Why is my Macbook Pro so slow to load applications?

October 2, 2009 6:28 AM

My 2.4 Ghz Macbook Pro running OS 10.6 seems awfully slow to load applications. Any advice?

I have a 2.4 Ghz Macbook Pro with 4 GB of RAM, and compared to a lot of other Macs - like the 2.6 Ghz/2 GB iMac I'm typing this on - it seems awfully slow to load applications. I'm running Snow Leopard, and the problem has not gotten any different or better.

For example, if I quit Word, after opening it, and then start it again, it takes 8 seconds. On this iMac, it takes 2 seconds. They're both running Word 2008.

Firefox 3.6 often takes 6 seconds to open, compared to more or less instantaneously on the iMac. It's true that if I open Firefox, close it, and then open it again on my MBP, it sometimes then loads instantaneously, but if I wait 30 seconds, it might take 6 seconds again. Similarly, it often takes 4-6 seconds for system preferences to open up. And on and on.

I have my graphics card set to "high performance," so it should be using the nVidia card rather than the integrated card, and I have the 7200 rpm hard drive.

What's the deal? I can't think of any exceptional CPU/memory-hogging application that I'm running in the background, and activity monitor shows 85-90% capacity idle. I do run Carbonite and Growl in the background, but they don't seem to take up any CPU power normally.

I have 170 GB of hard disk space free, too, if that matters.

I have installed all software and firmware updates.

Any idea what the deal is? Thanks!

posted by shivohum to computers & internet (17 comments total)

Are you sure you are actually shutting down apps on the iMac and not just closing windows?
posted by b1tr0t at 7:17 AM on October 2

For what it's worth, I have the same problem. Firefox and Word are the worst offenders. Photoshop opens faster than either of them. Both macbooks around here just pop those two apps open like nothing. I have never been able to figure out the cause or a solution.
posted by milarepa at 7:28 AM on October 2

As mentioned above, are you closing windows or quitting the application (this is different behavior than most Windows users expect).

If you are indeed quitting, create a second user account on your Mac. Log out of your user account, log in to the new one and see how long things wait.

If things run just fine there, that means your profile for Firefox (and I guess Word, I tend to avoid Microsoft products, so who knows what is going on there) is wonky. Export your bookmarks and wipe the Firefox information. I'm not sure where Firefox stores it, I'm sure you can google, but it should be something like ~/Library/Application Support/Mozilla/Firefox or something. Then import your bookmarks.

If the problem persists on the other user account, it is not your profile, but another problem. Reinstall the applications to make sure. Run XBench to make sure your harddrive is reading/writing at the expected speeds.
posted by Brian Puccio at 7:37 AM on October 2

Did you recently install Snow Leopard? Did you do so from scratch, or with an "update" to an older Leopard installation? Have you run Disk Utility to be sure your disk is free of errors, and permissions and such are fixed? Are there nasty errors scrolling past in the Console while you launch these misbehaving programs?

Is Spotlight busy indexing your hard disk (blinking dot in Spotlight icon) while you're trying to work? (It often does this right after a fresh installation, which is very annoying to me.)

Recent Firefoxes have become quite slow-launching for me, I've noticed. I avoid Word unless someone sends me a file that I need to use it for, but it's always been a monster of slowness.
posted by rokusan at 7:39 AM on October 2

Thanks for the help so far!

I'm definitely shutting down apps and not just closing windows.

A 2nd user profile has the same problem. XBench gives normal results for the hard drive.

I did recently install Snow Leopard; it was an update to an older Leopard (10.5) installation.

Disk Utility shows things are fine. No Console messages when I launch these programs. Spotlight's not indexing when I'm working.

I'm hoping not to have to reinstall applications...ugh.
posted by shivohum at 8:17 AM on October 2

Is it a case of the applications bouncing forever? I had that with Snow Leopard -- I actually ended up downgrading to Leopard because of it, and because it's evidently a rare enough problem that I was only able to find about two reports, and it was "spreading" to other applications. Quite frustrating to tell Application X to launch, only to find out it never did and is now stuck in your Dock ...
posted by WCityMike at 8:39 AM on October 2

1) Do you have any external devices (particularly external HDs) plugged into your MacBook when launching these programs? If so, does the problem persist even after disconnecting the device(s)?

2) Have you flushed out your Application, Font, Kernel, and System caches using a program like Onyx? I've had very good success with using Onyx to make my systems snappier and more responsive...speeding up application launch times, boot times, etc.

3) I've also seen faster launch times by trimming languages and unneeded code (PPC code stripped from the Universal Binary) of applications. The best tool for this is XSlimmer. Not only will this save you GBs of HD space, your apps will also launch faster. Of course this makes them less portable to other architectures. This is especially true on older slower systems.

4) Is the slow application launching happening even after a reboot? Or is it fast after a reboot and then generally gets slower? If so, maybe you're seeing massive memory fragmentation and you should look for any software you're running that might be leaking and not releasing its memory properly. I've had good luck with Activata's iFreeMem to help me force applications to release RAM back to the system.
posted by mrbarrett.com at 8:54 AM on October 2

Well, it's not really about the applications bouncing forever - they do load - just an issue of them taking much longer than other comparable Macs.

I should mention that this problem was there even when I was running Leopard. I was hoping SL would solve it, but apparently no dice.
posted by shivohum at 8:55 AM on October 2

I will say that I find performance in "High Performance" mode worse than "Battery Optimized" (or whatever). I need to make a date w/ Apple at some point, though, because my screen flickers off and on in Battery Optimized mode.

How do things load in non-High Performance mode?
posted by backwards guitar at 9:55 AM on October 2

2) Have you flushed out your Application, Font, Kernel, and System caches using a program like Onyx? I've had very good success with using Onyx to make my systems snappier and more responsive...speeding up application launch times, boot times, etc.

Voodoo. It's more useful to get some diagnostic information before telling people to blow away caches, which by their nature are designed to improve performance. I never do any of this, and neither do any of my friends or colleagues, and all of our machines run very well.

3) I've also seen faster launch times by trimming languages and unneeded code (PPC code stripped from the Universal Binary) of applications. The best tool for this is XSlimmer. Not only will this save you GBs of HD space, your apps will also launch faster. Of course this makes them less portable to other architectures. This is especially true on older slower systems.

- Stripping unused architectures will not improve application performance.
- Stripping unused architectures and languages is mostly a waste of time in Snow Leopard, because many parts of the system have been compressed at the file system level already. You aren't going to save much in the grand scheme of things. (Especially since binaries themselves are very small anyway.)
- Altering the binary by removing architectures may also have code signing implications that you don't want to mess with.
posted by Mikey-San at 4:21 PM on October 2

Hrm... I just ran Onyx and did an automated procedure to do nearly all the maintenance/cleaning stuff. When I opened apps for the first time after the reboot, they took a little longer than usual to load.

But now: it seems there's real improvement! Word jumps onto my screen in a second or two. Ditto firefox, system preferences, and everything else.

Let's hope this lasts!
posted by shivohum at 9:55 PM on October 2

Mikey-San, I beg to differ. There is documented evidence that flushing out caches can clear up application launch times. Yes, the *first* time you launch the program after doing it, it can take a bit longer to launch, but subsequent launches are significantly faster....this is because the application has to build the cache files again. This is particularly true if a user has installed extra Fonts.

I'll grant you the point about architectures and languages with one small qualification. On the OP's modern machine, he's not going to see any improvement, but on older machines (say, a 700MHz G4 eMac), there will indeed be improvements in launch times and overall usage. This is more true for Tiger than for Leopard, in my experience, but that may be only because it's Tiger that I've been stripping down to install on these older Macs. One data point, on the eMac custom image I've just built, I was able to save about 4GB of space on a 20GB HD--not an insignificant savings. So your comment about the "binaries being small" is just not very correct. *Some* Applications are small; many are not.

And I also offer some bona-fides. I've been professionally supporting Macs in the SMB environment and in Education for almost 15 years now. I live and breathe this stuff. I don't claim to know everything, but I do know a great deal. I currently manage about 500 Macs at a school and we're prepping for a 1000-plus 1:1 laptop program for next Fall. I have extensive experience and knowledge of Mac OS X Server, client management, application interaction, and desktop support. I wouldn't offer a potential solution if I didn't think it would help the situation.
posted by mrbarrett.com at 4:35 AM on October 3

Oh, and thanks for Sandbox. A truly useful tool that we use all the time.
posted by mrbarrett.com at 4:39 AM on October 3

Whoops! Looks like I spoke too soon. There's only an improvement in relaunching an application immediately after I've closed it. Otherwise, no dice. Sigh.
posted by shivohum at 9:45 PM on October 3

Do you have lots of extra fonts installed?
posted by mrbarrett.com at 6:02 AM on October 4

Hrm... no, I haven't installed anything more than the default # of fonts.
posted by shivohum at 4:01 PM on October 4

Huh - looks like, just as backwards guitar says, performance is significantly better in non-high-performance mode. Firefox doesn't load any faster, but other stuff does.
posted by shivohum at 9:49 PM on October 7