Speed up Mac Lion but first understand how your Mac works

Many users ask about “ Why my Mac is running slow” , How to speed up Mac Lion get out of this beach balling situation. Here we are explaining the working of computer and reasons of slow Mac lion.

Understand how your computer works and what you can/not change

Central Processing Unit - (CPU) is the brain where all the calculations are done. However Intel and AMD CPU's are now incorporating limited graphics processing ability called Integrated Graphics.The CPU's on Mac machine cannot be changed or upgraded. The only choice user remains with is to buy a new machine.

Random Access Memory - (RAM) it serves as a temporary memory for your CPU's (and Integrated Graphics). RAM is very fast, but volatile ie; its contents get erased if the power goes off. This is the reason why contents of your working material are saved to the more pernament boot drive. Accessing RAM is much faster than storage drive which is also used as extra memory (aka "Swap") to support RAM. RAM can be increased on Mac computers, more RAM usually results in more performance.

Mac Beach Ball

Video RAM - (VRAM) is referred to portion of RAM available to graphics rendering purposes. This cannot be increased or decreased by users but it raises with increase in RAM in some models of Mac.

Boot Drive – This refers to the drive (memory storage) which holds the OS - operating system that gets loaded into RAM as needed or requested. Boot drives can be replaced or upgraded. A drive with 5,400 RPM can be replaced with 7,200 RPM or even with an SSD, which of course would speed up Mac performance.

Interfaces – This refers to the medium which connects various devices or a CPU to RAM/memory. The faster an interface is, the faster the computer operates. For example SATA 3, 2, 1, Thunderbolt, FireWire 800, are faster than FireWire 400, USB 2,1. Its important to notice that the interfaces cannot be upgraded or changed.

Operating System - (OS) Sometimes newer versions of operating systems are much larger than the previous ones and have more hardware demands than your machine's supportability. OS can be upgraded, however there is no guaranty that it will speed up your Mac performance. For example keeping the hardware unchanged, OS X 10.7 (Mac Lion) is slower than 10.6 which is again faster than 10.5.

What is the average boot time in Mac

When your has no login items, no auto-start programs, no network connections, then the average boot time of Mac on a 5,400 RPM hard drive should be between 30-40 seconds. This decreases to 20 seconds on an SSD.

If the boot time goes beyond 1 minute, it is a matter of concern and there is something wrong and need to take some steps to speed up Mac by identifying the reasons of slow Mac booting.

What can cause a slowdown with Mac performance


Network related issues

You need to check whether your network is the only cause or is part of the problem. So, disconnect from your network and attempt the same tasks offline to see if your problem is related with computer or with the network. If your problem occurs only while you are online, then you need to fix the network issues first.

The purpose of this User Tip is to focus on computer issues, see this User Tip of possible WiFi/Internet related issues if or before you have eliminated the computer as the source of the slowdown. If it's not enough, call in a professional.

Browser based issues

Corrupted Caches

The caches are used by the OS X to load things faster, if these get corrupted/overbloaded then performance issues may occur. The issue can be fixed by cleaning all the system and other caches. The task is not something that requires to be done often as the basic need of cache is to speed up the machine's operation.

Less free space in Boot drive

Go to Activity Monitor in your Applications > Utilities folder and look at your Disk Usage.

If your boot drive is near full or about 80%, then you should take steps either to delete the unnecessary files or to move the important user files to another media and have some more free space in boot drive.

Not enough RAM for OS X and other programs

As explained earlier, the higher versions of OS X need more resources so please check if your machine has RAM, as per the requirements of new OS X.

10.8 users may have to System Preferences > Security > General > set downloads to "Anywhere" to install software from the web.

Too many programs running at once, runaway process

Go to your Activity Monitor -> CPU ->All Processes. Here, you can check the list of processes and amount of RAM they are consuming, too many at once will over load your RAM and slow down your machine, and in Mac Lion 10.7 slow down your boot time.

Bad sector effect the process and slow read speed of your computer

Sectors sometimes fail and thus create problems for OS X to read files from the disk. There is an automatic mechanism adopted by driver software to map off these failing sectors and place your data on another sector, but it is comparatively a slower process and causes slight beachballing effects, slow reads etc.

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