Lion and Applejack

[mnewman]

A couple of weeks ago I installed Lion on a freshly formatted external hard drive. I created a new user and then migrated almost everything (except for a couple of experimental users) from my Snow Leopard drive. I booted to the external drive whenever I had time to explore Lion.

When I finally decided I liked it, I booted to the Lion external drive, formatted the internal drive and used CCC to clone the external drive to the internal drive. This all worked well. I thought.

A couple of days ago my wife started using the Lion machine to help her decide if she wanted to install it on her MacBook. Her first reaction was, "It's really slow." At the time she was playing with Finder windows, something I rarely do. She clicked on the Applications icon in the Finder sidebar. It took well over ten seconds before the Finder populated it's window with the contents of the Applications folder. The same operation on her MacBook is almost instantaneous. Other Finder operations were also slow. I've already written about what a slug Safari 5.1 is.

I ran both Xbench and GeekBench and compared with my prior results and with results posted on line. Things looked normal. (Except that Xbench's thread test doesn't finish under Lion. Maybe due to sandboxing?)

Next step was to boot in single user mode and run Applejack. I couldn't really find out if Applejack is compatible with Lion. Tried it anyway. Applejack's repair permissions tasks didn't run, but everything else did. fsck found no problems with the drive.

Rebooted. All back to normal. Finder is just as snappy as on the MacBook. Safari is no longer a slug. No more issues with already-loaded pages turning blank and then reloading.

I assume that the sluggishness had something to do with some system or application caches, but I don't know for sure.

My wife did install Lion on her MacBook and is happy with it.

So far.

[mnewman]

Here's an off-topic observation:

With Snow Leopard a Time Machine backup would consume so much cpu time that my MacMini became unusable. The usual culprits were mds and mdworker which would consume nearly 100% of the cpu immediately after a TM backup. I ended up using Time Machine Scheduler to turn Time Machine off during my waking hours.

With Lion, TM backups are barely noticeable. Right now TM is "Indexing Backup..." But look at how little cpu is being consumed by indexing the backup:

Processes: 136 total, 4 running, 132 sleeping, 624 threads 20:13:45
Load Avg: 0.65, 0.69, 0.58 CPU usage: 15.83% user, 7.7% sys, 77.9% idle
MemRegions: 24799 total, 1555M resident, 0B private, 625M shared.
PhysMem: 745M wired, 2277M active, 776M inactive, 3798M used, 297M free.
VM: 320G vsize, 0B framework vsize, 1171658(1) pageins, 134891(0) pageouts.
Networks: packets: 5987471/1232M in, 11322753/9367M out.
Disks: 1001469/21G read, 2355307/21G written.

PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #WQ #POR #MRE RPRV RSHR RSIZ VPRV
30659 Terminal 17.2 02:03.94 5/1 1 146 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
119 WindowServer 11.1 24:00.85 5/1 1 506 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
0 kernel_task 3.8 45:01.26 65/3 0 2 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
400 SystemUIServ 2.2 45:16.95 3 1 278- N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
12733- iStatLocalDa 1.5 22:16.66 3 1 44 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
487- SugarSyncMan 1.1 23:31.72 50 3 210 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
1045 Transmission 0.8 20:16.63 7 1 312 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
32810 top 0.4 03:46.16 1/1 0 60 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
450- SimpleFloati 0.3 06:46.70 2 1 90 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
454- ClamXavSentr 0.3 09:43.74 10 4 138+ N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
1047 NetNewsWire 0.2 02:10.89 8 1 187 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
30590 WebProcess 0.2 20:32.91 7 2 168 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
16 notifyd 0.1 01:48.84 3 3 155 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
79 mds 0.1 06:16.04 10 5 168+ N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
36035- DashboardCli 0.1 01:08.00 12 2 302 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
58 coreservices 0.1 02:00.38 4 1 552 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
451- Path Finder 0.0 04:44.28 6 2 317 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
20 syslogd 0.0 00:59.01 4 0 79 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
368 launchd 0.0 01:01.07 2 0 446 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
497- Dropbox 0.0 06:25.75 17 1 115 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
448- LaunchBar 0.0 02:04.22 5 2 210+ N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
15 opendirector 0.0 01:20.53 9 9 124 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
104 taskgated 0.0 00:31.63 3 1 42 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
1 launchd 0.0 03:41.51 3 0 313 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
372 distnoted 0.0 00:45.60 4 3 150+ N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
401 Finder 0.0 20:26.09 7 4 221 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
407 fontd 0.0 01:10.61 3 2 118 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
456- ChronoSyncBa 0.0 00:49.97 3 1 101 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
240 mysqld 0.0 00:52.28 16 0 35 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
49674 bztransmit 0.0 00:13.14 2 1 36 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
81 loginwindow 0.0 00:34.94 2 1 309 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
488- Default Fold 0.0 00:27.41 4 1 184 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
21 fseventsd 0.0 01:42.03 32 1 149 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
43582- Adium 0.0 01:15.04 8 2 350 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
34190- GraphicConve 0.0 00:44.88 5 2 204+ N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
45137 mdworker 0.0 00:03.91 4 2 54+ N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
22 diskarbitrat 0.0 00:34.05 3 2 201+ N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
398 Dock 0.0 00:31.45 5 3 221+ N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
45142 mdworker 0.0 00:06.29 3 1 58 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A


mds and mdworker are consuming tiny amounts of cpu compared to what they consumed under Snow Leopard. In fact, they are consuming less than 1% of what they did while indexing a backup under Snow Leopard.

[regulus6633]

I'm not certain your applejack routines had any real impact. In my opinion there are still some bugs in Lion that will get worked out over time. The sluggishness you describe happens some times to me too. The Finder seems to get lost periodically (it only happens rarely) and I see the spinning beach ball during these times. It may take up to a minute or two before it stops spinning. I see this in applications as well as the Finder. I just move on to something else while that process is spinning. When it stops everything is fine. I chalk it up to bugs because for the vast majority of the time it's fast and stable.