6 replies to this topic

[Brant]

I just recently bought Spell Catcher X when you had a special on Mac Update Promo.

I've been pounding my head for the last week on what is causing my computer to slow down. After uninstalling Spell Catcher X last night, I have found that it was the problem.

Not sure what is happening, but after about 5-6 hours of my computer being on, it will start to slow to a crawl. It will take 10-15 bounces to open Mail.app for instance. I have been trying to look in Console to see what the problem was, but am not that technical and could not find anything obvious. I decided that it must be between 2 apps, since they are the most current apps I've installed that install files that modify the system. It came down to Spell Catcher X and Parallels Desktop 5 (which was just an update). Decided to uninstall Spell Catcher X first. This morning when I woke up, my computer is still running fast as it should be.

It starts to slow my computer to an unusable state after about 5-6 hours. After a reboot, I'm back to have a fast computer. There is nothing hogging up CPU as that will still be below 10% and my ram is under 50% usage.

I'm running Spell Catcher X 10.3.4, OSX 10.6.2, on a MBP 3,1 (Late 2007), 6GB ram. Let me know if I can give you more information on it. As of now I'm going to leave Spell Catcher uninstalled.

[Evan Gross]

Brant, on Feb 6 2010, 01:39 PM, said:

I just recently bought Spell Catcher X when you had a special on Mac Update Promo.

I've been pounding my head for the last week on what is causing my computer to slow down. After uninstalling Spell Catcher X last night, I have found that it was the problem.

Not sure what is happening, but after about 5-6 hours of my computer being on, it will start to slow to a crawl. It will take 10-15 bounces to open Mail.app for instance. I have been trying to look in Console to see what the problem was, but am not that technical and could not find anything obvious. I decided that it must be between 2 apps, since they are the most current apps I've installed that install files that modify the system. It came down to Spell Catcher X and Parallels Desktop 5 (which was just an update). Decided to uninstall Spell Catcher X first. This morning when I woke up, my computer is still running fast as it should be.

It starts to slow my computer to an unusable state after about 5-6 hours. After a reboot, I'm back to have a fast computer. There is nothing hogging up CPU as that will still be below 10% and my ram is under 50% usage.

I'm running Spell Catcher X 10.3.4, OSX 10.6.2, on a MBP 3,1 (Late 2007), 6GB ram. Let me know if I can give you more information on it. As of now I'm going to leave Spell Catcher uninstalled.

Please install it again, but this time make sure you start with fresh preferences. To do this, move any files named like "com.rainmaker…..plist" out of your home ~/Library/Preferences folder before you install.

[Brant]

Evan Gross, on Feb 6 2010, 01:18 PM, said:

Please install it again, but this time make sure you start with fresh preferences. To do this, move any files named like "com.rainmaker…..plist" out of your home ~/Library/Preferences folder before you install.

I did not have a preference file in my ~/Library/Preferences folder. Probably because I did a full uninstall. I really don't think that is the answer to my problem though as the install of Spell Catcher X 10.3.4 was the very first install of the program on my computer. Wouldn't make sense that I already had a corrupt preference file.

I'm going to give it another day without installing Spell catcher X to make sure it was the culprit. I'm about 95% sure it was as I my computer is still running good after over 24 hours of use. I did disable some backups I had going also, so I've re-enabled them and they should run tonight. If it is good at the end of the day on Monday, that would mean it was Spell Catcher X. I'll post back here on Monday night.

[Evan Gross]

Brant, on Feb 7 2010, 08:58 PM, said:

I did not have a preference file in my ~/Library/Preferences folder. Probably because I did a full uninstall. I really don't think that is the answer to my problem though as the install of Spell Catcher X 10.3.4 was the very first install of the program on my computer. Wouldn't make sense that I already had a corrupt preference file.

I'm going to give it another day without installing Spell catcher X to make sure it was the culprit. I'm about 95% sure it was as I my computer is still running good after over 24 hours of use. I did disable some backups I had going also, so I've re-enabled them and they should run tonight. If it is good at the end of the day on Monday, that would mean it was Spell Catcher X. I'll post back here on Monday night.

OK, keep an eye on it. When you see this happen, please open the Activity Monitor utility, make sure you're viewing "All Processes", then choose File > Save and save in XML Property List format (plain text doesn't appear to include all the columns).

Since you say that CPU usage wasn't through the roof, the other culprit would be memory usage.

[Brant]

Evan Gross, on Feb 8 2010, 06:55 PM, said:

OK, keep an eye on it. When you see this happen, please open the Activity Monitor utility, make sure you're viewing "All Processes", then choose File > Save and save in XML Property List format (plain text doesn't appear to include all the columns).

Since you say that CPU usage wasn't through the roof, the other culprit would be memory usage.

Well, it looks as though I'm totally wrong. It's back to the drawing board for me. Even after everything uninstalled from Spell Catcher X I had my computer suddenly get slow after about 72 hours of use. Seems as though something else is causing this. Don't know if it was a coincidence or if Spell Catcher X was aggravating whatever is causing this. It has improved from 5-6 hours to 48 - 72 hours of usage. May come down to a fresh install and slowly install apps to find what is causing this, but that will be a last resort.

It's very weird because I don't have a spike in processes or memory so it is hard to figure out what is causing it. When it gets slow, I have tried closing all apps and restarting the finder, but that doesn't affect anything.

Well, sorry for jumping to a conclusion so fast. I will post back if I find anything with Spell Catcher X after a fresh install.

[Evan Gross]

Brant, on Feb 10 2010, 11:32 PM, said:

Well, it looks as though I'm totally wrong. It's back to the drawing board for me. Even after everything uninstalled from Spell Catcher X I had my computer suddenly get slow after about 72 hours of use. Seems as though something else is causing this. Don't know if it was a coincidence or if Spell Catcher X was aggravating whatever is causing this. It has improved from 5-6 hours to 48 - 72 hours of usage. May come down to a fresh install and slowly install apps to find what is causing this, but that will be a last resort.

It's very weird because I don't have a spike in processes or memory so it is hard to figure out what is causing it. When it gets slow, I have tried closing all apps and restarting the finder, but that doesn't affect anything.

Well, sorry for jumping to a conclusion so fast. I will post back if I find anything with Spell Catcher X after a fresh install.

Often a gradual slowdown is due to an app leaking memory and causing excessive VM use. Did you open Activity Monitor and check if one app is using way more memory than the others? Before you go on a troubleshooting/reinstalling binge, reproduce the problem and do that. Might end up saving a lot of time...

[Brant]

Evan Gross, on Feb 10 2010, 11:17 PM, said:

Often a gradual slowdown is due to an app leaking memory and causing excessive VM use. Did you open Activity Monitor and check if one app is using way more memory than the others? Before you go on a troubleshooting/reinstalling binge, reproduce the problem and do that. Might end up saving a lot of time...

Awesome. Thanks for the tip. I really appreciate it and will give it a go.