Mac problems

[matt_london]

just recently my Mac has been particularly slow when I've got a few applications open, and I get the spinning beachball thing up a lot. This has not happened previously and I used to be able to have loads of apps running simultaneously. I've still got over 25gig of hard drive available. I checked my activity monitor and safari and firefox are using between 50 and 110 megs of system memory each and Kernal (whatever that is!) is about 60 megs. Apart from adding more Ram (which is quite difficult with my Mac mini) any tips on sorting it out?
Thanks.

[fo3nix]

What are your mac's specs? How much RAM and what's the processor?

Instead of checking RAM usage, click the 'CPU' title in activity monitor, and let us know the highest few apps that are using the CPU (the highest numbers basically). Are there one or two with much higher numbers than the others?

Also, I assume you've restarted it?

Finally, from the utilities folder in the apps folder, run terminal. Type 'uptime' (no quotes) at the prompt, and press enter. it'll give you load averages at the end: what are the 3 numbers?

[matt_london1]

Hi
The Mac is 80gig hard drive / 512meg ram / 1.5 gighz processor.
The CPU % are: Safari between 5 - 15%; Activity monitor 2.5%; firefox 2%; pm tool 1.2% - the others are below 1%.
The load averages are 0.99 0.84 0.51
As I'm writing this I've only got 8meg free system memory. 65meg wired ; 290 meg active ; 147 meg inactive.
Thanks.

[LeMarchand]

Hang on! Does this mean that Macs don't "just work" after all?

@ matt-l: sorry for the unhelpful answer, but I couldn't resist!

[fo3nix]

LeMarchand: this has nothing to do with 'just working' at all. That relates to other things that macs do better than Windows machines (and do), such as when you plug a flash drive in it just appears instead of telling you first in a little annoying bubble at the bottom-right like on Windows.

matt: that load average is too high. try quitting safari then waiting 5 minutes and see if the load average drops down.

also, I assume it's a G4, and not a core due?

[matt_london]

I have tried re-booting but after about 1 hour it starts slowing down again. Its a MacMini. The problem has only started recently. Previously I used to be able to run loads of applications without any bother at all.

[wendyl]

Sorry can't help with your problem matt but wonder if you can help me. I have heard from a friend that he cannot reach pages other than the index page on our web site. He has an Apple Mackintosh and is with BT internet. The only person I know with a 'mac' ,a friend of my daughter, is out of the country so I can't ask her. I wonder if you can throw any light on this thanks

[matt_london]

The built in browser on Mac's is Safari. There are a couple of websites that dont work properly with it, but not Answerbank. Your friend could always try downloading and using Firefox (its free!) as that seems to work perfectly everywhere.

[fo3nix]

Can you trace back to when you first noticed it slowing down, and if so, did you change anything or install anything, no matter how small?

Also, if you're on Tiger then download 10.4.9 from software updater. It's a good update regardless, but it may sort your issue in some way.

When you have time to mess about with it, try restarting then not running any apps and see if it's slow after an hour still. Then try running your apps one by one, to see if you can narrow it down. From the CPU numbers though it sounds like it may be Safari, but really it's a little low on the percentages for it to be that noticible.

[fo3nix]

wendyl: run your website though this site:
http://www.browsrcamp.com/

It'll let you know what it looks like, for free.