Tiger painfully slow

E

edgarmontcommo

Registered
Since installing Tiger on my iMac (1 GHz, 256 MB RAM), I’ve been experiencing a significant slowdown in the computer’s activities. Even simple tasks are painfully slow. Opening any folder takes ~10 seconds, waking from sleep often takes several minutes, opening iPhoto can take as long as 5 minutes. All this occurs with no other programs open or running.

I note that this site’s Tiger Installation FAQ says to expect Tiger to temporarily use a lot of CPU power for Spotlight to do some indexing, but what I’m experiencing is a VERY significant slowdown that has persisted for a week already. I realize that 256 MB RAM is the minimum required for Tiger, so I expected some performance issues, but this is so bad that I literally have to walk away from the computer at times because it’s simply too frustrating to sit there and wait the several minutes it takes to switch from one active program to another.

This can’t be normal, can it? If not, can anyone think of issues that might be affecting my Mac’s performance so significantly?
 
I think this slow down is due to your 256mb of ram. Although it meets the minimum requirements, I see a good reason why apple increased the Ram for all their imacs from 256mb to 512mb.
So, add another 512mb modul and I am very positive you gonna love tiger.
And welcome to the forum.
 
Open the Activity Monitor and look out for apps that hog the CPU. (You'll find your way around the list of open processes, I'm sure.) If you can identify one or two that misbehave, tell us here. Might be some application that needs updating for Tiger.
 
Unbelievable to me that Apple would release Tiger without making sure all other Apple software would be compatible... I've had similar slowdown issues and more! I have a dual-867 with 1.25GB ram, and Final Cut pro STOPPED working with Tiger. After checking a few forums, I found that this WAS COMMON! Now, I've also heard that my particular dual-867 (mirror-drive-door) has had MANY problems with software updates, but Tiger should have fixed this issue. Anyway, it seems Apple has followed Microsoft's example of "release-->patch-->patch-->patch." Any ideas?
 
Bear in mind that the spotlight indexing all information may slow your machine down for the first couple of days after install,my machine was dog slow to begin with but has sorted itself out now.

I aggree that more memory is a good call though
 
I too have had major slowdowns with Tiger. I bought a brand new Powerbook, 1.5ghz with 1 gig of ram. I understand that Spotlight can cause slowdowns as it is indexing, but it has been more than a week and this machine still operates slower than my 3 year old 867mhz Powerbook with 512megs ram. Even when it isn't writing files (why index when nothing new is written to the drive?)

Does anyone know of a way to disable Spotlight? That would be a good way to trouble shoot if that is the problem.

Also, I feel like Safari RSS is a problem. Has anyone else had wierd errors using Safari RSS with sites that used to work with old Safari and work fine with Firefox? I often get errors that my "network connection has been reset". Also, I often see the RSS version of the page, then it reloads into the regular version.

If anyone has insights on how to hack better performance into the new system, please share.
 
I read that Spotlight can be quickly disabled by adding your hard drive to the list of ignored locations in Spotlight preferences (the Privacy tab). Then you can remove it from the list and the index will be rebuilt from scratch. Someone else was reporting that this helped immensely, possibly due to a messed up index.
 
Mac OSX likes to run 24/7. In the wee hours of the morning, UNIX, the underlying technology behind Mac OSX, likes to do house keeping chores. Try two applications to speed things up. Try using Cocktail Tiger Edition and then rebuild with Diskwarrior. If that doesn't do the trick, try disabling shareware, freeware and other third party applications that may be incompatible with Tiger. Lastly, if that doesn't work, try creating a new user account and see if the problems still exist in the new clean account (you can always blow away this account later).

Cocktail: http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/26516
Diskwarrior: http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/19441

Where Safari is quite buggy in 10.4.1, I don't believe RSS is the issue. I also don't believe that Spotlight is the cause of the severe slowdown. If you wish to turn off Spotlight, try Spotless: http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/26842
 
So I tried Davidbrit2's solution of preventing Spotlight from indexing my entire hard drive, and it seems to have fixed all the slow down issues. It's been 24 hours and my Powerbook is running as I would expect it to (read: fast).

I actually didn't turn Spotlight back on for re-indexing. While it is a nice tool for others, I have a solid file system and don't need to search through every bit on the drive when finding the invoice I need to send. (E-mail on the other hand, egads, but gmail handles searching that nicely.)

I was watching my CPU usage and with Spotlight on, it would top out almost constantly, with half the usage being the OS. With Spotlight off it idles with very low usage and only tops out briefly when I make something happen in Photoshop or Flash, etc... It makes sense, having a constantly reoptimized and refreshed index of everything on a system is going to take some memory and a good chunk of CPU cycles.

Anyway, thanks Davidbrit2.
 
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