10.9.3 now available...

http://support.apple.com/downloads/DL1745/en_US/OSXUpd10.9.3.dmg

http://support.apple.com/downloads/DL1746/en_US/OSXUpdCombo10.9.3.dmg

Billy Y..

 

Ugh. I put 10.9 on a laptop that I don't use much so I could try some
apps that require Mavericks. The 10.9.3 seems to have accomplished the
impossible and made Mavericks even slower. It stalls like it was booted
from an ancient CD ROM drive. No swapping, no CPU load, no errors -
just beachball.

 

No problems here on several computers.

 

I have it running on a 2009 MBA with 2.13 GHz Core 2 Duo, 2 GB of RAM
(256 MB is shared with the graphics processor) and it runs fine with
10.9.3. Usual 'load' is Chrome, Mail, iTunes - other programs used
often include Word, Excel and others. Occasionally use Bridge/Photoshop
CS5 and it does well enough.

CPU load per Menu Meters varies as normal (including a nice clean idle)
but it doesn't take much to be near fully loaded. (Some web page
content can cause it to go near saturation).

That said I'm considering a rollback to 10.8.x to see if it does perform
better.

I suspect your installation has other issues - or is it simply that it
hadn't finished Spotlight indexing?

 

I have found that most issues of "slow Macintosh" are indeed caused by
Spotlight indexing.

Personally I have found that on both a 2011 Mac Mini and a 2010 Macbook
10.9 is faster than 10.8 - AFTER I let Spotlight do its thing!

 

I've debugged this before. 10.7, 10.8, and especially 10.9 make
excessive calls to an aging filesystem that can't handle the load.
Finder may deep traverse a directory over and over again for several
minutes for no apparent reason, resulting in thousands of 'stat64'
calls. Autosave, file versioning hacks, mds, local Time Machine
backups, and several new daemons hit the filesystem hard.

Apple's bonehead workaround is for these problems is that the filesystem
throttles excessive calls. Yes, Apple is throttling their own apps to
keep their bugs from locking up their old OS.

This is also the reason for people complaining that network volumes are
slow in Mavericks.


Try running 'fs_usage' in 10.6.8. It's fairly quiet. Now try it in
10.9. It's massive spew with 'THROTTLED' flashing by periodically.
Open some Finder windows and watch Finder go nuts hammering the
filesystem.

 

That's all very entertaining but as I say above I don't seem to have the
same issues with a fairly low powered laptop with only 2 GB of RAM.

It has, in some cases, with some web pages, gone to CPU saturation but
that's pretty easy to solve.

So it would seem to be less an OS version issue than a particular
installation issue.

 

Stands to reason. On my prior iMac when it was indexing I'd leave the
room and do something else (unless I was doing something pretty passive
like reading the news online or some such).

On the new iMac I haven't noticed when it indexes at all.