Yosemite slow on air and rMBP

[igneousc]

I did fresh installs on my gf's Macbook air and my rMBP and both of us are having slowness issues that didnt exist as much before.
Are there any good articles out there on ways to optimize yosemite? I've noticed mac mail has been using a lot of memory usage, as has the "loginwindow". Mail can be fixed by restarting it, but I dont know what the loginwindow thing is all about. I do know that both of our login screens are kind of glitchy from time to time, and definitely not as quick to respond as they were in mavericks. Im happy with it, but its far from perfect, especially on her air which has half as much ram and a slower processor.
Thanks

 

[simonsi]

Have you tried booting in Safe Mode and see if it is still the same, you may just have a login item/app that isn't playing nice. Yosemite runs fine on my 11" MBA in 4GB so I don't think it is anything fundamental to Yosemite.

 

[panzaman]

"lots" of memory usage is ok, is the norm, and is not a bad thing.

Yosemite is not running as smooth as mavericks even on MacPro and MacBook Pro retina, unfortunately the OS suffers from performance issues.

There are various threads regarding this issue on this board and on apple forums.

try do disable transparency in the Control Panel/Accessibility that should smooth things around, but don't expect a night/day change.

See if you can bare it otherwise the only thing you can do is to go back to mavericks.