I have a Macbook pro, both of which are evincing awful performance for day to day tasks. I'd like to know what is causing it, or failing that, how to diagnose this performance issue more effectively. I'll describe the main problem and what I think may be related effects, and hopefully someone here can lead me down the right path to an answer.
When I open my machine and it wakes up from the suspend state, the password dialog comes up, but often my keyboard input does not appear in the dialog for some time (this morning, for example, I typed my password and waited 45 seconds for the first character to appear, followed by a perceptible lag for each subsequent character). At the same time, I can hear what I believe to be the disk thrashing away madly.
The disk thrashing continues for a long time (today, 7 minutes). During that time, my computer is nigh unusable; cmd-tab takes ~10 sec to display the task switcher, typing anything into my terminal results in a wait for the command to echo, followed by slow runtimes. Chrome just beachballs for no reason.
I am running:
- OSX Lion 10.7.1
- Chrome 15.0
- Emacs 24
- Quicksilver
- Growl 1.3
- Sparrow
- Adium 1.5
- Dropbox
- Google Music Updater
- iStat Menu (installed after this started, to try diagnose the issue)
- Watts
- iTerm
- iTunes
- iCal
I do not have any remote volumes mounted; I had thought that perhaps the issue was with Quicksilver indexing AFP volumes, but evidently that's not the case.
My hardware is a Late 2010 17" MBP, 4Gb RAM, 1TB 7200RPM HD.
What tools can I use to track this down (remembering that I don't have a terminal when it's most prevalent, and in fact am not even logged in) or what's happening?
Best Answer
My suggestion would be to, as a commenter suggested, look at the Console.app logs. Specifically use the search bar and search "I/O", and see if there are any errors. If there are it's your hard drive.
The next place to look is free RAM and running processes. If you have little free RAM this could be the culprit although given the extent of your issues I doubt it.
A rogue process chewing up processor cycles is a more likely scenario.
Lastly if all that seems within reason open up your Disk Utility.app, select your boot volume, usually "Macintosh HD", and under the First Aid tab run Verify Disk. If you get any errors then that is by far the most likely cause of your slowdowns.
If you don't get errors, select the root drive (the one above Macintosh HD in the hierarchy) and then click the Info button on the menu bar. You should get a window with some SMART attributes listed at the bottom of the list. If "Raw Read Error Rate", "Reallocated Sector Count" or "Reallocation Event Count" are anything but zeroes, it's very likely that your drive is on its way to failure.