Performance issues

My computer is running super slow and is taking a long time to perform simple tasks like open system preferences or load basic finder windows. I am currently have Yosemite as my OSX and my computers stats are below. Is there any "Housekeeping" i can do on my machine to improve performance or is my mac now just too old to keep up with all of the new applications and OS's that apple offers?

I have a Mac Pro (Early 2008) with 2x2.8 Ghz Quad Core Intel Xeon processor and 22Gb of 667 Mhz DDR2 FB-DIMM memory.

Your machine should not be that slow. When was the last time you verified the hard drive that you're booting and running from? Use Disk Utility from Recovery and check the hard drive to see if it may be the cause of the slowness. A failing hard drive sometimes displays that symptom.

Is there a particular option I check before I check the hard drive? Is there anything I should do in prep first?

Not really. Once you boot from the Recovery partition go ahead and run Disk Utility.

I apologize if this is a dumb question but I have never done this before. How do I boot from the recovery partition? Will this fix the problem or let me know if I have a problem?

Give this a quick read Repair Boot Disk in Mac OS X with Disk Utility & Recovery HD | OSXDaily It pre-dates Yosemite but the process is the same.

Shut your computer down. Press the power button to boot up and hold down the Command + R keys until you see the recover screen. It will take a while so just be patient.

When the recovery screen comes up select Disk Utility. Then select your boot drive on the left side - default is Macintosh HD although you might have named it different. Click on it and on the right side at the bottom right side will be verify disk and repair disk. My personal preference is to run repair disk first and if it all goes well, run repair permissions (bottom left) next.

When you are done at the top of the screen you can use the drop down menu to exit and your mac will reboot.

If any errors show up, let us know what they are.

Lisa

Edit - Slydude types faster and he provided pictures! Cool!

lclev said:

Edit - Slydude types faster and he provided pictures! Cool!

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I have it on good authority that this cannot possibly be true. I must have had a head start.

let me guess your using a 2.1 mac pro or a 1.1 that was converted into a 2.1 using the hardware hack method.

Now for hard drive space i recommend using 2TB western digital hard drives you can use a green drive as well as there black series and there blue series drives as well.

If you are running a stock drive like a Seagate this would explain why your computer has slowed down sea gates eventually firmware corrupt or just scramble the drives data causing slowdowns and other issues i recommend doing a backup and making sure to replace your drive if it is a seagate.

However if its not.

look at your memory and get a application to check your ram moduals out you might have a faulty unit

Slowness can also be caused by processes eating all your CPU cycles.
Launch Activity Monitor.app from the Applications/utilities folder and verify if there are processes that consume a lot of CPU for extended periods of time.
( Make sure you have " All Processes " listed )

Cheers ... McBie

This is all super helpful! Thanks to all! I went into recovery mode and ran the repair disk as noted below. After it ran it told me nothing was wrong and nothing needed any repairs so I rebooted and am going to try McBie's suggestion when I get home tonight. I also have 400 of the 500Gb hard drive full so I am going to try and move my photo library to an external hard drive. I have no clue if the new "photo" app allows that or not but thats my next course of action after I check the processes via the Activity monitor.

McBie said:

Launch Activity Monitor.app from the Applications/utilities folder and verify if there are processes that consume a lot of CPU for extended periods of time.

Click to expand...

Once I see the processes what do I need to do to change them? Also which tab am I looking under? Disk?

You're going to look under CPU for CPU processes. You don't change anything there - you are only looking to see if there is something using a high percentage of your CPU's processing power, which will slow down other processes you try to do.

Since you haven't told us specifically what a "long time" is...

While it could be some process eating CPU cycles, a 5-7 year old hard drive with 20% free space that has never been defragged is going to be slow. Under normal use, every OS I have ever used becomes unbearably slow to me at 30-35% free space. I have friends that don't seem to notice the slow downs until they're hitting 5-10% free space or less.

Moving your photo library or anything else to an external and getting your free space back up to 40-50% will help. Running iDefrag afterwards will help immensely. Running iDefrag without freeing anything up would probably help immensely, but with 20% or less free space you're going to be defragging pretty often to keep that drive running it's fastest.

If you're going to be keeping and using that computer for another couple of years, for under $100, I'd suggest a new WD Black drive in the 1-2 TB range and either migrate or even easier, grab SuperDuper! or CarbonCopyCloner and clone your existing drive over to it. That will automatically give you a defragged volume with 60-80% free space on the new drive.

(And if you're not running Onyx (Automation tab - Cleaning and Maintenance) maybe once every 6 months to clear out the cruft, that will help also.)

This is super helpful! If I grab SuperDuper or CarbonCopy to migrate my photo library, will the updated Photo app be able to link to the new path or will I lose all of the albums/folders I have currently existing in the app?

Apologies for vagueness. By "long time" i meant that I am getting spin wheels and delays to up to 10-15 seconds for simple tasks like new finder window, creating new folders, and opening simple apps like textedit, mail, etc.

I have purchased the 3Tb drive. Will either of the apps listed above

SuperDuper! or CarbonCopyCloner

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work to only migrate my photo library to Photo while maintaining my previously created albums?