I've recently updated my 15-inch, Mid 2010 Macbook Pro to Mavericks. Since then, it's been running incredibly slow and tends to hang while using programs such as FireFox or Excel.
If I look at the activity monitor, the only task taking up a large amount of resources is kernal_task
.
I've verified the hard drive through disk utility, and it said that the drive is fine. Here's the hardware overview, if that helps:
Hardware Overview:
Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro6,2
Processor Name: Intel Core i5
Processor Speed: 2.53 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 2
L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 3 MB
Memory: 4 GB
Processor Interconnect Speed: 4.8 GT/s
Boot ROM Version: MBP61.0057.B0C
Does anyone know what could be causing this?
Best Answer
As Mathias711 pointed out in the comments, the cause of this was Spotlight automatically re-indexing after the after the OS upgrade. The process of indexing was greatly slowed down by OSX attempting to index a very slow, old external drive we had hooked up.
Once the indexing had finished (it actually took quite a while) the laptop eventually returned to its former speed.
There's also a post by Computer World that backs up this conclusion: