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OS X Lion / New Mac Pro – Slow Performance Issues
Hi,
I am experiencing some speed issues with a brand new Mac Pro (2 x 2.93 GHz 6-Core, 8GB ram, 1TB hard drive) running OS X Lion (10.7.2).
The machine is only a couple of months old and is used primarily for motion graphics – After Effects CS 5 and Cinema 4D 13 (plus the other Adobe Creative Suite applications).
Initially the machine seemed to operate at the speed I expected – fast previews & renders in After Effects and Cinema 4D, able to operate smoothly with several applications open & rendering in the background. However as time has passed the machine had become slower and slower – especially during rendering when it is all but impossible to use the machine it becomes so slow – applications become unresponsive or painful slow, windows / folders take an age to open – even simple google searches take several minutes (despite other machines in the office having fast internet).
The hard drive is also very noisy – “chugging” during its slowest periods.The hard drive is barely half full and the projects on it are well organised.
I have tried repairing disk permissions, updating software and amending memory preferences in After Effects in an attempt to improve speed with no success.Can anyone suggest any reasons for this sluggish performance? I’ve more or less narrowed it down to OS X Lion not operating properly or a hard drive issue (both of which are disappointing considering how new the machine / software is). I’m contemplating a clean install of everything but just wondered if there was a less drastic course of action which could get the machine running smoothly again?
Thanks,
T.
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3 Replies
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A great way that you can check exactly what slowing down your Macintosh is to open up the activity monitor your utilities folder and leave it running while you do intensive activities like render.
Here will find 2 major culprits–something that’s eating up all of your processors and the observation of how much of a swap file was being used in the memory tab. If you utilizing a lot of swap files the speed of your hard drive would be a major reason that the machine is running slow, and that you’re hearing the hard drive chug quite a bit.
Best,
Jeff G
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It’s possible that your hard drive is dying as well. If OSX can’t easily read or write data to the disk, it would slow everything down tremendously.
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Use the activity monitor of your Mac OS X to evaluate the usage of memory, CPU and other resources. Must make sure to run this very utility and check it as well on regular intervals. You will know what is the virtual thing causing the slow performance of your system.
If nothing good comes out of it, you can try to reset system management Controller or the SMC: https://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964.
Besides, upgrade your RAM by adding additional memory to the Mac, uninstalling vague items which are not in use. Cleaning up browsing history, clear them, caches, cookies and the download history as well.Reference: https://www.boostmacperformance.com
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