Freezes, beachballs and problems. How do I fix this?

Question

I have been having a lot of problems lately, well really since the day I bought this thing, and I'm curious if there is something I can fix? My macbook pro seems to be running really poorly; getting beachballs just to open another tab in Safari when it is the only program running and I have only one tab open, taking upto 10 minutes to load apps like iMovie, and so on. I'm not sure what to provide to be able to help someone to potentially be able to tell me what is wrong with my computer but after several trips to the genius bar, a replaced logicboard (based on other complaints which have still not been resolved), this thing is still not running the way I feel it should.

Answer 1

Your problem is excessive swapping of data between physical memory and virtual memory.
That can happen for two reasons:
(1) You have a long-running process with a memory leak (i.e., a bug), or
(2) You don't have enough memory installed for your usage pattern.
Tracking down a memory leak can be difficult, and it may come down to a process of elimination. In Activity Monitor, select All Processes from the menu in the toolbar, if not already selected. Click the heading of the Real Mem column in the process table once or twice to sort the table with the highest value at the top. If one process (not including "kernel_task") is using much more memory than all the others, that could be an indication of a leak. A better indication would be a process that continually grabs more and more memory over time without ever releasing it.
This suggestion is only for users familiar with the shell. For a more precise, but potentially misleading, test, run the following command:
sudo leaks -nocontext -nostacks process | grep total
where process is the name of a process you suspect of leaking memory. Almost every process will leak some memory; the question is how much, and especially how much the leak increases with time. I can’t be more specific. See the leaks(1) man page and the Apple developer documentation for details:
Memory Usage Performance Guidelines: About the Virtual Memory System
If you don't have an obvious memory leak, your options are to install more memory (if possible) or to run fewer programs simultaneously.