About the performance of macbook pro

Hi all,

I bought macbook pro around 5 months ago. My processor is dual core with speed 2.4GHz and ram 4GB. With this kind of configuration I was expecting a decent performance. However, my mac is performing really poor nowadays.

I must say, I use my mac extensively, I normally don't intend to shut it down and use it for months. I run pretty intensive experiments using matlab specially. And I am experiencing really poor performance.

First my matlab crashes most of the time in mac. I am not sure if it is the issue with matlab. I experience the same thing with eclipse ide as well. When I run matlab and eclipse in another desktop computer with similar configuration I don't have this issue. Further, my macbook runs really slow. I did some quick google and found some people saying that adobe flash plugin for mac is really buggy. So, I guess since I see lots of video tutorials in internet, the flash plugin might have caused such scenario when I browse

However, even for small applications like Preview which is in my view, the worst application that I have ever used. It's the slowest I am not sure why. I did some googling and tried a couple of tricks like clearing cache, disk permission fixing and stuff using onyx but still my laptop is really slow.

The most irritating thing is the busy circular sign with rainbow color. It keeps on coming even for small things and it takes control of everything and doesn't let me do anything. Is there any way to get hold or control stuff. I mean if I do sudo init 0 in linux it shuts down in seconds. However, in case of mac, it kind of tries to close the applications slowly and takes like an era. I just want control over stuff. Is there any way I can achieve this kind of stuff in mac.

Well, I don't intend to be criticizing a lot because I can see lots of people using mac. If it had been an issue with mac everybody would have said so. But in my case, I am not sure why things aren't working perfectly. I hope to get some nice suggestions so that I can have a decent speed. Thanks

Let's try this:

Open your Activity Monitor app (Applications, Utilities, Activity Monitor.app) and observe what's going on with the CPU and how much memory is being used. It could be that something is running in the background that's sucking up all the oxygen not allowing enough left to breath.

It could also be that apps like MatLab and Eclipse need plenty of memory to run. You do have 4 GB installed but nowadays, especially if you're running Lion, you probably could use 8 GB.

What version of OSX are you running? Click on the Apple and on About this Mac.


Also what is so bad about Preview? For it's intended purpose it's a great little app.

Well, I have checked the activity monitor and most of the time it's the flash plugin of the browsers that are consuming memory. So I tried to use mac without using flash exclusively for some time. But still it's slow. I am not sure why. The activity monitor shows everything to be fine. I don't have huge CPU cycles consumed by processes. I don't see any unusual process.


About the Preview application, i am not sure why but it takes such a long time to open. I mean lets say I have pdf file or image and I double click on that. It is intended to be opened by Preview app which is default. But it takes a lot of time. This is unusual as well. I noticed this from the beginning. But it is getting worse.

About the matlab and eclipse thing. I will definitely expect them to perform decently in this configuration. I am not sure if it is because of the OS LionX. I really think that OS X takes all the control and doesn't let me do anything. May be it is too heavy and has issues similar to Windows Vista. I am not sure though. It performs way better in ubuntu. I have tried googling for a day or two and try everything I can.

It's not that the system is slow all the time. I just expect that if I have only two or three applications open, then the system should perform better rather than freeze frequently. By freezing I am not saying that it will hang all the time. It's just that the response time is longer and it is not smooth. I want everything to be fast rather than freezing here and there and showing the busy circular sign all the time.

Is there anything I can do, I want to remove all the fancy graphics and animation. I want things to be simple but fast. Also, I forgot to mention I saw this screen saying that something error has occured and you need to restart the computer some time(something similar to window's blue screen of death). Could that be some hardware issue?

If the message asked you to restart, and was in several languages, what you experienced was referred to as a kernel panic. While they can indicate hardware problems I have also seen them occur and then not reappear for several months.

Have you run Disk zUtility and asked it to verify/repair the hard drive? Not just repair permissions. If not try that and see what errors, if any, occur. Some of the symptoms seem like the early signs of a failing hard drive (especially if the Mac hasn't always acted this way).

Has your Mac always performed this way or has its performance deteriorated over time?

Also, how large (file size) are the images that are slow to load in Preview? I have not experienced a noticeable slowdown with it unless it is managing a very large file .

Since you are running lion, by any change do you have any external hard drives hooked up? I ran into a site that mentioned Lion when externals are connected sometimes scans them first before opening the file you click on. I turned off my externals and it was way faster. I could see the lights on the external drive blinking when things were taking time to open. Just a thought in case.

About the performance of Mac OS X, I don't think it is comparable to Linux. Linux really outclasses OS X when it comes to performance. I think the performance of mac OS X hasn't been satisfactory from the beginning. But it was much better than what it is now. I am not sure if that is the way Mac OS is supposed to perform.

If that is the case then I must say, Mac OS X is not good at all. Even though people say it is stable and doesn't hang at all, if you give this sort of performance, then I would say it is nothing but crap.

Slydude said:

If the message asked you to restart, and was in several languages, what you experienced was referred to as a kernel panic. While they can indicate hardware problems I have also seen them occur and then not reappear for several months.

Have you run Disk zUtility and asked it to verify/repair the hard drive? Not just repair permissions. If not try that and see what errors, if any, occur. Some of the symptoms seem like the early signs of a failing hard drive (especially if the Mac hasn't always acted this way).

Has your Mac always performed this way or has its performance deteriorated over time?

Also, how large (file size) are the images that are slow to load in Preview? I have not experienced a noticeable slowdown with it unless it is managing a very large file .

Click to expand...

I understand your frustration but that does not really answer any of the questions that I had. I won't claim to never have experienced the issues that you are describing but they are not typical of my experience.

While I have not run the applications that you mentioned I can say that I rarely have problems with Preview. This was the basis for my question about the hard drive. Did you check that BTW.

If you say Mac OSX is no good and a rotten OS, there is really nothing any of us can do to help you. We asked you questions and you came back with a post ripping OSX to the ground with things that are simply not true. So unless you at least try what was suggested, there is nothing more we can do to help you.

So, were you looking for help, or just to gripe?

If the former, let's get on with troubleshooting. If the latter, move on - we don't want any here.

OS X is based on FreeBSD, which is a UNIX variant, much like Linux. As such, performance in general should compare well to Linux. If it's not, you've likely got either a configuration or hardware issue. In either case, we should be able to help, but only if you stop being combative.

Thanks.

Hi Dennis,

Actually, I was a bit disheartened seeing my laptop performing so poor. Let me apologize. To answer your question I don't have any external hard drive attached to my laptop. Verifying the disk using disk utility says that the HD appers to be OK. I haven't been able to work properly because of this. So I really need your help to get rid of this problem

Also about the Preview application, I have very small ebooks and some papers that I read normally just around the size of 4 MB in the case of ebooks. But still Preview takes a lot of time to load the book, more than 10-15 seconds and so. I was expecting it to load immediately

cwa107 said:

So, were you looking for help, or just to gripe?

If the former, let's get on with troubleshooting. If the latter, move on - we don't want any here.

OS X is based on FreeBSD, which is a UNIX variant, much like Linux. As such, performance in general should compare well to Linux. If it's not, you've likely got either a configuration or hardware issue. In either case, we should be able to help, but only if you stop being combative.

Thanks.

Click to expand...

Matlab is doesn't play nice on Mac portables or at least it never has for me..
You HDD is failing I'd bet, try all the remedies here and else where then take it into the Mac Store and have them take a look..It's probably passing SMART and "fsck -fy" but it's failing..