slow downloads

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jimward5

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I have been running slow for a week or so and cannot find the reason. My activity monitor shows crash report every 10 second or so. is this normal or do I have a problem?
I'm new here so be "gentle"
 
Can you tell us a few things about your Mac?
Which Mac do you have?
What version of OS X are you running?
How much RAM memory is installed?
and finally - How much free space do you have on your hard drive? (That would also be space available on your hard drive)

I _don't_ think the Activity Monitor shows crash reports. Usually, all you see is a process that might show "Stopped Responding", or the CPU may show high CPU use for a particular process. Be sure that the process drop down in Activity Monitor shows All Processes, and not just My Processes.
You should also be able to determine which process is showing problems.
What's the name of that process?

You can also go into your Console (in your Applications, then the Utilities folder, and open the Console), and look through the system.log - which will be listed by time and date. That log can be quite large, and scrolling down to the approximate date and time can help you look for other system messages that you recorded in the log. You can copy and paste a few relevant lines here. 20 or 30 lines should be sufficient.
 
Can you tell us a few things about your Mac?
Which Mac do you have?
What version of OS X are you running?
How much RAM memory is installed?
and finally - How much free space do you have on your hard drive? (That would also be space available on your hard drive)

I _don't_ think the Activity Monitor shows crash reports. Usually, all you see is a process that might show "Stopped Responding", or the CPU may show high CPU use for a particular process. Be sure that the process drop down in Activity Monitor shows All Processes, and not just My Processes.
You should also be able to determine which process is showing problems.
What's the name of that process?

You can also go into your Console (in your Applications, then the Utilities folder, and open the Console), and look through the system.log - which will be listed by time and date. That log can be quite large, and scrolling down to the approximate date and time can help you look for other system messages that you recorded in the log. You can copy and paste a few relevant lines here. 20 or 30 lines should be sufficient.
osx is 10.8.3I have
IMAC
20" EARLY 2008
2 GB RAM 800 Mhz ddr2 sdram
96 gig free space
Activity monitor shows report crash and pid numbers keep climbing all day (was at double digit when I first posted and now is 5 digit one hour later)
cpu usage is 30 % for 1 second then zero. about 10 -15 seconds later same thing.
all processes is selected
I have the cable guy coming this afternoon to check delivery of service.
 
2 GB is NOT very much RAM for Mountain Lion.
Your Early 2008 iMac can be upgraded to a maximum of 6GB.

Can you tell what processes are crashing? The climbing PID numbers are likely associated with some process that is crashing, then automatically relaunching. It will help to know the name of THAT crashing process or processes.
 
there are no visible programs crashing. my cpu shows 90% idle except when reportcrash happens then it dips to 65%.
might I be chasing my tail here and this is normal?
 
You said in your first post that your Mac has been running slower for the last week.
Is that still your experience?

You should be able to tell what process is crashing in the Console. Check in the System.log, which keeps track of all system messages.
Note in your Activity Monitor when a new PID is produced. If that happens every few minutes, or even every few seconds, you can see the name of the process as it appears.

You can also look in the Crash logs - probably in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter
The crash reports are listed by date, so look at the most recent ones for clues.
I suspect that you don't have any apps fully crashing, so the CrashReporter may not be helpful - but the system.log should show something. That is listed by date and time, so scroll through the system.log to the approximate time that a new process is produced, and you may see something relevant listed there.
 
2013-05-30 12:00:22.831 PM RimAlbumArtDaemon[83781]: Failed to write artwork to folder, will try again directly from iTunes: /Users/jimward/Library/Application Support/BlackBerryDesktop/MediaCache/AlbumArtCache/compilations/films about ghosts_ the best of...
I tracked down the culprit, I removed blackberry desktop software from my Mac. No more crash reports.
Many thanks for the guidance.
 
A couple of things you may wish to consider in the future.

1. Make sure you clone your drive--to an External. You say you are "new" so let me tell you nothing solves problems easier than having "where you were" backed up before you decided to "delete that strange file" or "OMG . . . MY VOLUMES CORRUPTED" or what have you. Time Machine should do this. WAY back it use to not make a "bootable clone"--a clone you could actually boot your computer from. So some paranoid users such as myself used SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner. I believe that has changed.

2. Boot From Clone:--the reason for this is so you can run Disk Utility periodically to make sure you volume is not corrupted--this can certainly happen after "hard reboots" and the like. The program--in your Utilities folder--cannot repair a drive that it is booted on. Since you have Mountain Lion, you should also have a "Recovery Disk" you can also boot from which, I believe, does the same thing--I have not tried it.

3. Maintenance Scripts:--have you run them? Do you know what they are? Two good programs clear things like logs files and the like and can help. I long ago purchased Cocktail which does a very nice job. There is, however, the free :) Onyx which is also fantastic. Both allow you to tweak things you may like tweaking.

4. Do What Delta Mac Suggests:--particularly with regards to memory. The good news is memory is rather cheap. I have had good experience Data Memory Systems; others can recommend other vendors. The point is while Apple reports the thing supports 4 GB, you can go up to 6 GB as Delta Mac notes. IF you have a 2 GB chip--one chip--then another 2 GB is ~$30 and a 4 GB is ~60. If you have two 1 GB then the upgrade is a bit more expensive--either ~60 for 4 GB total or ~60 for the 6 GB. The extra memory, especially for Mountain Lion, is a big help.

--J.D.
 
My Mac seems to be back to what I had before, but I will look at more memory soon as well as the auto backups. I backup to a external HD for my important stuff manually. thank you for your input.
 
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