Strange Slowing Down

[Applespider]

Middle of last week, I created a new Admin account and turned my old Admin account to a 'Standard' one. So far so good... yesterday, I noticed my Mac slowing down (nothing else installed) slowly but surely I restarted it and today it's like sludge.

It's taking 3-4 seconds to bring up a cursor in a log-in window or text box. There are times there's a similar delay in bringing up Quicksilver - or even just selecting a link in Safari. And the server UI window is taking up 60% of the CPU with just Safari open; my fans haven't been on so much in ages.

Something is definitely not right - anyone got any ideas? My thinking at the moment is that using the "sudo chown -R newaccount:admin *.app" in the Applications folder might have screwed something up even though it seemed to be fine initially.

I've tried reinstalling the Combo update and obvious, repaired all those permissions but to no avail.

I'm debating whether
to do an Archive & Install to see if that fixes stuff since it leaves the new admin/standard in place
or
to do a Restore from my bootable backup (taken 2 weeks ago) before I made any of these admin/standard changes.

Any thoughts? It's a Powerbook 1.25Ghz with 1.25GB RAM (and I've checked that both RAM slots are working since at first I wondered if it was only running on 256MB or RAM it's so slow!) and 20GB of free HD space

 

[Applespider]

Well... no ideas here so I decided just to get on and do something since it had become so slow, it was annoying.

I went with the option of restoring the backup (after taking fresh copies of my Mail and iTunes files) back to a single admin user, updating with last week's updates and then recreating the admin + standard user but this time using a different Terminal script that only changed the previous admin user as opposed to all of them.

So far, so good - although it seemed to take a few days for the slowdown to become annoying last time.

 

[annk]

I did the same thing using the same command at approximately the same time as you, and did in fact notice an incredible slowing down. But I closed all my apps and restarted, and the problem went away.

To be honest, I assumed it was because I was following MR intently at the time, and discovered I had a zillion Camino tabs. I know Camino can hog CPU, and since I'd never before had so many tabs, I just figured I brought it on myself.

I'll post again here if it slows down again, though.

 

[Applespider]

That was my first thought that the system had been 'up' for a while, that I didn't usually use it with Fast User Switching and that Safari had been open for ages.

But my restart seemed to make the slowness worse. It had only been the occasional beachball when clicking on text boxes and now it was more or less constant. I have a feeling it was somethign to do with ApplicationUIServer which seemed to be taking ridiculous amounts of CPU.

Reverting to back up and using the find user -account exec etc command that was listed later in the thread seems to have stopped the problem. It was a joy using it again last night compared to much of the day!

 

[EGT]

Keep an eye on your drive status and backup important stuff.

 

[mad jew]

Good advice, keep an eye on your drive.

Also, do you use AirPort? FI so, try turning it off and see if the problem gets better.

 

[Applespider]

Everything is backed up to date - did a fresh one once I had it all restored and up to date last night - and SMART status is verified (and was verified even when going slow) - I did a Repair disk while I was booted from the external drive just to be on the safe side.

Airport was on. I think I know the problem you're talking about madjew but it wasn't that kind of beachball. It was just odd - a 4 second delay whenever I clicked on some different element which coincided with the SystemUIServer going bananas and taking up virtually all the CPU. The fans were kicking in while OS X was booting up; let alone after any apps were launched.

All appears OK again tonight so I'm going to assume some weird glitch for the meantime. And be very glad that I had a recent backup to retreat to!