try the "verify disk" option in diskutil? As previously stated this is not the same as the "verify permissions" option, and it may require you to reboot into recovery mode since I think this is your boot volume.

I have the exact same vintage mac mini, with the exact same model disk and it was exhibiting the same symptoms - slow boot, slow application load, general sluggishness.

Running "verify disk" from the recovery mode showed that my disk was failing, massive retries on read operations were slowing things way down. Replacing the drive solved all my problems...

-JimJ
Click to expand...

Ok thanks.

I ran 'Verify disk' in 'Disk Utility' and it didn't help. How do I run it in 'recovery'?
 
MacNoobGuy said:
Ok thanks.

I ran 'Verify disk' in 'Disk Utility' and it didn't help. How do I run it in 'recovery'?
Click to expand...

Hold down the command and r keys at boot (the split second you hear the chime if you use a BT keyboard). Hold the buttons until the recovery drive boots. Then choose the Disk Utility option.
 
opinio said:
Hold down the command and r keys at boot (the split second you hear the chime if you use a BT keyboard). Hold the buttons until the recovery drive boots. Then choose the Disk Utility option.
Click to expand...

Okay so doing this will be different than when I'm fully booted into OSX?
 
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