Anybody else have their iMac slow down over time?

I ditched Microsoft a couple of years ago after being sick of PC's slowing down over time and becoming unusable or requiring an OS reinstall. I switched to an iMac 27". I was so sick of performance problems that I absolutely maxed out the iMac with 16GB memory, 3.4 Ghz i7 processor, maxed out graphics card -- I took the maximum of whatever performance options they offered. Initially, it was fast as lightning, but I notice it steadily slowing down over time. I'm not doing anything different than I ever was, but it just gets slower and slower -- as I type this is it actually locks up every 30 seconds or so I can't see what I'm typing for a couple of seconds and then it finally catches up.

When I look at CPU stats, "Safari web content" is usually a heavy user. Safari is not the most efficient browser, I know, but I'm not doing anything different with it now than when I first got the iMac and Safari was always lightning fast back then, so I feel that the computer has slowed down a lot. Even when I'm not running Safari, it feels slow with other applications like Word, Excel, etc. I'm still running 10.6.8 (with latest patches), but that's what I was running when I first got the computer and it was super fast back then.

Has anyone else had this problem with an iMac slowing down over time? Is there a solution?

 

Thanks for the feedback MP. My iMac is from 2011, but the processor it has is actually more powerful than the processors available on the latest iMac (Apple - iMac). Mine has a 3.4Ghz i7 versus 3.4Ghz i5 on the latest and 16Gb memory vs 8Gb on the latest, so there is no way this computer should be slow.

There is a tool called iDefrag (Coriolis Systems :: Products :: iDefrag), which I suspect will help, but it sounds like Defrag is a somewhat risky -- this is from iDefrag's FAQ: https://coriolis.zendesk.com/hc/en-gb/articles/200380191-How-safe-is-iDefrag-

 

Thanks Joel. I read a lot of "how to speed up your Mac" documents and never saw anything about the permissions repair. I ran it and it did take quite a while to verify and repair. Hopefully this will help a lot.

I did take a couple of other steps from another document I found online (would post a link, but I lost the URL in my reset of Safari ):
1. Reset Safari (cleans everything (not just cache), does save your bookmarks but not your reading list
2. Took a few items out of the startup
3. Removed some junk from desktop (apparently stuff stored in desktop takes more resources from the OS than when it's in a document directory).

With the combination of the above, it definitely seems to be running faster. We will see over the next few days if it remains faster or bogs down again.

 

I don't have the SSD, but really I'm not doing anything disk-intensive and with 16Gb real memory, it shouldn't need to cache a lot on disk. It was fast when I first got the computer, so I know it can go fast without SSD.

 

Pre Windows 7, PC's were absolutely horrible about slowing down. By almost all accounts, Windows 7 fixed a lot, so that may no longer be the case but I bailed from PC's at home around the time Windows 7 came out.

Honestly, I think both Apple and Microsoft (at least before Windows 7) purposely let them slow down because it is very much in there interest to do so -- most people buy a new computer rather than running the maintenance tools to fix them. It would be very easy for both Apple and Microsoft to include nightly or weekly jobs to prevent the slowdowns in their OS, or at least provide a one-click tool to do maintenance, but they don't do either of those things. My guess is that a significant chunk of their revenue is from people replacing their computers much sooner than they would need to hardware-wise because of the software slowdowns they allow to happen.

 

I do believe it's forced obsolescence honestly. My case is a little different than typical in that my "old" Mac has more horsepower than the latest iMac and it still has become deathly slow.

It did seem to run a bit better after doing the cleanups in my previous post, but after a day it's back to being sluggish. I even tried killing Safari and running everything on Firefox instead. Firefox has much better performance than Safari, but it still locks up frequently. I have 2 Firefox windows with a total of 14 tabs (none with active content) and it's still agonizingly slow and every few minutes has the pinwheels spinning for about 5 or 10 seconds.

I'm not sure what it takes to reinstall the OS. I do have Time Machine backing up to external disk, but I don't know how to reinstall the OS and I'm a little afraid of losing some data.

 

In my experience, there is absolute truth in both platforms slowing down. Microsoft invented the phenomenon IMO. The early versions of Microsoft was just a horribly crude operating system, so it very well may not have been intentional. Windows 7 is supposed to be much better, so I believe it works better but have no personal experience. My experience at the office with XP was that it slowed down and required admins to reinstall the OS once a year or so, but everyone's mileage will probably vary a lot based upon how the computer is used.

Regarding Macs, I think most replace their Macs around 2 to 3 years, probably attributing slowdowns to old technology when it probably isn't the case. In my case, I spent something like $3500+ to get a a mega/Watson/Cray/Supercomputer version of the iMac 3 years ago, so I am in the somewhat unique position of having technical specs are still higher than the current iMacs (double the memory, i7 vs. i5, same processor speed), but the slowdowns are very real. Researching on the Mac forums shows that this is not the least bit unusual. I have been a PC basher and Apple enthusiast since switching, but this issue is definitely not unique to me, except that my hardware is still current.

Macs are based upon UNIX, which should be much more robust in terms of not slowing down. We used to have Sun Unix machines in very high performance trading environments and those never slowed down even slightly. Among the thousands of Sun machines in the network, we had many clients who hadn't installed any software updates or even rebooted their Sun servers for 5 years or more and they still performed flawlessly with no slowdowns from original performance. Even though the processors in those 5 year+ machines were very slow compared to then current technology, they still performed exactly as well as they did when they were new. UNIX should be extremely robust, so I'm not sure why Apple performs so poorly -- honestly I think it's intentional.

On my machine, there is nothing weird going on in the Activity Monitor -- I can boot it up, open a few browser windows with a total of about 20 tabs, and it will soon start dragging down to unusable performance. This happens with both Safari and Firefox, though Firefox takes longer to drag down.

I'm not that anxious to update the OS to Mavericks for a variety of reasons, but I will if it's the last resort. This morning, I did a "cache cleanup" with a tool called Onyx (recommend in many of the "speed up your mac" articles) and it seems to be much faster, but I need to let it run for a while to see if it drags down again after I've run it for a day or so. The memory in Activity Monitor looks a lot better now with a lot of the 16GB RAM free, so maybe the cache cleanup helped. The current memory usage is below and looks very good after cache cleanup (time will tell if it stays that way):
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I have been every bit as smarmy about Mac superiority (not in this thread, but in conversations prior to my "Macpololypse 2014" (which was a slow burn starting in late 2013)). The wounds from early Windows nightmares run deep and heal slowly, but sad to say that my experience with Mac today is that it is no better than the old Windows I knew when it comes to slowdowns over time. I wouldn't be surprised if Windows 7 was better than Mac now. That's a shame for Mac, and almost inconceivable to me since UNIX is a rock solid foundation for sustained high performance and the Mac isn't burdened with anti-virus. It should crush Windows, but I don't think it does today.

At a minimum, Apple software is not proactive. Macs are allergic to Flash, for example. Yes Flash can be a resource hog but I think Windows handles it much better. They "fixed" it on the iPhone by disabling Flash support, for the computer Mac OS, they don't seem to have tried to fix it and are instead hoping it will go away.

I think the problem is more than Apple ignoring problems, they let it get slow because it pays to let it get slow. People upgrade frequently thinking it's old hardware, but I think that is seldom the actual cause. Hardware doesn't lose performance as it ages -- it either works at the rated performance or it breaks -- the hardware itself doesn't slow down at all. When the processor on an old iMac is 2.8Ghz and the processor on a new Mac is 3.4Ghz, the performance improvement is only 21%, so the new processor doesn't actually make much of a difference. You shouldn't see any slowdowns on the old one and the new computer should be 21% faster. Instead, you see the old computers slowing down way more than 21%. It's money in the bank for Apple.