Mac Slows to a Crawl after about a week - Help!

[sbatson]

I have an Intel Based 20" iMac I got right after they were release in Jan 2006.

At first, it would often run without issue or crashes until a new software update from Apple would come out requiring a reboot. Now it seems that not matter what I do, after about a week (give or take a day or so) it will get REALLY SLOW when I wake it up from sleep mode and the only way to correct the problem is a reboot. Other than this, the system is rock solid and runs great!

Any ideas on what the cause or causes could be?

Any ideas on how to correct it?

 

[MacHeadCase]

The reboot flushes out the system's cache so I would think it's a full-up-to-the-gills cache problem.

At the beginning it probably wasn't a problem since the system wasn't running full tilt with plenty of new apps installed, is what I think.

 

[sbatson]

The reboot flushes out the system's cache so I would think it's a full-up-to-the-gills cache problem.

At the beginning it probably wasn't a problem since the system wasn't running full tilt with plenty of new apps installed, is what I think.

I can't argue with your idea, but having been a long time windows user and all the problems that one can experience there, I never heard anything about problems like this before. If this is the case, it's basically suggesting that Mac OS isn't able to clean-up or flush it's own cache very well. That's a bit of a surprise to me.

Any idea on how to prevent / clear the problem easily without reboots?

 

[louiscy1]

os X is doing an very well optimize daily,weekly and monthly by default at 3 o clock i the morning...now if you install a lot of things on one day or you did something very heavy and you want to flush your cache manually my personal favorite is spring cleaning but there other freeware apps like onyx,maintenance etc that you can perform a maintenance...give it a shot

 

[sbatson]

os X is doing an very well optimize daily,weekly and monthly by default at 3 o clock i the morning...now if you install a lot of things on one day or you did something very heavy and you want to flush your cache manually my personal favorite is spring cleaning but there other freeware apps like onyx,maintenance etc that you can perform a maintenance...give it a shot

I guess I'm just surprised that OS X isn't doing this stuff on it's own or giving you options to do it after exiting any type of application or other operation that is intensive in use of the cache.

I'll look into the software.

 

[MacHeadCase]

I find that upon restart certain apps discard their cache and temp files and I discover them in my trash in a folder called Recovered files. Now that to me is sloppy programming. But Apple too is guilty of this, as I will find iChat stuff in there once in a while when I have exchanged a file while in chat with friends. It's all built-in the OS, the least the programmers could do is use the feature.

As for the maintenance scripts, they are built-in too, the user must leave his computer on (not in sleep mode) between 3 and 5 a.m. and the scripts will run by themselves. I, by choice, do not let my Mac on 24 hours a day but others do.

 

[alaceo]

sbatson - Keep an eye on your memory usage. If it is progressively increasing day to day, you may have a program running with a memory leak and its eating all your RAM.