My applications run really slowly.

The attractive interface of OS X comes at a price—every drop shadow, translucent menu, and spinning rainbow requires processing speed and memory (RAM) to run. We’ve also noticed that since OS X is so good at multitasking, users tend to run many applications at the same time. That, too, requires more memory.

You will probably never see an error in Mac OS X complaining that your Mac is out of memory. Instead, your system will begin using more and more of your hard disk as temporary RAM storage. This is called paging out, and it slows down your Mac considerably.

To see for yourself, open Activity Monitor from Applications/Utilities. This shows every process running on your Mac, its usage of the CPU, memory, and virtual memory. At the bottom of the main window, select System Memory. Check that the number of Page outs isn’t growing quickly over time. Read Apple's Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor for more details.

Here are some things to try to speed things up again:

1. Check the Dock frequently to see what is running (indicated by a small black triangle or blue ball next to the application icon), and quit the applications you aren’t using. Remember that closing an application’s windows does not quit the application. To quit, click the application’s icon in the Dock, open the application menu (named Word, iTunes, Safari, etc.) and choose Quit Word (Quit iTunes, Quit Safari, etc.) You can also hold down the application’s icon in the Dock, and choose Quit in the small menu that pops up.
2. Always keep at least 10 GB of the storage space on your hard drive free. Too little empty space on your startup hard drive will slow a system to a snail’s pace. To check the disk space, click once on the icon of your startup disk and choose Get Info from the Finder menu. If you don’t see the hard disk icon, choose Finder > Preferences, click General and then select Hard Disks. Once you’ve selected your hard disk, press Command-I (for “Get Info”). Disk space used and available is shown under General. You may need to click the triangle next to General to reveal the information.
3. Check Activity Monitor from Applications/Utilities, and select the column header labeled “%CPU.” The application or process using most of your system will be listed first. (Note: “mdimport” is the process to add data to Spotlight and “WindowServer” manages your Mac’s graphical interface.) It’s better to quit bloated applications normally than use the Quit Process button you see here. If you don’t recognize the process, search for it online to figure out what it is. Quitting processes can cause you to lose unsaved work and make your Mac perform strangely.
4. Add more RAM to your system. Tekserve’s RAM Guide shows you how to figure out how much RAM you have and how much RAM we recommend for different applications. If you bring your Mac to Tekserve, we’ll help you decide how much RAM you need and we’ll install it for you while you wait. Tekserve RAM is guaranteed for life.
5. Revise your expectations. A three-year-old iMac will never be as snappy as the latest Quad-core Intel Core i7 processor.

Published March 24, 2009 12:00 PM
Last modified on November 25, 2011 12:12 PM