Mac getting slow

[ZeeeK_o]

Hi people, what do you think about this:

My mac at work is getting slower and slower, I read a lot about things causing a mac to get slower, I thought it is probably his HDD wich is getting old and overused since about 20GB of video files is going through it every day(I am a video editor for a local TV station), but here is the thing, a new HDD and a fresh installation of OSX didn't show any performance improvement, is it the processor, or the ram or motherboard or something. I watch it's performance while I'm editing and even the playback in Final cut pro 7 without any filters on videos can't manage to play normaly without dropping frames.

Mac Pro
two intel quad xeon 2.26Ghz processors
6GB ram
Nvidia 512MB graphic card (forgot the model name, imported and exported videos for editing are SD 720x576 anamorphic(16x9) DV Pal mov files)

So what do you think?

[alexora]

Hi ZeeeK_o,

I don't know exactly, but can guess that it may have something to do with with how much free disk space you have on your HDD.

Try moving your files and documents onto an external HDD and use the internal one only to store your applications.

I would also suggest you install the FreeMemory Pro application (£0.69/$0.99 on the App Store): it allows you to monitor your memory usage, and free it when it gets low.

Not much advice, but I hope it helps...

[jsimpang]

Better check your Mac Pro with Apple Hardware Test (AHT), you can read how to do AHT at Apple Support section.

[zandro]

I'm just going to throw this out there as a what if and also what I've gone through recently. On my MBP early 2011 with 4GB of RAM I notice crippling speeds on just normal stuff: video playback, iTunes, VLC, you know nothing too heavy. As a moment of "crap you gotta be kidding me" I thought the MBP was somehow dying. I check Activity Monitor and notice that as my Safari is active and is on a page with Flash content, it is eating away at what I estimate at 90% of RAM. The pie chart indicator looked like I was rendering something heavy or running some data intensive stuff, but there it was in plain english, Flash content in Safari eating the memory.

So just throwing it out there, maybe someone else might find this little tidbit useful.

[alexora]

Does your Mac Pro behave the same way as your Mackbook Pro when you are running Safari?

If so, try using another browser instead.

[zandro]

Suprisingly enough, the most notorious website that has Flash kicking up the massive amounts of RAM was x.warnet.ws

So I won't be frequenting that site as much primarily of the Flash thing but also their links are rarely ever alive.

[ZeeeK_o]

Originally Posted by alexora

Hi ZeeeK_o,

I don't know exactly, but can guess that it may have something to do with with how much free disk space you have on your HDD.

Try moving your files and documents onto an external HDD and use the internal one only to store your applications.

I would also suggest you install the FreeMemory Pro application (£0.69/$0.99 on the App Store): it allows you to monitor your memory usage, and free it when it gets low.

Not much advice, but I hope it helps...

Thnx alexora
My HDD is always about 20-25% free, found a few small duplicates with freememory-pro, while editing 2-3 of 16 processors are going up to 40-50% usage, the other are almost unused, and ram is used up to 3GB of 6GB, can I check somehow how much VRam my graphic card is using?

[ZeeeK_o]

Originally Posted by jsimpang

Better check your Mac Pro with Apple Hardware Test (AHT), you can read how to do AHT at Apple Support section.

Thnx
Checked it just now, there wasn't a problem.

[ZeeeK_o]

Originally Posted by alexora

Does your Mac Pro behave the same way as your Mackbook Pro when you are running Safari?

If so, try using another browser instead.

My Safari just crashes when I open it, this started a year ago when I updated Safari, but anyway I am not using Safari, other browsers are runing fine on my Mac Pro.

[alexora]

It sounds as if it may be a hardware issue, if I were you, I would go onto a dedicated Mac forum: there are likely to be many people with greater knowledge there.