Slow MBP. Beachballs. Where to start?

milltown

Early 2011 13" MBP running OSX 10.8.4 with 8GB RAM and all available updates installed. 50GB free on the 320GB hdd.

More and more often lately it becomes unresponsive for a few seconds and/or the cursor turns into the beachball. It can happen while doing anything, moving files around in finder or even just browsing the web in Chrome.

I'm a fairly recent Mac convert so I'm not sure where to start with the troubleshooting. It's kept backed up on a time machine so it's no big deal to reinstall the OS and restore it but I'd rather learn a bit poking about under the bonnet before I go for last resorts.

Liameter

Beachballing very often indicates the Mac is trying to read/save to the Hard Drive. As yours has less than the recommended 20% free space, I'd try shifting files to an external drive then deleting them off the internal. Start with the largest (e.g. movies).

Nemeses

Try doing the following:

-Empty the trash
-Clear your downloads folder
- Repair disk permissions & reboot
- Delete /library/caches content
- Delete ~/library/caches content
- Check startup items (Apple menu -> System preferences -> Users & Groups -> login items
- Delete /library/launchagent content
- Delete /library/launchdaemons

Reboot.

Let me know how you get on.

Liameter

I had another thought. Have you perchance installed "MacKeeper" or similar "clean your Mac" application? If so, do a search for how to get rid.

milltown

Liameter wrote: »

I had another thought. Have you perchance installed "MacKeeper" or similar "clean your Mac" application? If so, do a search for how to get rid.

LOL, no. I'm not that green.

Will try all the other stuff later and report back, although I'm pretty OCD about emptying the bin already, so that's not it. Will possibly need to give it a few days to know if it's sorted though, 'cos the problem comes and goes.

Did I read somewhere before that if time machine is set up that it "bundles up" the back-up offline (potentially taking up gigs of hdd space) in preparation for when it's next connected to the backup drive?

Thanks peeps!

Sad Professor

I doubt it's that.

If it were me I'd be running Activity Monitor to see if there was rogue background process or misbehaving app that was using a lot of CPU. I'd also be casting a suspicious eye over my most used apps, even my most trusted ones. After that I'd be considering the possibility that my hard drive is dying. Run Disk Utility and make sure you have a recent backup.

I never do any maintenance on any of my Macs btw and they both run perfectly. The only time I ever did do maintenance was in the very early 10.0 days of Mac OS X before Apple properly optimised the system (a nice way of saying it was unusably slow). I tried everything, including setting up a swap partition. It didn't make any difference then either.

Elessar

Also, run the cleanup scripts. Open Terminal and type "sudo periodic daily weekly monthly" without the quotes and press enter.

Run the apple hardware test aswell (though I'm not sure that was included in the more recent macs?)

skerry

Having the same problem with my Macbook, beach ball city any time I try do pretty much anything. Think I have about 80GB free on a 320GB HD. Have tried Onyx to run permissions which improves things briefly and then it's back to the beach balls pretty soon.

Is there anything I can do myself clean up wise that the likes of Onyx aren't doing and is Onyx a good tool to be using? Might try upgrade RAM currently have 2 gigs (I think)

milltown

First things tried were:
Disk permissions - Seemed to find a load of them to repair. No idea if this is normal or not.
Verify Disk - Got so far then told me the disk needed to be repaired.
Repair Disk - Started to repair then said it needed to run from boot, holding cmd+R while booting then choosing disk utility and repairing from there. Finished that, then verified again without issue.

I'll give it a few days now and report back.

BTW, why should emptying the downloads folder make any difference? Is it not like any other folder on the system?

Nemeses

milltown wrote: »

BTW, why should emptying the downloads folder make any difference? Is it not like any other folder on the system?

Space (Your hard drive seemed a bit low on space), If you do a lotta browsing and downloading... Then it hangs out here.
I've come across folders that are about 10-20 gbs due to people forgetting about them.

Other than that - They do no harm

Sad Professor

skerry wrote: »

Having the same problem with my Macbook, beach ball city any time I try do pretty much anything. Think I have about 80GB free on a 320GB HD. Have tried Onyx to run permissions which improves things briefly and then it's back to the beach balls pretty soon.

Is there anything I can do myself clean up wise that the likes of Onyx aren't doing and is Onyx a good tool to be using? Might try upgrade RAM currently have 2 gigs (I think)

Do your Mac a favour and delete OnyX. It's possibly the cause of your problems. Verify the hard disk using Disk Utility and make sure you don't have any rogue background processes using Activity Monitor.

When you are getting beachballs a lot it usually suggests there's a problem. Doing maintenance tasks that the system automatically does itself anyway is unlikely to solve anything. Disk Utility should be your first port of call.

Colonel Panic

Just to echo what SP is saying about maintenance and assorted repair utilities. There is no need for them.

My MBP's gone from 10.6 -> 10.7 -> 10.8 and assorted development tool added and removed and has seen over 2 years of heavy use and it's still incredibly snappy and was even before I put an SSD into it.

Likewise, the machine it replaced came with 10.5 and make it to 10.7 without ever skipping a beat.

milltown

Nemeses wrote: »

Space (Your hard drive seemed a bit low on space), If you do a lotta browsing and downloading... Then it hangs out here.
I've come across folders that are about 10-20 gbs due to people forgetting about them.

Other than that - They do no harm

Fair enough. I'm still learning Macs so I wondered if the system treated the downloads folder differently to others. I seem to recall reading on here that having too much on the desktop can slow a Mac down.

Thanks.

Nemeses

milltown wrote: »

Fair enough. I'm still learning Macs so I wondered if the system treated the downloads folder differently to others. I seem to recall reading on here that having too much on the desktop can slow a Mac down.

Thanks.

Aye it can do as it as well, a few items is fine but Geez I've seen desktops with WAY too much stuff on it.


Folders as far as the eye can see..

taylorconor95

zIf you're using TimeMachine with local backups it's gonna store some backup data on your HD too.

Run

sudo tmutil disablelocal

to stop these local backups (External HD backups will not be affected at all, neither will your current backups).

Of course you can always re-enable it:

sudo tmutil enablelocal

drunkmonkey

Can you delete everything in your downloads folder without loosing anything eg music or apps?
Once it's in the trash is it safe to delete from there as well?