My iMac has become soooooo slooooow...why?

[csblev]

Over the last few months, it seems my imac has gotten really slow. Like when I am typing, often there will be a few seconds between the time I punch the keys on the keyboard and the time they actually show up on the screen. Sometimes I can get four or five words in before the actually start to populate the screen. Even clicking on an inactive window can take a couple of seconds--very annoying for workflow. I only have 1GB of RAM, but usually all I am running is Firefox (3.5.12) or Safari, and then sometimes excel.

When I open the activity monitor I notice that sometimes Firefox is using 600mb to 1gb of real memory. Could that be the reason? Any help would be great.

Thanks!

 

[Vylen]

Yea, get more memory.

The slowness is a result of paging - especially since you said it slows down on clicking inactive windows. It's memory being swapped out between the RAM and HDD which is always a slow process.

 

[D'Illusion]

Never realised FF was so memory intensive. Mine says 146mb atm. Just loaded Safari and it said 45mb. 600 seems like there's a problem somewhere.

 

[MsUnderhill]

I have the same issue with Firefox - it's a total memory hog. Right now it's using a whopping 703.32MB of real memory!!! Anytime one of my macs unexpectedly slows down Firefox is always the culprit.

After a couple of hours of use I have to quit out of the program to free up some memory.

Both my macs (G5 iMac and intel Macbook are maxed out at 2GB RAM).

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

They all hog memory. Browsers seems to eat memory. Shut them down (to clear memory) from time to time. Reopen and you'll have a lot more free space.

Since buying the 27" 2010 i7 and installing 12GB of ram, I've noticed that general use seems to suck up about 4GB. I've unscientifically concluded that 4GB should be a targeted minimum (RAM). Still, Safari will eat up a good chunk of other RAM if I don't shut it down, then re-open it from time to time.

One more thing: while I'm pretty confident that your problem is probably all browser-related, if you haven't repaired permissions in a while (using disk utility) you might want to give that a try as well. Some slow downs like you are describing seems to be improved by a simple repair (permissions).

 

[mangrove]

They all hog memory. Browsers seems to eat memory. Shut them down (to clear memory) from time to time. Reopen and you'll have a lot more free space.

Since buying the 27" 2010 i7 and installing 12GB of ram, I've noticed that general use seems to suck up about 4GB. I've unscientifically concluded that 4GB should be a targeted minimum (RAM). Still, Safari will eat up a good chunk of other RAM if I don't shut it down, then re-open it from time to time.

Sorry to hear that. Is your SSD still performing well or could it be slowing down from use?

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

Sorry to hear that. Is your SSD still performing well or could it be slowing down from use?

This is not my problem, I was responding to the OP's problem. My system still screams. I rarely use all 12GB of RAM and with the whole home directory moved to the 2TB drive, I don't think I have anything doing much writing to the SSD. Bootups & app loads also still roar.