Mac Pro performance decrease???

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digital disastadigital disasta
Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
I have realized in the past few days my Mac Pro has gotten slower, and for the life of me I don't know why. I see the beach ball a lot more now, when opening the same program a few weeks ago I didn't. I have also realized that doing certain things that I do all the time, have now gotten slower. Is there anything I can do to fix this, or something that could help me figure out the problem? This is my first Mac so I really don't know EVERYTHING about them....What do I do?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 11
    slewisslewis Posts: 2,081member
    Um... How large are the HDD (s) how many HDDs, and how much space out of that are you using?



    Sebastian
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  • Reply 2 of 11
    robmrobm Posts: 1,068member
    Be agettin a copy of DiskWarrior.

    There are other apps as well but I've hung my hat on DW for so long that I can't be bothered with anything else for a good old fashioned workover.

    Saved my bacon many a time - and plenty of others out there. I use it regularly - at least once/month on my boot disc.

    http://www.alsoft.com/
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  • Reply 3 of 11
    noah93noah93 Posts: 168member
    Odd, I've kinda had the same problem with my MP. I had thought it was because alot of my apps aren't UB, but, turns out that they are, so I'm just as clueless as you. At times I can find that my PB is faster than my MP at certain tasks, which is a disgrace for a $3000 machine.



    Mac Pro:

    2 x 2.66 GHz

    1 x 160 GB HDD } Unused (Installing Windoze)

    2 x 300 GB HDD } Used ~320 GB

    2 x 512 MB RAM

    1 x ATi Radeon X1900 XT (512 MB RAM)

    2 x Apple Superdrive



    PowerBook:

    1 x IBM PPC G4 @ 1.5 GHz

    1 x 80 GB HDD } Used ~67 GB

    1 x 512 MB RAM

    1 x NVidea GeForce FX Go5200 (64 MB RAM)



    Noah
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  • Reply 4 of 11
    jamie240jamie240 Posts: 7member
    Wow. Threads like this make me nervous when I'm thinking about buying a new Apple laptop to replace my PowerBook. \
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  • Reply 5 of 11
    slewisslewis Posts: 2,081member
    Well I found out recently reading other threads that if too much of your HDD is used up, a Mac can slow down because it takes longer to find the Application and launch it on the HDD. So I figure, if you have a lot of HDDs (you can have up to 4) in your Mac Pro, it must be the same because it must take longer for the CPU to retrieve the proper information from the HDDs, and if they are fairly large, even longer.



    I believe someone is working on Storage Processing units, perhaps Apple would consider putting one of these in their Workstations to decrease the latency, because as we all know, the HDD is the slowest part of any given computer.



    Sebastian
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  • Reply 6 of 11
    santasanta Posts: 67member
    G'day



    Have you....



    ? Repaired Permissions?



    ? Run the Cron Scripts?



    ? Ensured you have at least 10% of the boot drive free?



    The Cron Scripts are supposed to run automatically during the day under the latest version of Tiger, but running them manually might fix your problem.



    Use the free utility Maintenance to run the scripts.



    http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs/english.html



    Regards



    Santa
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  • Reply 7 of 11
    jeffdmjeffdm Posts: 12,954member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by noah93 View Post


    Odd, I've kinda had the same problem with my MP. I had thought it was because alot of my apps aren't UB, but, turns out that they are, so I'm just as clueless as you. At times I can find that my PB is faster than my MP at certain tasks, which is a disgrace for a $3000 machine.



    Mac Pro:

    2 x 2.66 GHz

    1 x 160 GB HDD } Unused (Installing Windoze)

    2 x 300 GB HDD } Used ~320 GB

    2 x 512 MB RAM

    1 x ATi Radeon X1900 XT (512 MB RAM)

    2 x Apple Superdrive



    PowerBook:

    1 x IBM PPC G4 @ 1.5 GHz

    1 x 80 GB HDD } Used ~67 GB

    1 x 512 MB RAM

    1 x NVidea GeForce FX Go5200 (64 MB RAM)



    Noah



    I'm surprised that you are getting away with such little memory on those two systems. I really can't explain why the Mac Pro is behaving so slowly in comparison though.
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  • Reply 8 of 11
    noah93noah93 Posts: 168member
    Santa, yes I have run my cron/maintenence/repair/[insert other script here] scripts, still goes awfully slow.



    JeffDM, yeah, me too. I am looking to add another 4 GB to the MP, but I rarely use the PB, and 512 was alot when I got it, so I'll leaver her alone.



    Oh, and just to mention, my drives are in a striped RAID, if that makes any difference.



    Noah
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  • Reply 9 of 11
    jeffdmjeffdm Posts: 12,954member
    Other than maybe trying AppleJack and adding memory, your problem has me lost. Maybe you can check Apple's support forums.
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  • Reply 10 of 11
    digital disastadigital disasta Posts: 495member
    Well my specs for the Mac Pro are in my Sig. I keep all my apps on the 250 drive (not even a 1/4 full), and the 500 gig drive I use for all my projects, and mp3s. With the second drive I have iTunes keep my music organized in folders. This could be my problem I think, being that I have a TON of music...I mean...A LOT. iTunes just prob has a hard time searching through all the folders. I haven't noticed a decrease in performance where it REALLY matters. Like in C4D or anything like that, just these little applications like iTunes, or sometimes Camino will take a second to load. I wish there was a way to reverse the iTunes folder stuff, but I'm not to worried about it now being that I figured out the problem (hopefully) lol.
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  • Reply 11 of 11
    jeffdmjeffdm Posts: 12,954member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Digital Disasta View Post


    Well my specs for the Mac Pro are in my Sig. I keep all my apps on the 250 drive (not even a 1/4 full), and the 500 gig drive I use for all my projects, and mp3s. With the second drive I have iTunes keep my music organized in folders. This could be my problem I think, being that I have a TON of music...I mean...A LOT. iTunes just prob has a hard time searching through all the folders. I haven't noticed a decrease in performance where it REALLY matters. Like in C4D or anything like that, just these little applications like iTunes, or sometimes Camino will take a second to load. I wish there was a way to reverse the iTunes folder stuff, but I'm not to worried about it now being that I figured out the problem (hopefully) lol.



    If iTunes is the main program that you are complaining about, then the large library explains the difference between computers as the program seems to spend some of its time loading the database information.



    I didn't read all of it, but this article seems to explain why it might be sluggish when iTunes is dealing with a lot of files:



    http://theappleblog.com/2005/12/13/i...tabase-issues/



    If your notebook has a much smaller library then there will be a noticeable speed difference. There is a chance that there is some corruption in the database files too, you might try to rebuild the database. You would lose your play counts and rating information though.
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