Serious lagging, spinning beach ball - about to switch NLE's

I'm beginning a commercial edit with a fast turnaround.  To prepare, I bought a top of the mac pro - literally, the best you can get as far as I know.
12-core, 3.06ghz, 128gb of ram, ATI Radeon 5870, SSD system drive.  I'm editing off of a 6gb/s G-Raid ESpro fiber RAID with an ATTO controller card.  The computer is only two weeks old and the only software on is in FCPX and a few other quicktime and RED programs.  No FCP7 to compete with, permissions are in tact, etc.  I have iStat installed and all temperatures, hard drives, ram, and other hardware looks normal.  Nothing is being taxed when I'm editing, so I believe it's a software issue.
Editing ProRes (regular) 422 video, 1920x1080 23.98.  I'm not using proxies, because my understanding was, with this type of machine I wouldn't have to.   Project and event files are saved to the external fiber drive.
But I'm getting a serious lag on everything... moving a clip, stutters in the timeline when I click and drag.  When I hit playback, I would say about half of the time, i get a spinning wheel for anywhere from 2-20 seconds. 
I'm 3 days into this edit, but very seriously considering performing a system restore and installing FCP7 to get the job done.  This is no easy task, with over 2 terabytes of footage and many clips already tagged and prepped, but I'm willing to do it if it fixes this. 
Anyone else have experience with this?  I've been reading it may be a Mountain Lion (10.8.3) issue, but considering I couldn't a new computer with a different OS, how do I solve this?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I've taken out 4 sticks of ram to run 64gb.  It's paired correctly on 1, 3, 5, and 7.  Still issues.
Playback preferences are set to 'better performance'. 
I've moved all my event and project files to my system SSD and got rid of all unused projects/events that fcp sees.
I will buy the digital rebellion program and try trashing preferences, but I've done that in the past on previous machines w/ fcp7.  It would work for small quirks, but this feels like something more significant.
I'll be calling Apple today... with our tight deadlines, I'm just bearing through it since we don't have 2 days for them to run a diagnostic.  But I'll see if they can do anything.
Thanks

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    The iMac was at 10.7 when the beach balls started; upgrading to Mavericks made the slowness/beachballs worse. As I noted, Mavericks did not cause any trouble with the Air.
    The beach balls seem to coincide with a complete stall in everything the computer is doing. After the stall ends, the computer can be fairly speedy, so it's as if it pauses for several seconds to a minute or so to think very hard, and then goes back to its business.
    There is usually a slight improvement if I shut down and boot up again, but it gums up pretty quickly.
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    In Activity Monitor, memory pressure is fine (esp. now that I added 8 GB), no swap used. The two worst offenders under CPU usage seem to be kernel_task or WindowServer, but they are not always monopolizing the CPU at the times when it is stalled.
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    Used disk utility, repaired permissions, verified disk, etc. - everything was ok, although some permissions were repaired.
    Used third-party utilities, Onyx and iDefrag, to try to verify disk and clean things up. No significant problems detected, and no improvement.
    Various other methods of cleaning up -- eliminating old software or files that aren't being used, emptying trash, taking extra files off the desktop, etc. In particular, having read that Mail might have issues handling Google accounts, I eliminated a heavily-used Google account from Mail and got a separate, lighter-weight third-party app to handle that account. That did seem improve things at first, but we seem to be back to slowness and beach balls again.
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    Hi - been using iPhoto 08 since it came out. Never a problem. About a week ago things starting going weird. It would crash and I'd get the spinning beach ball a lot. This never happened ever. It got so bad I jumped on here, followed some advice and downloaded iphoto library manager. I rebuilt my library - no change. I would double click a photo to enlarge it and it would just stop with a spinning ball. Other programs worked fine, just iPhoto would ground to a halt. Then I noticed some pics I would double click to enlarge would be corrupt. Grey half way down or black completely? They use to be fine. So I got so frustrated that I reinstalled Leopard. Everything worked fine. I even downloaded a trial Lightroom and it worked fine too with a project of mine. Tonight I decided to test iPhoto and it is still playing up. My iMac is a 24 with all latest updates. 4 Gig ram. Hard drive has 250 gig available. my iPhoto library is on an external drive which has 140 gig available. Something went wrong in the last week or so. Is there a way to search out and find a corrupt file or whatever is causing my mac to struggle using iphoto? Thanks so very much for any help.
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    Have you tried to rebuild the library? Make a backup of it first and then launch iPhoto with the Command+Option keys depressed and follow the instructions to rebuild the library. Select all the options.
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    1 -Download iPhoto Library Manager and launch.
    2 -Click on the Add Library button, navigate to your User/Pictures folder and select your iPhoto Library folder.
    3 - Now that the library is listed in the left hand pane of iPLM, click on your library and go to the File->Rebuild Library menu option
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    5 - Click on the Create button.
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  • How to solve Macbook slowdown and spinning beach ball issue

    I've only had my Macbook Pro for one year so far, so it's JUST outside of warranty by about a month. Over the last few months or so, I've noticed it start to lag when opening applications or loading files. Sometimes webpages will cause a spinning beach ball which will then take around a minute or two before it kicks into life again.
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    When you have the problem, note the exact time: hour, minute, second.  
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    ☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
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    Select the messages entered from then until the end of the episode, or until they start to repeat, whichever comes first.
    Copy the messages to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.
    The log contains a vast amount of information, almost all of it useless for solving any particular problem. When posting a log extract, be selective. A few dozen lines are almost always more than enough.
    Please don't indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
    Please don't post screenshots of log messages—post the text.
    Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

  • The spinning beach ball keeps rolling

    Hey there!
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    /Johan

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  • Help for slow clients with spinning beach balls.

    I work at a school where we have an xsvr 105-000 running 10.5
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    We are having a continuing problem that no one seems to be able to solve. The computers slow to a crawl everyday. Students get spinning beach balls when they are clicking on sites, paging or scrolling up and down etc.
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    2. Is there some setting on the server that could be causing this? (I realize that I have provided no where near enough info for a specific here, but I am only a teacher.)
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    Hi
    Good question. I'm sure there will be others with opinions and experiences willing to share?
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