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MP 3,1 - last legs?

Kingsly

Kingsly

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Aug 9, 2005
3,389
14
Either in front of a computer or behind a camera.
I think my MP is tired... After five years of solid service and some pretty good incremental upgrades it seems to finally be giving up. Slow performance, beach balls all the time, etc. It's just not snappy™ anymore. :(

What's starting to worry me is that I just clean installed the SSD. Usually that kills the beach balls for a good while (hence why I keep critical data stored separately, so I can wipe the system drive whenever it seems prudent), but as of today's wipe it's still behaving poorly. Takes nearly three minutes to power up (from ~15sec when the SSD was first installed), apps take forever to load, and of course something as basic as checking the system profiler gives a beach ball.

So now that I've established it's not a software issue, os there anything else I can test/diagnose on the hardware end that would be contributing to the poor performance? The computer is critical to my business until it gets replaced with a trashcan or, as much as this pains me, an overbuilt PC box.

Thoughts?

8x 2.8ghz, 6gb ram (I know, not enough), 4x 2tb HDD's, 1x 128gb SSD, 6870.
FCP7, PS, ID, DW, DaVinci Resolve, NukeX
 
Kingsly said:
I think my MP is tired... After five years of solid service and some pretty good incremental upgrades it seems to finally be giving up. Slow performance, beach balls all the time, etc. It's just not snappy™ anymore. :(

What's starting to worry me is that I just clean installed the SSD. Usually that kills the beach balls for a good while (hence why I keep critical data stored separately, so I can wipe the system drive whenever it seems prudent), but as of today's wipe it's still behaving poorly. Takes nearly three minutes to power up (from ~15sec when the SSD was first installed), apps take forever to load, and of course something as basic as checking the system profiler gives a beach ball.

So now that I've established it's not a software issue, os there anything else I can test/diagnose on the hardware end that would be contributing to the poor performance? The computer is critical to my business until it gets replaced with a trashcan or, as much as this pains me, an overbuilt PC box.

Thoughts?

8x 2.8ghz, 6gb ram (I know, not enough), 4x 2tb HDD's, 1x 128gb SSD, 6870.
FCP7, PS, ID, DW, DaVinci Resolve, NukeX
Click to expand...

Doesn't sound like it's last legs to me. Sounds like a drive problem. Use a conventional drive for testing. At 128GB SSD, it's probably crowded right off the bat. Toss in a rotational drive for booting just to see what happens. Oh, and remove that SSD from the system while testing.
 
crjackson2134 said:
Doesn't sound like it's last legs to me. Sounds like a drive problem. Use a conventional drive for testing. At 128GB SSD, it's probably crowded right off the bat. Toss in a rotational drive for booting just to see what happens. Oh, and remove that SSD from the system while testing.
Click to expand...

I'll give it a shot. The SSD, with a clean SL install + the above listed apps still has 110gb of free space... my MBP is also in the middle of it's spring cleaning, but once it's back up I'll target disk it and try booting off that system dive. :)
 
If possible, try keeping the SSD powered but do not access it over night. One way to do this would be to boot up while holding the [Option] button and leaving it.
 
pastrychef said:
If possible, try keeping the SSD powered but do not access it over night. One way to do this would be to boot up while holding the [Option] button and leaving it.
Click to expand...

Ok, so it's mostly an automated process then? Since I'm on a non-EFI graphics card the option key idea wouldn't work. I could boot into Windows 7 (partition on one of the HDDs) and leave it running all night I suppose, would that work?
 
Yes. At least on some SSDs, garbage collection is an automated process, it has nothing to do with zeroing out or fresh installs. If a computer is too often put to sleep or turned off, it doesn't really have a chance to "do its thing". By leaving it idle for a stretch of time, we are trying to give it a chance to do what it may not have been able to do.
 
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This is how I have my energy saver settings and it seems to allow for enough time for my SSD to do its garbage collection.
 

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I just did an upgrade to my system, and in the process it disabled trim enabler.

So I reenabled it, and wanted to force all the unused space to be trimmed. I created a large file filling my partition. It went fast until close to the end, when performance cratered. I then deleted the file.

For the OP, I would suggest enabling TRIM on his existing drive. Then reboot into recovery mode and use the fsck command (I found with google) and tell the OS to trim unused space. Then do his tests.

The slowness should only be when writing anyway. Booting seems it should be fast since it is mainly a bunch of random reads, a SSD specialty.
 
pastrychef said:
Yes, Trim is important.
Click to expand...

It's definitely with the SSD, and not a problem with your Mac Pro - hardware doesn't just "get slow" over time, as others have said it's most likely a TRIM / Garbage Collection issue (I.e. it's not happened) with your existing SSD.

Or the SSD could just be faulty of course! How old is it?
 
You can check to see if TRIM is enabled through System Profiler.

1. Click the Apple logo in the upper left menu bar
2. Select About This Mac
3. Click the More Info... button
4. Click the System Report button
5. Select SATA on the left portion of the window
6. Select your SSD on the right portion, upper portion of the window

On the bottom, right portion of the window it will tell you if TRIM Support is enabled.
 
My Mac Pro lost it's legs and has to resort to piratey peg legs.
 

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Wow. How did that happen? I think there are some screws that hold that side of the aluminum to the base. Make sure that the broken heads of the screws are not floating around in your computer.
 
Bought a used 4.1 Mac Pro with a partially crushed rear leg. It worked perfectly. Added a little support to level it out. Upgraded to 5.1 hex to maximize performance

Named the computer "Stephen", not, as most usually suspect, as in Jobs, but rather, given the fact the machine functions at a very high level despite its physical limitations, as in Hawking.

Stephen is rarely seen by others, as he lurks in my machine room, connected to the world by ethernet and long monitor cables. He would empathize with Mr. Pegleg's condition.
 
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