Macbook goes laggy and I need to reboot

Question

Hey all,
I've been a Macbook owner since 2006. My desktop is a Windows machine I use for gaming and movies, but when it comes to my work I always use my mac due to the better security and overall stability of the operating system. From time to time I'll play a game or watch a movie on it too, but it's mainly geared towards my job.
I do have one problem, and I suspect has something to do with Firefox and other apps that are prone to memory leaks.
I tend to keep my macbook on at all times and never shut it off even at night time when I goto sleep. This is because I like to have my email ready and in front of me when I am ready to begin work that day. I pretty much follow the same policy with my Windows desktop. I simply shut off the screen on it.
Anyways if I open up a lot of stuff. Like Firefox with 15 tabs, Parallels running XP on a 512 meg virtual machine with stuff running inside it, and Windows remote desktop running my macbook starts to show signs of performance degradation even after I am done working with all the apps and it doesn't go away until I reboot it.
When I have all that stuff open, the first sign isn't laggy perfomance with the apps. The apps will initially be fine, but after a few hours when I minimize a window or restore a window and Tiger has those fancy minimize and restore animations that the Intel GPU, the minimization animation starts to get all choppy instead of running smooth as silk as before. If I let this go for a few days, the my apps start to run a bit laggy too.
Even if I close all the apps, I still have the choppy minimize and restore animations. It doesn't go away until I reboot, and the entire machine just doesn't feel as snappy.
Also if I leave Firefox on with a ton of tabs but don't open up a bunch of crap, my mac will run great for days without a reboot, but after around a week and a half it'll start having choppy minimize and restore animations too and eventually degrades and becomes less snappy. Maybe Firefox has a memory leak?

Answer 1

Hi Peter, and a warm welcome to the forums!
Very Important, how much Free Space is on your Hard Drive first of all?
What size Cache do you have set in Firfox>Preferences>Advanced>Network? Try smaller there & might try clearing it there if it slows down.
I think you should get Applejack...
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/19596
After installing, reboot holding down CMD+s, (+s), then when the DOS like prompt shows, type in...
applejack AUTO
Then let it do all 5 of it's things.
At least it'll eliminate some questions if it doesn't fix it.
The 5 things it does are...
Correct any Disk problems.
Repair Permissions.
Clear out Cache Files.
Repair/check several plist files.
Dump the VM files for a fresh start.