Improving Performance

MikeHiow · 3 Feb 2010 at 17:37

I have a 2009 13" MBP, its the bog standard model, except I've upgraded the ram to 4GB.

Its nearly two months old now, and I'm certain I can feel some slow down.

Most of the issue is Firefox, although Firefox 3.6 seems to have improved on that a little - flash is as terrible as ever.

But things like Photoshop start to suffer, especially when saving etc.

Do I need a new/better hard drive? Or is there something else I can do to help/improve performance?

NickK · 3 Feb 2010 at 17:44

Have you checked the system.log to see id there's a problem on the drive itself?

Also how full is the drive?

MikeHiow · 3 Feb 2010 at 18:34

OS X: 75GB Used/ 45GB Free
Bootcamp: 17GB Used / 8GB Free

Nothing obvious in System.log, just some Time Machine stuff.

NickK · 3 Feb 2010 at 19:16

Agreed - shouldn't be a problem. Have you run "periodic daily weekly monthly" ?

Have you checked that the machine is not swapping? (restart Safari if you're into swap)

Last thing is when was the machine last restarted? (I ask this because I sleep my machine - laptop)

artaxerxes · 3 Feb 2010 at 21:15

Run Onyx.

Run Flashblock or variant thereof in Firefox.

And whislt defrag is not normally an issue you can do it for free by backing up to a second disk with carbon copy cloner (or superduper) and then clone back to the original disk... all the files will be contigious. Consider also an external drive for the Photoshop scratch drive.

I have multiple browsers now... chrome/safari for uber speed. Firefox for necessary extensions. You might consider such a strategy.

Feek · 3 Feb 2010 at 21:30

artaxerxes said:
And whislt defrag is not normally an issue you can do it for free by backing up to a second disk with carbon copy cloner (or superduper) and then clone back to the original disk... all the files will be contigious. Consider also an external drive for the Photoshop scratch drive.

If you use Adobe apps then you should use SuperDuper! for your backups. CCC certainly used to screw them up badly (google for it, it's been well discussed) and I don't know if it ever got fixed. I trialled them both and after I had to re-install Photoshop I dumped CCC and bought SuperDuper!.

Spyhop · 3 Feb 2010 at 21:38

I remember something about Adobe writing crap in to your HDD's MBR (!) as part of their copy protection. Complete cowboys!

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If you have enough time when the slowdown happens, fire up Activity Monitor and use the tabs at the bottom to get a fairly detailed indication of which parts of your system are being taxed.