#How come a mac runs slow mac os x#
While running, Mac OS X and many apps temporarily "park" code that would otherwise use up your finite RAM. (Thanks Avi, Bertrand, Jordan, et al.) OH! And it's a good idea to leave 15–20% of your boot volume UNUSED. If you were to add up the total Virtual Memory the apps and processes in Activity Monitor claim to allocate for themselves, you'd think you'd need a terabyte of RAM installed! Virtual Memory works smoothly in the background and needs not your attention. I don't pay attention to memory consumption because it's Virtual Memory and uses hard drive space as Virtual RAM. A dozen or more threads means the process is allocating to itself a lot of resources. Also, this is real time, so the processes RAPIDLY hop up and down in the list constantly.īesides CPU consumption, Activity Monitor shows you how many threads a process is using. This sorting method is not perfect as you'll notice daemons or processes running within other processes and showing significant CPU usage, yet might not appear at the top of the sorted list as you'd expect. Then click on the CPU column which sorts all processes according to how much CPU MHz they are using. In Activity Monitor, select from the pop up menu to view "All processes, hierarchically." It REALLY IS "The Most Advanced Desktop Operating System In the World," IMO. You may be impressed at how much is going on behind-the-scenes with Mac OS X.
Spotlight takes a long time the FIRST time it indexes whole volumes, but no noticeable performance change is detectable (to me) after that, as it only incrementally indexes newly created files and data ( FAR less indexing that the first run on a whole volume).Īctivity Monitor has proven an indispensable tool for seeing all the "invisible" processes that are running and are not apparent to you otherwise.
(A shareware utility that allows you to delete the current Spotlight index might not be a bad idea, as Spotlight would after which start fresh and run without interference while you're asleep.) Spotlight SHOULD resume, and the magnifying glass should pulsate again. Then, if you DO want Spotlight to index everything (say, while you're sleeping) do the reverse and highlight each drive in the Privacy column and click the minus sign. This will stop Spotlight from indexing and consuming your storage I/O, CPU and other system resources. Add your boot drive and any other connected drives.
#How come a mac runs slow plus#
If you want, you can go to System Preferences–>Spotlight–>Privacy and click the plus symbol at the bottom left of the of the leftmost column. But in my experience, Spotlight hasn't exacted a troublesome performance penalty while I continued to browse, email, use Photoshop, Pages, etc. If the Spotlight magnifying glass icon in the very top right of your menu bar contains a small dot that subtly grows and shrinks, then Spotlight is indexing your hard drive (including the contents of each file). The above answer about Spotlight indexing is indeed one probable culprit.
Having TOO MUCH experience with Macs going sluggish, the one thing I do know is that (unfortunately) there can be innumerable causes. WARNING! This "answer" does address the question, but also goes on to includes a whole lot more information that I hope some people can benefit from.įor many this will be known information.
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