Today when I woke my MBP (early 2011, 2.3 GHz i7, 8 GB RAM, OS X 10.6.7, 500 GB SSD), my system was moving slow as molasses. To be somewhat precise, it was taking about 12 seconds to respond to each click or keypress. I tried to log out, but it timed out. So I began quitting each open program, one at a time. To my surprise, when I quit SpellCatcher 10.3.7, the slowdown went away and everything returned to normal. SpellCatcher was the last program I quit, leaving only the Finder running, but I had tried to restart the Finder previously. The Finder had quit but had not restarted. Until I quit SpellCatcher. I don't know if SpellCatcher was the cause of the slowdown, but it certainly had a part in it, as the slowdown remained until SC was gone, then it immediately disappeared. I see nothing in the logs that explains this (at least to me).
Chuck
0
slow as molasses
Started by clmartin, May 25 2011 08:25 AM
1 reply to this topic
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Posted 25 May 2011 - 08:32 PM
clmartin, on 25 May 2011 - 08:25 AM, said:
Today when I woke my MBP (early 2011, 2.3 GHz i7, 8 GB RAM, OS X 10.6.7, 500 GB SSD), my system was moving slow as molasses. To be somewhat precise, it was taking about 12 seconds to respond to each click or keypress. I tried to log out, but it timed out. So I began quitting each open program, one at a time. To my surprise, when I quit SpellCatcher 10.3.7, the slowdown went away and everything returned to normal. SpellCatcher was the last program I quit, leaving only the Finder running, but I had tried to restart the Finder previously. The Finder had quit but had not restarted. Until I quit SpellCatcher. I don't know if SpellCatcher was the cause of the slowdown, but it certainly had a part in it, as the slowdown remained until SC was gone, then it immediately disappeared. I see nothing in the logs that explains this (at least to me).
Chuck
Chuck
I've seen something like this happen a couple of times (and only a couple). The culprit turned out to be part of the Mac OS that deals with input methods. I couldn't reproduce it, or analyze what was going on because it was such an infrequent event. Keep an eye out if it happens again, open the Activity Monitor Utility and see what's chewing up all the CPU time. In my case, it was a background process called "TISwitcher".
