Beating the dreaded rainbow pinwheel

I have a MacBook Pro about 2 years old now, upgraded last year to Mac
OSX 10.5.4

In the last few weeks but probably worseining for more like twoi
months, everything is slowing down even when there are few
applications open. Nothing significant has been added in terms of new
oftware and, like I say, it's more of a steady slowing than any sudden
noticeable change.

Now, much of the time, the dreaded raindbow pinwheel is spinning away
when I load intrenet pages, open or swicth switch applications, and
even when i just scroll down too quickly in a document.

When - rue the day! - I was a PC guy, I used to defragment and do
misc. clean-ups when things slowed. Is there a kind of standard
organizing and cleaning up routine, approach or utility that should be
regularly used to keep things moving like new?

 

1. Back up the drive to another one using Carbon Copy Cloner.
2. Reformat the original drive.
3. Restore from the backup.

If it's still slow, you can try reformatting completely and reinstalling
Mac OS X. (You'll still have the clone to copy files from.)

But I think you'll find it's *still* slow, which means something is
wrong with your hardware.

But remember that clone? Plug it in and boot from it, then as soon as
boot is complete unmount the internal drive. If that speeds things up,
you just need a new internal hard drive.

(I hate to blame hard drives again and again, but there's a reason for
it: They're usually the culprit.)

 

For the browser, empty the cache, this will speed up the web pages. Also
some web pages are very slow to load which can cause the spinning pin
wheel.

Have you checked your disk and or repaired the permissions. The Disk
Utility found in the Utilities folder in the Applications folder can be
used to repair the permissions. To repair the hard disk, you will need
to boot from you System DVD and use the Disk Utility found there to
check and repair any problems on your hard disk.

 

As for web pages, the number of crappy ones, that eat CPU time like
there's no tomorrow and take forever to load, is increasing. This is
the most frequent complaint I get at work, where most everyone has
a very fast computer and an extremely fast net connection. Here's
some reading material concerning this problem, although yes, it would
better be read by the people writing all this junk -

Browser CPU usage
http://inessential.com/2008/12/08/browser_cpu_usage

Speed Matters
http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/11/marissa-mayer-at-web-20.html

Camino's "Stop loading this page" Button
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=629548

And here's a clipping that I missed saving the source for -

| Flash isn't just a hog on OS X. It's equally garbage on Linux.
| The system resources and CPU percentage it sucks out of a system
| are ludicrous.

Here is a very nice solution for the Flash problem (requires 10.5) -

http://github.com/rentzsch/clicktoflash/tree/master

| ClickToFlash is a WebKit plug-in that prevents automatic loading
| of Adobe Flash content. If you want to see the content, you can
| opt-in by clicking on it or adding an entire site to its whitelist.

WebKit in the above means Safari (I don't know which other browsers
might use it). It is implimented as a plug-in, so it won't screw up
or break anything (like more than a few other things that modify how
Apple's apps or OS works do). Those you interested in how it works
can read this -

http://boredzo.org/blog/archives/2009-01-29/how-clicktoflash-works

Billy Y..

 

I second this advice. In particular, look for mds activity. I get the
same symptoms occasionally and it is always due to *&^%$! Spotlight.
If that is your problem, here's the way to fix it:

http://www.macintouch.com/tiger12.html

 

This is one of the many reasons 97% of the worlds computer users, use
WINDOWS machines. Too bad you overpaid for your MBP. Now you are forced to
live with your mistake.

 

Yes, absolutely. My advice on backing up/restoring was based on having
ruled out software problems first.

 

No, there isn't any kind of standard organizing and cleaning up,
though at least with some versions of the OS, having too many files on
your Desktop can cause problems.

More likely:

1) you have hard drive problems resulting in delays while the system
tries to access some part of the drive that isn't working correctly.

or (better)

2) You don't have enough RAM. My limited experience says that given
the complexity of current web pages, one should have at least 1GB
to keep everything humming along decently.

It occurs to me that your machine may have shipped with 512 MB,
which I would describe as definitely too little.

The amount of RAM needed changes all the time as software gets
bigger, and web pages get more complex, etc.

 

Hardware, or a runaway app that's not visible and is wasting a lot of
virtual memory and/or CPU time.

First thing to do is to run the Activity Monitor utility. Look at the
%CPU and Virtual Memory columns. If any app is using an unusually large
amount of CPU time or virtual memory, try quitting that app. If that
doesn't work, try restarting your Mac.

 

Or, as a SWAG, the machine is infected with the DNS Changer Trojan.
Here's the freeware removal tool:

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/33696

Computers balance CPU, memory, and I/O to obtain the optimal
performance. Somewhere in the OP's MacBook Pro, there's a bottleneck
causing the slowdown. If you run MenuMeters (or it's ilk):

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/17713

You can watch memory and network performance in realtime. If you have
the Activity Monitor startup and run on login, you can display the CPU
utilization in the Dock. It will tell you what's running, taking up
your system's resources.

Unless the hardware is going, spontaneous performance degradation
doesn't happen. If you take data on what and when it happens, you're
partway there to finding out the "how" and getting it fixed.

Or this is really a wintroll.