[.:bHd:.]

My mac pro has been running extremely slow lately. i tried cleaning out all the cache files, temp files etc. Cleaned out my hard disk and its still slow. i've only used 350GB out of 1TB so its not the issue of the hard drive being full. Every time i try to open a program or something it makes a shit load of noise and takes forever to open. should i do a clean install of OSX or is there a better way of making it like new again?

[Year's_End]

inb4doug

[DougLikesBMW]

Originally Posted by .:bHd:.

My mac pro has been running extremely slow lately. i tried cleaning out all the cache files, temp files etc. Cleaned out my hard disk and its still slow. i've only used 350GB out of 1TB so its not the issue of the hard drive being full. Every time i try to open a program or something it makes a shit load of noise and takes forever to open. should i do a clean install of OSX or is there a better way of making it like new again?

Wipe the disk completely clean (this link might help, dunno) and do a fresh install of OSX. Should be like new.

Also try and take off any panels that are easily removable and blow the shit out of it with a dust remover

Originally Posted by Nikkahtropolis

inb4doug

[.:bHd:.]

i think ill try the dusting thing first. i was really hoping to not have to reinstall. All these programs are gonna take forever to reinstall.. is there a program that backs up your mail and contacts and stuff?

[DougLikesBMW]

Originally Posted by .:bHd:.

i think ill try the dusting thing first. i was really hoping to not have to reinstall. All these programs are gonna take forever to reinstall.. is there a program that backs up your mail and contacts and stuff?

Beats me I don't have a Mac...just save all that shit to a USB or external drive.

There should be an export contacts option.

[.:bHd:.]

lol k thanks for the help.

If anyone knows about macs can you answer me this? If i copy everything in the folder Macintosh HD> Users > My Username, then paste it in the fresh install, will all my docs and stuff be there?

[ABQ325i]

Originally Posted by .:bHd:.

...Every time i try to open a program or something it makes a shit load of noise and takes forever to open...

Where exactly is the noise coming from? Hopefully not the hard drive.

[radix]

It sounds to me like you might have a lack of free physical memory and are either paging heavily or outright swapping/thrashing. Thrashing could also account for hard drive noise. The next time your system gets like that, open a terminal:

Finder->Applications->Utilities->Terminal

then enter the following commands:

$ export PS1="$ "
$ sar -g -p 2 10

04:53:12    pgout/s

04:53:12     pgin/s        pflt/s        vflt/s

04:53:14    pgout/s
04:53:14        0.0   

04:53:14     pgin/s        pflt/s        vflt/s
04:53:14        0.0           4.5         488.5

04:53:16    pgout/s
04:53:16        0.0   

04:53:16     pgin/s        pflt/s        vflt/s
04:53:16        0.0           0.0         444.0

04:53:18    pgout/s
04:53:18        0.0   

04:53:18     pgin/s        pflt/s        vflt/s
04:53:18        0.0           0.0         441.5

04:53:20    pgout/s
04:53:20        0.0   

04:53:20     pgin/s        pflt/s        vflt/s
04:53:20        0.0           0.0         448.0

04:53:22    pgout/s
04:53:22        0.0   

04:53:22     pgin/s        pflt/s        vflt/s
04:53:22        0.0         196.0        1425.5

04:53:24    pgout/s
04:53:24        0.0   

04:53:24     pgin/s        pflt/s        vflt/s
04:53:24        0.0           0.0         442.0

04:53:26    pgout/s
04:53:26        0.0   

04:53:26     pgin/s        pflt/s        vflt/s
04:53:26        0.0           1.5         455.5

04:53:28    pgout/s
04:53:28        0.0   

04:53:28     pgin/s        pflt/s        vflt/s
04:53:28        0.0           0.0         444.0

04:53:30    pgout/s
04:53:30        0.0   

04:53:30     pgin/s        pflt/s        vflt/s
04:53:30        0.0           0.5         446.0

04:53:32    pgout/s
04:53:32        0.0   

04:53:32     pgin/s        pflt/s        vflt/s
04:53:32        0.0         194.5        1408.5

Average:    pgout/s
Average:        0.0

Average:     pgin/s        pflt/s        vflt/s
Average:        0.0          39.7         644.3

$ vm_stat 2
Mach Virtual Memory Statistics: (page size of 4096 bytes, cache hits 0%)
  free active   spec inactive   wire   faults     copy    0fill reactive  pageins  pageout
  9420 153613   1409    72669 221214 2637706K  141590K  640327K  4852558 29648491  1308193 
  9516 153919   1409    72669 220896     2921      394      738        0        0        0 
  9290 153400   1409    72430 221770     1783        1      957        0        0        0 
  3119 159123   1878    72407 221815    15342     1856     4746        0      825        0 
  2844 159826   1878    72404 221733     2752        9     1191        0        3        0 
  2256 156623   1028    77000 221503    19212     1877     9165        0      846       13 
  2135 157187    199    78120 220961     5473      417     2605      291       17       67 
  2209 156644    199    78120 221503     1083        0      408        0        0        0 
  2411 156500    199    77838 221506      971        0      408        0        0        0 
  2561 157411    200    77838 220627      917        0      435        0        0        0 
  2394 156550    244    77826 221507     1357        0      469        0        1        0 
  2232 156414    136    78206 221494     3331      393      967        0        4        5 
  1774 156987    168    78119 221494     1709        0      986        0       45        0 
  1717 157533    170    78116 220949      901        0      414        0        0        0 
  2032 157436    175    77949 220927     1169        3      489        0        2        0 
  2109 156619    166    78112 221453     4448       13     3405     1761       69      516 
  2125 157184    187    78112 220896     2982      390      718        0        4        0 
  2015 157507    187    78112 220576      877        0      402        0        0        0 
  3437 157268    187    77317 220362      888        0      405        0        0        0 
  3059 157271    198    77314 220588      863        0      387        0        0        0 
  2767 156921    215    77176 221453     2250        0      432        0      612        0 
^C

Control+C will exit vm_stat. Paste the results here.

[radix]

Originally Posted by DougLikesBMW

Wipe the disk completely clean (this link might help, dunno) and do a fresh install of OSX. Should be like new.

Also try and take off any panels that are easily removable and blow the shit out of it with a dust remover

Why would you recommend reinstalling his system when you haven't identified what the problem is?

[radix]

Originally Posted by .:bHd:.

lol k thanks for the help.

If anyone knows about macs can you answer me this? If i copy everything in the folder Macintosh HD> Users > My Username, then paste it in the fresh install, will all my docs and stuff be there?

It depends on if you do an archive and install or an erase and install, the former will and the latter won't. Can you even tell me why you're reinstalling?

[.:bHd:.]

It's hard drive noise that im hearing. And I thought a clean install would ix it thats why Im considering it. I ordered 12GBs of ram yesterday hopefully that will solve the issue. I already have 6GB in here and i thought that would be enough but apparently it isn't.

[ABQ325i]

In my experience if the hard drive is making a mechanical sounding noise then it is on the way out. Continuous whirring is more than likely an issue with the file system and cmd+shift+u will get you to the utilities, open disk utility select your disk and verify and repair disk permissions might be a good place to start rectifying this.

If it is a bad hard drive all is not lost, one of the simplest ways of replacing a still working hard drive is to buy a new hard drive and put it into a spare slot, download carbon copy(free) and copy original drive to new drive, remove both drives and put the new drive in slot one and you are back to how you were.

Radix or others might have a better solution but with my experience (selling G5 Power Mac's and other Apple parts) this is one of the quickest solutions for those not comfortable doing more indepth instructions/processes.

[.:bHd:.]

A little background. About two months ago I had a big project to do and filled the hard drive to almost 90% of its capacity. I had it like that for about a week and deleted everything. Now I have 750/1000GB available. I feel like ever since I did that project it has been acting weird. Can/should I defrag it?

The reason why I don't wanna duplicate this hard drive is because if there is a system error then it will be copied into the new one.

[Hawkeye]

If your HD is on the way out like mentioned above, it probably means in the mechanical sense and you should be OK duplicating the HD for a backup.

[.:bHd:.]

I have a feeling it's my HD as well. I'm gonna buy a new one today and mirror my old drive onto the new one. If it works fine then problem solved, if not then.. lets just hope it works.

Even simple tasks such as surfing the web cause hard drive noise. SMART status seemed okay but that hardly detects a failing drive.

[ABQ325i]

Is the sound a clicking or clunking sound? If so the sooner the better on the replacement.

[.:bHd:.]

Originally Posted by ABQ325i

Is the sound a clicking or clunking sound? If so the sooner the better on the replacement.

i have no clue how to explain the sound other than regular hard drive working sound just more often lol I have an old HDD laying around here I'm gonna try using that before I buy one

[ABQ325i]

Hopefully that will speed things up for you.

[aretardedorange]

My mac is slow and its locked up completley 4 times...my pc has never locked up. . How much ram do you have? I think I might upgrade to 8GB.

[.:bHd:.]

Originally Posted by aretardedorange

My mac is slow and its locked up completley 4 times...my pc has never locked up. . How much ram do you have? I think I might upgrade to 8GB.

I have 6GBs and just ordered 12 more. I realized my mac is slow when I went to the apple store and started messing with their mac pros. I realized that I had just gotten used to it lol The computer there had 3GBs if you're not using ram intensive apps like after effects then you don't really need more than 3.

I'm copying the drives now I'll keep you posted on what happens. If that doesn't go through I'll do a clean install on the new drive to see if that works better. I'm pretty sure it's the hard drive, I did a PRAM reboot and it was the same deal.

[radix]

Originally Posted by .:bHd:.

i have no clue how to explain the sound other than regular hard drive working sound just more often lol I have an old HDD laying around here I'm gonna try using that before I buy one

Originally Posted by .:bHd:.

I have a feeling it's my HD as well. I'm gonna buy a new one today and mirror my old drive onto the new one. If it works fine then problem solved, if not then.. lets just hope it works.

Even simple tasks such as surfing the web cause hard drive noise. SMART status seemed okay but that hardly detects a failing drive.

If it's a normal hard drive noise then I'm probably right about you being low on memory. Here's how it works:


Physical Memory + Swap = Virtual Memory


Other than kernel memory and binaries, physical memory is primarily used for two things, application memory and file cache. File cache is simple, every time you read from a file, it's contents are cached in memory. Application memory is primarily memory allocated for the processes' "heap", using malloc(3). File cache is "backed" by the file from which the cached data was originally read. heap is backed by swap space.

In the case the a system is low on memory and more memory needs to be allocated (using malloc(3) for instance), a kernel process searches for pages (4k chunks of memory) to page out to disk in order to free up more memory.

$ pagesize
4096

The process that does this on OS/X is known as the dynamic pager.

$ ps -ef | grep [p]ager
    0    41     1   0   0:07.22 ??         0:07.22 /sbin/dynamic_pager -F /private/var/vm/swapfile

The paging space (swap) in this case is located under /var/private/vm:

$ ls -l /private/var/vm/
total 6291456
-rw------T  1 root  wheel  2147483648 Mar  1 08:27 sleepimage
-rw-------  1 root  wheel    67108864 Jan 15 17:07 swapfile0
-rw-------  1 root  wheel    67108864 Mar  4 03:11 swapfile1
-rw-------  1 root  wheel   134217728 Mar  4 03:11 swapfile2
-rw-------  1 root  wheel   268435456 Mar  4 03:11 swapfile3
-rw-------  1 root  wheel   536870912 Mar  4 03:11 swapfile4

and is really nothing more than a series of files that are used as swap devices. So supposing you use all the memory on the system, then try to start a new process which in turn attempts to allocate a lot of memory which is not available, a couple of things can happen depending on the severity of the memory shortage:


1. page outs


The system needs to allocate more pages of physical memory, but first needs to free some to do so. In this case the system should check to see which pages in memory have been least recently used, and then those will be paged out to allow room for the newly allocated pages. If the pages are application memory they will be paged out to swap. If the pages are file cache, then will either simply be freed, or paged out to the file from which they were read.

2. swapping


In this case the system is severely short of memory and entire processes have their application memory paged out to swap. This is known as swapping. In the case that swapping happens consistently, and heavily, this is known as thrashing.


Thrashing happens when your system is continuously reading and writing a large number of pages of physical memory to and from swap. The symptoms of thrashing are:


1. Increased lag starting new processes, or switching processes.
2. Heavy, unexplained hard disk activity.
3. System freezes/hangs.


These sound like the symptoms you have. There are two options:


1. Use less memory. Start fewer processes at once.

or

2. Buy more memory.


In either case, reinstalling the system will only delay the inevitable and will be a waste of time. Fragmentation is also likely not your issue, although you could give it a try.

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1375

[radix]

As an addendum to my previous post, again, this is all a guess based on your symptoms. It really would help if you were to cut and paste the output of the commands listed in my first post to confirm or rule out my suspicions. Also, I've tried to dumb it down a bit, but a more complete explanation of VMM on OS/X can be found here:

http://developer.apple.com/library/m...outMemory.html