SLUGGISH MacBook Pro 17" (2GB RAM)

sport73sport73
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
Anyone experience sluggishness with their 2Ghz MacBook Pro. My 17" beauty has 2GB of RAM, but lately is slower than my 867Mhz G4 Powerbook. It just stalls up launching multiple applications. Mail frequently refuses to quit; I can pretty much rule out running Parallels, and anytime I have a Rosetta application open that app and everything else just chugs.



The machine still 'sees' the 2GB of RAM, so I'm just not sure what to do?



I've tried repairing permissions etc.



NOTE: I have installed a Bootcamp partitition, but can't recall the slow-down beginning with that install.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 6
    aryayusharyayush Posts: 191member
    It's the way Mac OS X handles RAM. It loads every application into the memory when it is launched but does not remove it when you close the app but keeps it stored in the inactive memory. Eventually, your entire memory gets filled with mostly inactive memory in half an hour and you machine becomes slow/unresponsive. This is what happens on my MacBook Pro 17" Core Duo 2.16GHz. I have 2GB of memory too. People here say that it is a good way of allocating memory, I say it's crap!
  • Reply 2 of 6
    gregmightdothatgregmightdothat Posts: 1,709member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by aryayush


    It's the way Mac OS X handles RAM. It loads every application into the memory when it is launched but does not remove it when you close the app but keeps it stored in the inactive memory. Eventually, your entire memory gets filled with mostly inactive memory in half an hour and you machine becomes slow/unresponsive. This is what happens on my MacBook Pro 17" Core Duo 2.16GHz. I have 2GB of memory too. People here say that it is a good way of allocating memory, I say it's crap!



    No, it's because you don't understand how it works.



    Inactive memory just gets written over like free memory when you open up a new application.



    Either way they both take exactly the same time.



    There is absolutely no performance loss from caching inactive memory, and loads of performance gains.
  • Reply 3 of 6
    gregmightdothatgregmightdothat Posts: 1,709member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Sport73


    Anyone experience sluggishness with their 2Ghz MacBook Pro. My 17" beauty has 2GB of RAM, but lately is slower than my 867Mhz G4 Powerbook. It just stalls up launching multiple applications. Mail frequently refuses to quit; I can pretty much rule out running Parallels, and anytime I have a Rosetta application open that app and everything else just chugs.



    The machine still 'sees' the 2GB of RAM, so I'm just not sure what to do?



    I've tried repairing permissions etc.



    NOTE: I have installed a Bootcamp partitition, but can't recall the slow-down beginning with that install.



    Maybe try a reinstall? Rosetta applications slow things down a lot, they're really RAM intensive, meaning that when you load one, it'll pretty much take over all your RAM, which pushes everything else to the hard drive.



    It sounds like you probably have a cache problem somewhere, there's probably an easy way to clean those w/o a reinstall, but I've never had to.
  • Reply 4 of 6
    sport73sport73 Posts: 438member
    I'll probably do a reinstall soon, but I was still hoping there was another way...Since obviously the best reinstall is to re-build the OS from scratch and re-install all applications etc. If you have any other suggestions, keep them coming.



    Thanks!
  • Reply 5 of 6
    lundylundy Posts: 4,466member
    No need to do a clean install. Just do an Archive and Install and see what happens. No need to replace any of your apps.



    Then, if there is no improvement, there are some more troubleshooting steps.
  • Reply 6 of 6
    talksense101talksense101 Posts: 1,738member
    Try this link: http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/performance.html
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