blackest Loc: Ireland

Activity Monitor is a very useful application on the Mac. Essentially there are 2 or 3 reasons for poor performance. Ram use, a little bit of swop in use is irritating but not a problem there should be a good bit of ram free. Around 512 MB as a minimum really and a couple of GB free is plenty.

The other thing that slows you down is lack of free cpu cycles If you are not doing something to be using a lot of cycles it should be mostly idle. Sometimes you do get bad programs e.g i was running something called scratch which uses adobe air it had one of my cpu cores at 100% just being idle. within a minute of killing it my cpu temperature dropped about 40 degree's and things were moving faster. Spotlight sometimes uses a lot of cpu cycles if there has been big changes on disc, it can take a while to index a drive but once done it shouldn't be noticeable. The third reason for slowdown is disc speed, SSD will be faster but to be fair once a program has loaded usually it will be responsive, even if it did take a while to load initially.

So enough free ram and cpu cycles is what you want, if a process is out of control you might kill it. If its something optional, you might avoid starting it automatically. Macs remember what you had open between reboots, so check you are not running something unnecessarily.

markjay

Thanks !
Will check it !