Why is application switching slow on Late 2013 Mac Mini compared to early 2008 Macbook Pro

hard driveperformance

I recently purchased a Late 2013 Mac Mini Quad Core i7 2.6Ghz with 4gb DDR3 ram, 1TB 5400 rpm drive model APPLE HDD HTS541010A9E662 running OSX 10.8.2

I used Migration Assistant to migrate apps and files from Macbook Pro to Mac mini over gigabit Ethernet.

The Macbook Pro is an early 2008 model equipped with a Core 2 Duo processor at 2.4Ghz with 4GB DDR2 Memory and an (upgraded) 750GB 7200 RPM hard drive model ST750LX003-1AC154 running OSX 10.7.5 Link to model: http://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/laptop-hard-drives/momentus-xt-hybrid/

Why does my 2008 Macbook Pro completely outperform my Late 2012 Mac Mini when switching applications? (CMD+TAB). The Mac Mini outperforms the Macbook on all other fronts.

I normally run Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop CS5, Adobe Bridge CS5, OpenOffice, and FireFox and I regularily switch between them all. Changing from Lightroom back to Firefox will bring up the beach ball for 15-30 seconds, and beachball again if I wish to open a new firefox tab.

This doesn't happen on the Macbook.

It is purely the hard drive RPM difference?

Best Answer

4GB of RAM isn't much to be running all of those heavyweight apps at the same time. My guess would be that it's doing a lot of paging to disk. Check the size of the swap files on both machines.

  1. Go to the Finder's "Go" menu and select "Go to Folder…".
  2. Enter /private/var/vm/ into the box and press the "OK" button.
  3. Add up the sizes of the swap files.

If it's more than 1GB I usually reboot. That will clear out these files. I've seen these files up to 4GB on a machine with 8GB of RAM.

Since running out of RAM can cause writes to disk, the difference in disk speed may be what's causing the delay.

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