Mavericks slowdown

My Mac Mini is extremely sluggish ever since I installed 10.9.3. I reset SMC, fixed permissions, etc. but nothing helps.

Specs: 500 Gb drive with 93 Gb available. 8 Gb available.

Your hard drive is approaching the level of its capacity where things are going to slow down because of fragmentation and the lack of contiguous free space. There are several things you can do without spending $$:

1. Download the free OnyX cleanup application from here and run it in auto mode. You may have to right click on the download and tell it to open because of "Gate Keeper".

2. Boot to your recovery partition, erase the Macintosh HD and reinstall Mavericks as that will eliminate the fragmentation. Make sure you have a full Time Machine backup prior to doing so. After reinstalling Mavericks, restore from your Time Machine backup.

The ultimate solution of course is to buy a larger faster hard drive and replace the one you have.

Mavericks slowing down my Mac

I don't understand why 93 Gbytes should not be sufficient to keep my machine running smoothly. Prior to the 10.9.3 installation it was running just fine.

I'll run Onyx first and see what transpires.

Thanks.

The old 25% rule pure and simple.

I don't understand why 93 Gbytes should not be sufficient to keep my machine running smoothly. Prior to the 10.9.3 installation it was running just fine.

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You'll notice I stated "Your hard drive is approaching the level of its capacity where things are going to slow down because of fragmentation and the lack of contiguous free space."

Read it again carefully and try to understand what's happening. The installation of 10.9.3 may have introduced more fragmentation and less contiguous free space. You could have 100 GB of free space left on the drive but if it isn't contiguous, it won't mean a thing.

aherodias76 said:

Specs: 500 Gb drive with 93 Gb available. 8 Gb available.

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I'm not 100% sure what this means. The 500gig drive with 93gig available makes sense…but what's the 2nd "8gig available" mean?

- Nick

I think the 8 GB he mentioned is system memory.

That's what I was thinking too…but wasn't 100%.

- Nick

Mavericks slowing down my Mac

CHSCAG:

Thanks for your help so far. Since I have never done this kind of operation before I need some advice:
a) What does it mean to "boot to your recovery partition"?
b) I should make a Time Machine backup of my current config running on OSX 10.9.3?

Onyx didn't make any noticeable difference.

PS: Yes, that 8 Gb referred to system memory.

Booting to your recovery partition means using the built in recovery utilities to: Verify and repair the hard drive if necessary, re-install the operating system, do partition work, and so forth. In other words, doing things to the hard drive which requires that it not be mounted.

The last three operating systems from Apple (Lion, Mountain Lion, and Mavericks) are not available on disk and so Apple provides a way for you and I to do repairs and maintenance on the hard drive without an external disk. In order to accomplish that, the system has to be booted to recovery. We can do that by holding down the "R" key and "Command" key during the boot process.

Yes to making a Time Machine backup. Additionally, we recommend using cloning software to make a bootable clone of your system. Time Machine backups are not bootable whereas a clone backup is. The two applications recommended are: Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper.