imac Gb 300, Gb 4 ram firefox 3.6

Since yesterday, my imac has really slowed down. After clicking "new topic" it took over a minute for the window to appear. I erased free space, then repaired permissions and then using onyx, under systems, deleted the enabled cache. None of which has made a difference but I thought I'd try anyway.
What else should I do? I havn't downloaded anything.

jaybass

When you say "After clicking 'new topic'" are you talking about on Finetunedmac? Cause I've noticed it's been running a bit slow for the past few days. Don't think that has anything to do with your computer, more to do with our hosting ISP.

A few more details might be useful. First, what model iMac do you have? (I assume "Gb 4 ram" means you have 4 GB of RAM installed, but I'm not sure about "Gb 300"—does that mean a 300 GB hard drive?) I note in some of your other posts you mention running OS X 10.5.8. Is that still the case, or have you replaced that with Leopard?

I take it the slowdown persisted through a restart or restarts? How much free space does your hard drive have available?

Is the slow behavior accompanied by a spinning "beach ball" cursor? If so, it's likely that some application or system process is hogging processor time; you can check this by launching Activity Monitor (in /Applications/Utilities) and clicking on the CPU column heading in the main Activity Monitor window (if the little arrow next to CPU is pointing up, click once more to display the list in descending order). If the beachballing or other sluggish behavior corresponds to high CPU values for one particular process, that strongly suggests that that process is to blame for your problem.

OS 10.5.8 Leopard. imac model 9.1 4 GB ram 300 GB HD

Space available 235.58: Used: 62.19

There is no spinning beach ball. I hope this screen shot is okay.

jaybass

[img]CPU[/img]

It doesn't look like my screen shot succeeded.
BTW, Just how do you include a screen shot?

jaybass

you need to have your image hosted somewhere like imageshack or me.com and then link us to the url

Does this tell you anything?

jaybass



http://imageshack.us/

wrong again!

[url=file:///Users/jondan/Desktop/CPU%20.png][/url]

Hello, jaybass

I am not sure if this reply will be of any help, but let's see what happens.

I did not register at ImageShack, but have uploaded an image from my computer's desktop to that site.

After a successful upload was reported, I clicked on the "View full size" link.

I copied the url for the image and pasted it here:

http://img399.imageshack.us/img399/845/tulip.png

The same address is listed under Links to share your image: for "Direct Link"

http://img399.imageshack.us/img399/845/tulip.png

By not registering, my image will not be saved so I don't know how that will impact what happens when the tulip.png link is clicked. It is currently okay when previewing my post before clicking the "Submit" button.

http://img251.imageshack.us/img251/7643/cpurh.png

Does this tell you anything?

jaybass

OK, that screenshot came through. Now you want to do that again, but this time after clicking on the CPU column heading to sort the window by CPU use as DK suggested earlier.

That said, there doesn’t seem to be all that much overall activity in your first screenshot (about 96% idle) to account for your slowdown. The idea is to have Activity Monitor running sorted by CPU usage, and go about your normal computing to take a screenshot when you experience a slowdown like the one(s) prompting this thread.

In addition to sorting for CPU you should select "All Processes" rather than the "My..." that's selected in your screenshot.

Have you recently added a lot of files to the top level of your desktop? In Leopard, files on the desktop are treated as windows by the Window Manager, and that degrades performance.

Using the Finder’s Go to Folder feature in the Go menu, see how large the current swapfiles are. The path to the swapfiles is:

/private/var/vm

Do NOT do anything to the swapfiles.

Thanks for posting that. I've never run across that tidbit, and it adds a whole new dimension to the long-standing problem of overloaded desktops.

Close to a dozen times I've seen a machine come in with over 1000 items on the desktop. Usually from someone doing a file search for say, MP3 or JPG, and selecting all, and dragging to their desktop.

The computer becomes essentially unusable since there are so many "windows" on the screen at once, overlapping many layers deep. Easiest way to fix that is to boot into FW target and get in there and make a folder in their desktop folder, and move everything into it. It's not even worth the time of trying to do that simple thing while booted up on it.

I personally strive to keep only a single vertical column of icons on my desktop, two at the most at any given time. I can't stand it when I am working on someone's computer and for example, plug in a flash drive and have to HUNT for where it landed on the desktop.

Excellent point, but this phenomenon predates Leopard (see A simple but effective Mac speed-up tip) and as described there, may be further investigated by running Quartz Debug.

afaik, all versions of os x treat icons as windows.

I'd have to search the macfixit archives, but i seem to remember posting this link at one time or another:

Windows of Perception

The "⌘⇧4 plus spacebar" technique is especially illustrative.

Indeed, this particular issue has been discussed before, on several occasions. While posting the MacOSX Hints article above I did a quick search in the archives, but only found the relatively recent thread how to speed up a Mac? where desktop clutter is mentioned as a cause of slowdowns, but I recall earlier instances I haven't yet been able to locate.

At any rate, I have been suggesting various friends and family members for years to keep their desktops clean and to move sundry temporary items they don't yet want to part with into a special folder organized by Date Modified.

So, regardless of how often it has been brought up before, I think this issue warrants repeating here.

> The "⌘⇧4 plus spacebar" technique is especially illustrative.

Indeed it is! (I have no recollection of ever having followed that link, but...)

I've always been aware of the value of keeping my desktop clear; I just don't remember having run across the "windows" aspect of the issue before.