Slow Mini

[Steve_J]

Recently, my MacMini has slowed down in all phases. Booting, loading apps, downloading from the internet, etc. I've run several cleanup and maintenance programs to no avail. Suggestions.

[Xairbusdriver]

How much space left on the drive?

How much RAM?

What OS?

How many apps running at the same time?

[jchuzi]

QUOTE(Steve_J @ Aug 25 2013, 02:36 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I've run several cleanup and maintenance programs to no avail.

Which ones? What did you have them do?

[Steve_J]

Here's the info requested:

My MacMini has a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 duo, running OSX 10.6.8, with 2 GB RAM, a 308 GB hard drive with 259 GB available. I run anywhere from 0 (at boot) to 5 apps. Four run in the background; TechTool Protection, MacAfee Internet Security, DashLand and Time Machine. Plus whatever app I'm running or starting up at the time: Such as Safari, Excel, Word, iPhoto, iTunes, Mail, etc. Only one of these at a time.

The cleanup utilities I've run are; Disk Utilitiy's First Aid, MacKeeper's Cleanup and Optimization, Spring Cleaning's Maintenance, TuneUpMyMac's System Cleaner, Logs Cleaner, and App Optimization, and TechTool Pro's SMART, Volume Structures, Video Memory, File Structures, Rebuild Volume, File Optimization, Volume Optimization, and Repair Permissions.

Hope this helps.

[Xairbusdriver]

Thanks, Steve, here are some ideas/opinions from me. Others will probably have different ones. Hopefully, we'll get some effective speed improvements for you!

QUOTE

Four run in the background; TechTool Protection, MacAfee Internet Security, DashLand and Time Machine.

MacAfee Internet Security: It may give you a good feeling if you run it once a week or so, otherwise, until a Mac malware shows up "in the wild" it's just consuming CPU cycles.
Have no idea what Dashland does.
TT Protection may eventually help you.
Time Machine should be running only a few seconds at a time and only once an hour. If it takes longer, there could be a problem there.

I'd suggest turning all those (except TM) OFF, and do a complete Shutdown/Startup. Leave them OFF for a couple of days (don't forget to change your Startup Items) and look for improvements.

I'd be surprised if those Utilities did much besides what Disk Utility does. OS X, at least 6 and up do a great job of keeping your drives "optimized" anyway. I simply don't trust any "clean up" apps to know what they are doing; remove one wrong file and you end up needing a complete System re-install. YMMV. I do know Disk Warrior can do more with the disk's Directories when DU can't do anything!

As for the apps you use "one at a time" Word and maybe Excel can certainly be memory hogs. iPhoto, iTunes and Mail can also use a lot of processor power, at least if you have large libraries and/or do a lot of editing. Browsers tend to use lots of space if you like to use lots of tabs or multiple windows.

2GB is just about the minimum recommended for OS X, I think. And I'm not sure what you mean by "one at a time." My wife and I've seen it happen with windows switchers, thinks closing an app's window(s) also closes the app. A quick command-tab will easily show you foreground apps are running. But if you're using command-Q, you already know how to really Quit an app.

Finally, open Activity Monitor and select "All Processes" and then click on the "CPU" column header to see what's using the most cpu power. Also look at the memory columns, especially "Virtual Mem" to see what's using your drive a lot. Disk "memory" (Virtual memory) is much , much slower than real memory (RAM). With only 2GB of RAM, your disk may be getting a real workout! BTW, you can select what columns are displayed by using the View->Columns item in Activity Monitor. Near the bottom of the AM window there are some tabs that may provide some interesting info. In the newer versions, selecting the "System Memory" tab will give you an updating total size of virtual memory usage, Page ins/outs can also be important.

If you start up each of those primary apps and take a screen shot of DU for each one, you might recognize which one(s) are the most intensive users of memory and your cpus. "Free" memory might be interesting, also. If those numbers are quite high, post the image, if you can, or just report the CPU %, Virtual Mem sizes/amounts and "Free" memory numbers.

If you'd like to see a really slow computer, start up all those apps and open some work you've done in each one!

[Jack W]

If you completely shut down occasionally, that might help.
Stuff tends to eat up memory without releasing it - a shut down cures that.

I don't use some of the maintenance apps you use.

I use OnyX and Applejack a couple or so times a month.

Those seem to do a good job of keeping my iMac 27" w/4GB of memory healthy and running with very few burps.

Also, as Jim said, 2GB of RAM is rock bottom.
I'd bet you are getting a lot of swapping.

I also agree with Jim on the MacAfee software.

FWIW,

Jack

[Paddy]

Steve, as Jack says, with 2GB of RAM, there may be a lot of swapping going on - by that we really mean that your hard disk is being used to store things that otherwise would have been stored in RAM if you had enough.

The way to check this is to look at Activity Monitor and under the Memory tab, look to see what your Page Ins are, vs your Page Outs. If you have a lot of Page Outs (significantly more than your Page Ins, in particular) your computer is short of RAM.

Reading and writing from your HD is a much slower process than reading and writing from RAM; hence the slowdowns.

See: http://macintoshhowto.com/hardware/does-my...ore-memory.html

So, have a look in Activity Monitor and report back.

My bet is that you need to feed your Mini some more RAM. You can put up to 8GB in it on 10.6.8 - if you upgrade to 10.7.5 (min) you can put 16GB on it. Your choice. If it was me, I'd get the 16GB, put 8 in, and then wait for Mavericks and install the rest. It's possible you will have to upgrade to 10.8 first, but you may not have to do that - 10.8 can be installed without installing 10.7 first. Is there any reason you're running 10.6.8 instead of 10.8? (I like 10.8, but then I generally keep fairly up to date with my OS, 'cept when it comes to the disaster known as Windows 8. )

8GB kit $85 from OWC: http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20Wor...g/8566DDR3S8GP/
16GB kit is about twice that.
Slightly cheaper at Data Memory, where I always used to buy my RAM when living in the US: http://www.datamemorysystems.com/apple-mac...emory-upgrades/

And as for your background apps, I'm with Jim. Disable the lot of them, except for TimeMachine. There is absolutely no need to run something like McAfee all the time. Really.

Did you mean "Dashlane" - the password manager, by any chance? There is no app called "Dashland" that I can find.

As for the maintenance routines - very little of what you're doing is actually necessary. See: http://www.macworld.com/article/1133684/ma...ance_intro.html

And get rid of MacKeeper - I don't know how you got hornswoggled into that, but many of us have been warning for years that it's utterly unnecessary scareware, and may in fact cause damage. See: https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3123

The only think I'd trust among those apps (other than DU, of course) is TechTool. The rest are unnecessary. I do use Onyx once in a blue moon, and the other app I wouldn't be without is DiskWarrior (which I just realize I now need to stick on a USB stick, since there is no optical drive on this Retina!). DW has saved my bacon on occasion when Disk Utility threw up its hands and said it couldn't fix some directory error. I generally only run maintenance apps when things go wrong - and they don't go wrong very often in my experience.

If my Mac Pro starts getting pokey after many weeks of up time, I just restart it - 99.99% of the time, that cures it.

[Steve_J]

QUOTE(Paddy @ Sep 1 2013, 04:54 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

The way to check this is to look at Activity Monitor and under the Memory tab, look to see what your Page Ins are, vs your Page Outs. If you have a lot of Page Outs (significantly more than your Page Ins, in particular) your computer is short of RAM.

So, have a look in Activity Monitor and report back.

My bet is that you need to feed your Mini some more RAM. You can put up to 8GB in it on 10.6.8 - if you upgrade to 10.7.5 (min) you can put 16GB on it. Your choice. If it was me, I'd get the 16GB, put 8 in, and then wait for Mavericks and install the rest. It's possible you will have to upgrade to 10.8 first, but you may not have to do that - 10.8 can be installed without installing 10.7 first. Is there any reason you're running 10.6.8 instead of 10.8? (I like 10.8, but then I generally keep fairly up to date with my OS, 'cept when it comes to the disaster known as Windows 8. )

And as for your background apps, I'm with Jim. Disable the lot of them, except for TimeMachine. There is absolutely no need to run something like McAfee all the time. Really.

Did you mean "Dashlane" - the password manager, by any chance? There is no app called "Dashland" that I can find.

And get rid of MacKeeper - I don't know how you got hornswoggled into that, but many of us have been warning for years that it's utterly

Paddy, Jack and Xairbusdriver (Jim)

Many thanks to all for your helpful advice.

I have done the following recommendations: Turned them off all background programs except Time Machine and DashLane;
I normally use TechTool and Disk Utility for maintenance and troubleshooting. I don't have a current DW, but I have used it in the past. I have used ONYX for emptying trash that I could not get rid of any other way. The others I tried to see if they might be of help and as I said,  they were not. I'll probably relegate them to archives;

In Activity Monitor, I have 22GB Page Ins and 8GB Page Outs. This is after turning off the suggested backgrounds which does seem to be helping;

Am planning on getting extra memory, how much is the question. 8 GB is max for the MiniMac4,1. Why would upgrading to a newer OS make it capable of utilizing more RAM? I thought that was a physical hardware limitation. 16 GB seems like overkill if I could only use half of it until I upgrade which I usually don't do until programs I want to run require it.

What is Mavericks;

I completely shut down every night;

I think that responds to all of your suggestions. Again, thank you all so much for your input.

[jchuzi]

QUOTE

What is Mavericks

Mavericks is OS 10.9, to be released soon.

[Xairbusdriver]

QUOTE

...open Activity Monitor and select "All Processes" and then click on the "CPU" column header to see what's using the most cpu power. Also look at the memory columns, especially "Virtual Mem" to see what's using your drive a lot. Disk "memory" (Virtual memory) is much , much slower than real memory (RAM). With only 2GB of RAM, your disk may be getting a real workout! BTW, you can select what columns are displayed by using the View->Columns item in Activity Monitor. Near the bottom of the AM window there are some tabs that may provide some interesting info. In the newer versions, selecting the "System Memory" tab will give you an updating total size of virtual memory usage, Page ins/outs can also be important.

If you start up each of those primary apps and take a screen shot of DU for each one, you might recognize which one(s) are the most intensive users of memory and your cpus. "Free" memory might be interesting, also. If those numbers are quite high, post the image, if you can, or just report the CPU %, Virtual Mem sizes/amounts and "Free" memory numbers.

Just for grins, I'm now running Safari and Chrome with two different videos playing, Pages, Fetch, Mail, iTunes video, iStmbler (monitors web usage), PathFinder (Finder replacement), SpamSieve, URLM Pro, Photoshot Elements and Activity Monitor. In the back ground are DropBox, Growl, DefaultFolderX, Typinator, ClamX Security, a clipboard replacement, GlimmerBlocker and the normal assortment of Pref Panels. Some of those apps are really doing anything unless something is edited or created. During the startup and running of this stuff, I managed to get the Page ins up to 787.9 MB. Page outs have not reported anything, but that would certainly change if I did some editing/creation activity, I'm sure. VM Size is shown as 379.4 GB. These apps and the OS are using ~5.5 GB. All this shows is that with "only" 8 GB of memory, one can have a lot going on without slowing things down with Virtual Memory.

I'm suspecting that most of your Virtual Memory is being created when the apps are started. Each one you start requires many of the others to send stuff back to the drive so there's room for the 'new kid on the block!' And when any of those need to perform some task, they have to re-load it from the drive. And unless you replaced the mini's drive, it's probably running at 5400 rpm, that's kinda the standard for laptops and the lower end iMacs. Higher end drives are ~40% faster.

Obviously, having apps that are actually performing tasks instead of simply 'waiting' to be used will increase cpu usage. But most apps will off load as much code as possible if they don't need it to perform whatever they do the most. When they need that code, they will reload it from the drive (Page In). That's why they would then run slower, it takes a lot of time to have that stuff re-loaded into RAM. And the OS will probably require other apps to send more of their code to the drive (Page Out). That means when you switch back to those apps, they may have to do the whole Page IN/OUT routine, also. Minimum RAM is like disabling all but one cylinder in your cars engine. It will still run but not enjoyably!

BTW, Quitting Elements, Mail, Safari, iTunes and Fetch reduce the GB used to 4.5GB without changing the other figures perceptibly.