Thursday, July 9, 2015


Macs are strong machines, but some times after a period of work they become slow and get more lazy at work. Dispatching and exchanging programs takes longer, the dreaded Spinning Beach Ball appears more regularly, and soon even simple tasks become arduous. What's going on? and Why Is My Mac Running Slow?

A lot of things can decrease performance  and increase the execution time of applications, The most common reasons are: insufficient RAM, insufficient disk space and running too many applications at the same time.

 

1- Insufficient RAM

Your Mac uses RAM to store user data that the CPU is actively using; RAM storage is fast and efficient, but is limited capacity compared with slower disk storage.  Increasing RAM capacity of your Mac helps more data to quickly accessible by the processor, with less need to read and write to disk. You can see how much RAM is installed in your system From the Apple menu, select About This Mac. The window shown below appears.

 

2- Insufficient Disk Space

All Modern Operating Systems use the hard disk space for temporary storage. Temporary  files, Cache files,  and (most importantly) virtual memory swap files help the OS juggle limited RAM resources among the many apps and tasks which are running.

When your hard drive fills up too much, the free disk space that helps the OS is become smaller and then the system performance suffers.  You can check how much free space is left on your drive by :

1- From the Apple menu, select About This Mac. The window shown below appears.
2- Click More Info. The About This Mac window appears.
3- Click Storage. The window shown below appears.

You should always have  a suitable free disk space on your Mac at least 10% of your hard drive, with an absolute minimum of 5GB free.  Drop under this and you will see that your Mac running slow, down to accessing even non-boot drives becomes tricky.

To free up space you have to delete unneeded data, including old downloads, installers and .zip archives.  There are several Gigabytes of files in your top level /Library/Application Support folder for things like Garage Band, iDVD, etc., which you can delete if you don’t use these applications.  You can also move files to external drives and delete the originals.
You can use cleaner applications such as Detox My Mac, will help to remove all unnecessary files and speed up your Mac.

If you feal that the free disk spcae  is Insufficient and you can't remove more files from your Mac then it’s time for a bigger hard drive.


 

3- Running Too Many Applications At The Same Time.

Every applications you run on Mac request its space in RAM, so many Apps you run att the same time will need more space at the RAM, the Mac OS will then start useing the virtual memory swap files on the disk drive and mac begin running slow.

Unlike on a Windows PC In Macintosh closing all the windows for a program does not quit the program on the they still in RAM, You need to choose File –> Quit (or CMD-Q) to exit the application.  If the dot is still glowing underneath a program’s icon in the dock that means it’s still running.





Subscribe to RSS Feed Follow me on Twitter!