iMac slowing down

digitalfailure

digitalfailure

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Brian
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My 24" iMac is starting to get a little bit laggy, how do you clean it and speed it up again?

There doesn't appear to be a defrag option, a google search threw up suggestions of repairing permissions, done that and all it did was repair stuff for Airport in just about every language the world has ever known.

Still very sluggish though when using CS4 if lightroom or firefox are open.

4gb of ram should be more than enough for the job, and indeed it was super speedy until about a month ago.
 
Brian, how much space do you have left and what appears to be slowing down?
 
Over 170gb free as I keep most stuff on ex hdd's

General slowness tbh, laggy mouse pointers, slow dropdown box opening etc.
 
I've had the same with my Macbook when using aperture. It seems to be when it overheats it will almost grind to a halt. Does the back of your IMac feel hotter than usual.
 
Try booting up in safe mode, then repairing the disk permissions. There's a very good clean up app called "onyx" which I rate very highly. Cleans out all the caches and others to refresh the computer.
 
To check for odd goings on with the System, you can use Activity Monitor to see what processes are running and the level of CPU, memory and HD activity. You'll find it in the Utilities folder in Applications. Once open, select "All Processes" from the pop-up menu on the top right, as the default view only shows the processes your user owns.
You can also check Console to view logs and check what messages are showing up. Sometimes a rogue app or process can go a bit nuts - Software Update seems to be a frequent offender - and fill the asl log. If this is happening, you'd notice a gradual reduction in free space on your boot drive and performance until you restart your Mac, when it'll clear the temp file and start again.

These are general "fix all" solutions and won't address a specific problem, but...

clear out the contents of /Library/Caches and ~/Library/Caches and restart
check your login items and see if anything launches other than the itunes helper, some apps will stick themselves in there to speed up launch, but it means the process is running from the minute you log in
check System Profiler and look under Diagnostics (POST reporting) and Memory (to check it still recognises both DIMMs)
rename the com.apple.finder.plist in ~/Library/Preferences

One final thing I can think of off the top of my head - do you have a mobile me account, and is it syncing your iDisk automatically? If so, turn it off!

Hope this helps :)
 
The only thing that has a noticeable impact on mine is the time machine backup.

The only solution I can offer is to swap the unit for a 27" model ;)
 
John....i'd love a 27" model, maybe later in the year though :D

I don't use mobileme, so that's not an issue.

I've been reading bits about night time maintenance scripts that never get run because the machine is off, can you manually invoke these?

All the activity looks ok tbh, it's not running out of ram, but still feels a bit bogged down compared to how it used to be.
 
If you're running Snow Leopard, have you got the latest update installed? There was a glitch in the graphics driver (certain cards only) in 10.6.4 and they've released a patch to cure it while they finish testing 10.6.5.
I had exactly the same on my Macbook, the patch has pretty much rectified things.

EDIT: This is the one I wa thinking of. From reading about it at the time, this seemd to clear up a lot of peoples issues, not just those with the software and hardware mentioned.
 
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Do you run any antivirus software? Coming from a PC background I naturally installed Sophos AV on my new iMac and was really worried for months that I should have stuck with the PC as the performance was awful. I removed antivirus a few months back and it has literally doubled the performance of the iMac.
 
Brian, get hold of a copy of OnyX (free download) Linky and give that a go. It will run all the maintenance scripts, clear caches etc etc
 
If you read my top tips I show you how to run all the maintenance scripts without installing Onyx. :D
 
Some people don't like, or are afraid of, running terminal scripts and prefer the GUI. OnyX also does so much more than just run these scripts, such as clearing caches etc.

Everything you can do with OnyX can be run from terminal but an App is so much more convenient most of the time.

As they say, 'there is more than 1 way to skin a cat' and I am all for making it as easy as possible.
 
[hangs head] Darren, I forgot to even look in the tips[/hangs head]

I've just checked in terminal for the times of the last running of the scripts and got this

Last login: Thu Sep 9 16:08:20 on ttys000
***********-imac:~ *********$ ls -al /var/log/*.out
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 13800 15 Aug 09:19 /var/log/daily.out
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 261 13 Feb 2010 /var/log/weekly.out

so I'm guessing it hasn't done it for a while, will force it now :D
 
I think I had issues running Onyx. Can't quite remember what but I know I removed it. I went back to occasionally running 'Maintenance' which does most of what Onyx does.
 
I'm not precious over the tips :)

Maintenance & Onyx are both good solutions as are others. I included the scripts as another way :)
 
I use Snow Leopard Cache Cleaner which is a little programme which runs all the scripts including the small file defrag. Used it on a number of friends machines and has sped them up one hell of a lot. If you want a good defrag programme I recommend IDefrag which you can run without having to have a start up disk
 
Brian. When/If you decide to get a 27" iMac give me a shout as I might be interested in the 24" and flog off my 17" iMac in the studio.
 
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