Yosemite slower than Lion

[shonboy]

Hey guys, i have recently erased my OS X partition and installed Lion as the earliest available one for my macbook (late 2011) and a day after i installed Yosemite. Oddly enough Lion was noticeably faster in some regards, like booting, opening most apps (Appstore especially), spotlight worked faster and so on. Is there any reason why Lion would perform better than Yosemite on a fresh install and is there anything i can do about it?
P.S. the differences aren't huge but they are noticeable, and it makes no sense that the newest OS performs worse than a 4 year older one.

 

[cbautis2]

Yosemite added more features and eye candy thus requiring more CPU, RAM and GPU power. Upgrade the RAM to 8 GB and get an SSD so that Yosemite can run decently.

 

[shonboy]

Aw hell, the only reason I'm using it over Lion is because of iBooks :/. Anyway, so there's nothing that can be done to speed it up, especially the booting and shutting down time?

 

[CoastalOR]

Aw hell, the only reason I'm using it over Lion is because of iBooks :/. Anyway, so there's nothing that can be done to speed it up, especially the booting and shutting down time?

The only things I know is to implement cbautis2's suggestions. I have a late 2011 MBP that I added more RAM and changed the HDD for a SSD, it runs Yosemite (10.10.4) fine. It boots up really fast and opens apps very fast, but shut down is a little slower than when I had Mountain Lion (10.8). I still had the stock HDD and 4 Gb RAM when I had 10.7 but I upgraded to 10.8 then upgraded hardware and moved to 10.10. I saw a big improvement in performance when I upgraded the hardware while still using 10.8. I did the RAM first and then the SSD later. I saw the biggest performance improvement after upgrading to the SSD.

 

[shonboy]

Yea, i forgot to address that, i know those would be great improvements but i don't really have any cash to invest into it right now and both of those would take 50-100$+. I was wondering if there was anything minor to do software-wise that could make a difference..

 

[Partron22]

You've already got transparency turned off, and most/all of the iTunes/cloud based services disabled?

 

[shonboy]

iCloud and transparency yeah and for iTunes I'm not sure, haven't activated anything in the first place so probably no. It does seem to be getting a bit better now, also unchecked some stuff from spotlight search pool and its going a bit better as well, i goes everything else is beyond tweaking

 

[Samuelsan2001]

If it was after a new install then spotlight would still be indexing your drive this can take hours (especially on an HDD), this will use a large chunk of your CPU and slow you computer down until it has finished.

 

[h9826790]

IMO, since Mavericks, OSX is designed to use SSD. Yes, it can still run on a traditional HDD, however, the speed will be quite unacceptable. And this is getting worst in Yosemite.

I don't know how about 10.11, but at this moment. SSD is almost the only solution (required, but not necessary sufficient to solve the problem).

My machine spec as per my signature. And I have an internal HDD which is the clone of my SSD as a backup boot disk. I occasionally will boot into that partition. With exactly the same spec (same CPU, RAM, GPU...), just boot from the SSD or boot from the HDD, the performance difference will be day and night (in terms of OS operation / responsiveness).

Of course, if everything is painfully slow, then it may be something else, but not only this "HDD factor" (e.g. bad GPU driver, software bug, OS background operation etc).

 

[kingdLo]

You definitely need an SSD drive. Yosemite on my 2012 Mini with SSD runs amazing. When I had the regular HDD I would get spinning beach ball to death even with 10GB ram.

 

[redheeler]

Yea, i forgot to address that, i know those would be great improvements but i don't really have any cash to invest into it right now and both of those would take 50-100$+. I was wondering if there was anything minor to do software-wise that could make a difference..

Software-wise, trying the 10.11 Public Beta would help with performance a little bit...

Regardless, an SSD, like others have mentioned, is the way to go. What you described in your first post are all symptoms of a 5400 RPM HDD on Yosemite.

 

[Ebenezum]

You could try checking Activity Monitor if your software or a process uses unusually large amount of processor or RAM.

More likely your problem is the 5400 HDD. Yosemite is unfortunately very slow on an HDD.