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haroldo
join:2004-01-16
USA

haroldo to heavyduty

Member

to heavyduty

Re: [OS X] How to get rid of Slow Mac Lion Slow Mac OS X 10.7

Wow...I think that's it....thanks!!
said by heavyduty:

YMMV, but here's what helps me get rid of the Safari beach ball and disk thrashing:

Safari creates and maintains a SafeBrowsing.db in a persistent location on your main OS volume for each user and it lies outside of your home directory. Sorry for not having a nice GUI way for you to do this but try:

1. quit safari
2. in Terminal.app window issue this command:

rm $TMPDIR/../C/com.apple.Safari/SafeBrowsing.db
 

The problem is over time this file (it's a SQLite file) gets completely fragmented. And when Safari starts up and reads the file, it starts to read it 4096 bytes at a time and causes (according to my last debug session) about 10,000 disk seeks. Assuming you get 150 iops that's over a minute of pure hdd thrashing.

Removing the file is ok. It will be re-created by Safari automatically, and be "less fragmented".

Hope this helps.

stevenros
join:2011-09-13

stevenros to Thinkdiff

Member

to Thinkdiff
Dear,

Its not only about space on hard drive but in Apple's words -

"If your disks are almost full, and you often modify or create large files (such as editing video, but see the Tip below if you use iMovie and Mac OS X 10.3), there's a chance the disks could be fragmented. In this case, you might benefit from defragmentation, which can be performed with some third-party disk utilities. "

So, I think I should go ahead.

Thinkdiff
MVM,
join:2001-08-07
Bronx, NY

Thinkdiff

MVM,

Mac OS X 10.3? How old is that quote? Granted, HFS+ hasn't changed too much since then, but fragmentation is not the huge problem you're making it out to be.

As I said in my post, once your disk is almost full, all bets are off. Your disk will be thrashing constantly and you will experience some slow down. That problem is amplified by not having enough RAM - anything that can't fit in the RAM will be pushed to virtual Memory ... on the hard disk. The same HD that doesn't have enough space and needs to seek to thousands of locations to open a single file. If you really are working from a nearly full HD, freeing up space will do a lot more good than defragmenting every week.

You don't have to convince anybody here that there are other factors to a slow system. But more than a few posters provided you with the recommendation to upgrade your RAM. If you don't want to follow that advice, have fun defragmenting your hard drive every few weeks for a couple millisecond improvement here and there.
heavyduty
join:2008-03-26
Brampton, ON

heavyduty

Member

said by Thinkdiff:

Mac OS X 10.3? How old is that quote? Granted, HFS+ hasn't changed too much since then, but fragmentation is not the huge problem you're making it out to be.

I have to respectfully disagree. Whether it's due to OSX having more sophisticated apps which save more metadata, search data, etc, or something else, the main apps such as Mail, Safari, Spotlight, degrade in performance quite quickly. As a quantity against the entire volume, it may not resonate as "fragmentation" but these little files can wreak havoc with app performance.

Maybe Apple doesn't care because buying a flash drive can mitigate the issue and that makes more $$$ for them. Who knows.

But the issue is there, and has been since at least 10.5 . It's here today with Lion. Take Safari as an example. It uses many tiny database files which fragment quickly over time. Web history, cookies and safe browsing. Then others for add-ons like ad-block, flash, all do the same thing. Using end-user features such as "clear cache" simply don't get the job done in many cases. Either some files are not exposed via the function, or other techs like Flash simply lie and don't really empty their cache or index files.

The problem is systemic. And it saddens me to say so, but there seems to be no compelling reason for Apple to enact a fix because their success diminishes their interpretation of problem severity.

BTW, these problems are all well in excess of milliseconds. They are accumulative, and cause beach ball delays on the order of tens of seconds to over a minute. This on very clean systems, tons of ram, and properly operating hdd (read not having sector issues).

Titus
Mr Gradenko
join:2004-06-26

Titus

Member

said by heavyduty:

I have to respectfully disagree. Whether it's due to OSX having more sophisticated apps which save more metadata, search data, etc, or something else, the main apps such as Mail, Safari, Spotlight, degrade in performance quite quickly. As a quantity against the entire volume, it may not resonate as "fragmentation" but these little files can wreak havoc with app performance.

I agree. The clean install it's teh snappy mantra goes to this. When I went up from Leopard to Snow, I upgraded a 2.4 C2D and fresh installed a 1.83 C2D. Guess which machine feels significantly faster now? And I'm referring to after installing all my apps and data after the install. It stands to reason it's fragmentation over time, usually years.
stevenros
join:2011-09-13

stevenros

Member

The defragmentation did its task. Of course not very much, but I can see the difference. Earlier, my disk was fragmented very badly but now, the disk is optimized and running smoothly.

Jurgen
@xtra.co.nz

Jurgen to stevenros

Anon

to stevenros
I have the same problem, at the moment my guess is that the Sony sxs drivers are producing the problem, they are automatically removed by lion but something is still wrong
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lifeform
join:2012-01-06

lifeform to stevenros

Member

to stevenros

Re: [OS X] How to get rid of Slow Mac Lion Slow Mac OS X 10.7

Thanks for all the good advices here about repairing permissions, installing more RAM and SSD harddrives.

I also have had huge problems with a much slower iMac (3.1 GHz Intel Core i5, 8GB 1333MHz DDR3 RAM) after I upgraded to Lion.

I.e. when waking up this morning my whole computer was not reacting except hearing the harddrive working for full speed when listening to the computer.

I had to manually hold in the power button for 5-6 secs to restart it, though even after the restart the harddrive works very hard for a long time.

Working and working...

What are the computer working on, and how can I disable ALL unwanted and unneeded services...? I mainly use it just for Internet, mail, Photoshop and webdevelopment.

(NB. After 5-10 mins now, it has finally stopped though I want to deactivate all that I dont need. Also Launchpad if possible.)

clevere1
Premium Member
join:2002-01-06
Vancouver, WA

clevere1 to stevenros

Premium Member

to stevenros
I did the upgrade from 10.6 to 10.7 on my 2010 mac mini.. I ended up doing a complete fresh install. Now it's snappy as all get out.
Rampcheck
join:2011-12-27
Austin, TX

Rampcheck to stevenros

Member

to stevenros
Mac OS X automatically defragments files smaller then 20MB. There is no need for defragmentation. If fact, it is strongly recommended not to defrag SSDs.

The only time it will be an issue on Mac OS X is, like someone correctly said, the drive is above 90% full. OR if you are working with a lot of multimedia files. It that case it is best to work off a scratch drive and and erase between projects/
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