slow, beachballing mac book pro core 2 duo

[publicljv]

Hi all --

Happy new year. My mac book pro core 2 duo 15" inch has suddenly become amazingly slow. The only thing I've done differently recently was to add to itunes a bunch of music that maps to an external hard drive. That is, I didn't put 60 gigs of music on the laptop hard drive, but I did add the library of songs to the itunes reader. Again, it maps to an external drive, so it's not as if I filled up my laptop's hard drive.

I can't really think of anything else. But it's slow as molasses in native and non-native apps. And switching between apps freezes it with a release maybe a minute later. One of those freezes where all the clicking and trackpad movement you do during the freeze happens all that once after it stops being frozen.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
PublicLJV

 

[adk]

Well, then the culprit is probably the connection between the HD and your laptop. If you're using USB2 then yeah, it's going to be slow. If you're serious about keeping your music files on an external drive, get a firewire 800 drive.

Otherwise I would try repairing permissions in disk utility.

 

[iMinnesotan]

Have you closed a bunch of application windows thinking that you were closing the applications themselves? Have you overloaded on widgets? Perhaps you have too many applications running. Apoligies if you already know better.

 

[WillMak]

Go to activity monitor and "force quit" any application that is taking up a huge percentage of cpu power (25-30%>). This sometimes happens to my macbook with 2 gigs of ram. I'll quit a program that'll still be runnign or one of my programs will start acting strange and take up like 80-90% of my CPU's processing power. My Macbook will then beachabll and lag like crazy. A simple force quit of the application at hand and restart of said application will always do the trick and have things runnign nice and quickly again.

 

[Passante]

Let us know how much RAM you have. Also restart and check your page in and page outs after a few hours. You'll find this in activity monitor which is the first place to go when your Mac is acting slow.

 

[pianoman]

it's all in the RAM.

 

[MaaseyRacer]

My bet is Cache. Go to your Home folder/Library/Cache and delete all the files in there. Give the computer a restart, and see how it runs. Still slow, repair disk permissions. Still slow after that boot into single user mode and type in exit, restart the computer after that.

 

[morse]

I'm working on two Macbook Pros, a 1.86 and a brand new 2.33 C2D. One gig of ram and two gigs of ram, respectively. They are both unbelievably slow when doing any Finder functions (Save As, Connect to Network, use Dock, anything). They lock up and beachball for minutes at a time, and Finder is much, much slower than my 12" PowerBook. And both of them came out of the box this way.

 

[MaaseyRacer]

I'm working on two Macbook Pros, a 1.86 and a brand new 2.33 C2D. One gig of ram and two gigs of ram, respectively. They are both unbelievably slow when doing any Finder functions (Save As, Connect to Network, use Dock, anything). They lock up and beachball for minutes at a time, and Finder is much, much slower than my 12" PowerBook. And both of them came out of the box this way.

Delete your System, Library, and user caches. Run the exit script in single user mode, and then repair your disk permissions. Should not still be running slow.

 

[morse]

Delete your System, Library, and user caches. Run the exit script in single user mode, and then repair your disk permissions. Should not still be running slow.

Run the exit script? Sorry, I'm somewhat new at this.

 

[Mitch1984]

Yeah how do you do the exit command?
Also can I delete the caches in the main Library as well as the one in the Home folder?

 

[publicljv]

beachballing thread author with an update!!!

Just so you all know, I posted the original thread on 12/29. I'm sorry to report that despite everyone's best efforts/advice/wisdom, I continued to have problems. Mac Tech support had me back up my data (which tooks like 12 hours b/c of the speed issue) and then they had me wipe the drive. No luck. Same problems. I finally had to take it to tekserve in NYC and get a new hard drive. I have an old G4 powerbook. That had a hard drive replacement. I have this mac book pro. It needed a hard drive replacement. I have a big pre-intel G5. That needed 2 gigs of ram replaced this week. I have an iMAC g5 20 inch--it arrived with a spanish keyboard.

Stock price soars. Quality plummets. LAME LAME LAME. My old IBM laptop could have taken a bullet. I'm so bummed about this all, yet I continue to use these things b/c I hate windows. And Vista just looks awful. What to do?

UGH.

Thanks for all the help! BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP!!!

 

[plinden]

Hmm, I have one more possibility for those of you with slow beachballing Macs.

A corrupt file in the Firefox 2.0 profile ...

This happened to me just this week. My iMac started beachballing every few minutes and was totally unresponsive when doing so. I managed to get Disk Utility started but it showed no problems with the hard drive. And all permissions were correct. I booted using the install disk and checked the disk again - no problems.

Rebooted back into the iMac, started Firefox and Entourage as I always do right at the start, and everything was fine for a few minutes but started beachballing again.

I decided my HD was about to fry so I ran rsync to back up to my external drive. Since I do incremental backups, this normally takes only 2-3 minutes, but it was still running after 10. When it finished, it displayed an error message that it had problems mapping "Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/s5kwgl8t.default/urlclassifier2.sqlite"

So I removed urlclassifier2.sqlite (Firefox's phishing site database) and restarted Firefox. I've had no problems since.

Now, if I had done an archive and reinstall, or installed a new HD and copied my home directory over, this file would have still been on my new install, and the problem wouldn't have been fixed.

I'm not saying this is always the reason for such issues, but if you run Firefox 2 and you run into similar issues, try removing this file before doing anything drastic.

 

[rijiMacDij]

Copy you there on the Firefox issue....

Hmm, I have one more possibility for those of you with slow beachballing Macs.

A corrupt file in the Firefox 2.0 profile ...

I got rid of Firefox but thanks to your post I will now re-instal it and remove the offending file instead!