Snow leopard very sluggish in general.

Question

Since I upgraded to snow leopard on both of my machines they both have been extremely slow. Snow leopard claimed to be twice as fast, but I experience something that is 10 times as slow. I had no problems with Leopard.
I have 2 macs:
Mac Pro 8 cores 2.8 Ghz 16GB memory
MacBook Pro 2 cores 2.8 Ghz 4 GB memory
On the Mac Pro, the one with most CPU and memory, just a few minutes ago, right klicking on the activity control took several seconds before the menu popped up during which time the gui was completely frozen. The 2 most CPU intensive processes when I checked with top was VMWare at 177% (out of 800%) and top itself at 10%. At the time I'm runnging one finder, one shell window, firefox, apple mail, iTunes, 2 vmware machines (not being used at that moment), and NetBeans. I'm using around 25% memory. This is very typical. When I bought this mac and it ran Leopard it took me over 2 months before I saw the so called "Beachball" for the first time. I had no idea what people where speaking of when they mentioned the beachball. Now with Snow Leopard I get it all the time. Just moving the mouse it enough to make it show sometimes.
On the MacBook Pro with just 2 cores and only 4 GB of memory it is totally unbearable. I'm a software developer and consultant and just doing a java compilation and reading mail at the same time is very difficult. When doing a GWT compilation the whole machine is completely unresponsive for about 20 minutes. Other project collegues running Dell and Lenovo lapptops with Windows XP (can only use 3GB!) actually gets better performance than me! This is really embarasing. I did not buy the MacBook Pro because it looks good. I bought it because I though it was a capable machine. Before Snow Leopard, it actually was.
I've been hoping with every OS update that there is a fix for this, but so far nothing! I google on this problem at least once a week hoping to find some answer to this, but nothing so far (at least nothing that has worked).
I keep the CPU usage window open at all time, but when the machine is very slugish it shows almost no CPU usage. I've come to realize that as soon as the CPU usage goes up relatively high the gui repsonse and window refresh goes down quite considerably.
Am I the only one having these performance problems ? I see a lot of entries about the beachball in conjunction with firefox or safari, but I get it all the time. It is not specific to any application. And there is often extreme slugishnes even without the beachball showing, like my example above.
This must be a software problem in Snow Leopard since I had no such problems with Leopard, and the machines have not changed.
I've tried some suggestions found on the web, but the last I tried disabled the sound and provided no better performance. I undid that change and got the sound back again. But there seems to be no remedy for the performance problem.
Is there an easy way to go back to Leopard again, without scratching and reinstalling the whole system ?
Any suggestions are appreciated.
Regards,
Tommy Svensson

Answer 1

Hi guys
Thanks for your contributions. I have made little progress on this issue since posting.
Just as added info, I did a re-install of Snow leopard from install DVD and upgrade again to 10.6.1 and no change to the startup behaviours. Same pattern as before, although the first restart was fast and probably how it is meant to be, then the slow ones reappeared.
I also had a thought that somehow it may be related to the nominated startup disk. There were posts on other boards about similar issues with Leopard where the hanging start was found to be related to the computer not knowing which startup disk to use. I thought maybe as it works when using the boot camp icon from Windows but not the restart button, it may be related, but in OSX and Windows both are set to startup in OSX on HD. So no further joy.
Maybe someone else will come along who can understand the Console logs. Why does the loginwindow and Security Agent take so long?
Do you guys have any clues from your Console system logs? Does yours hang on loginwindow?
The fact that there are so few people with the same problem suggests to me that there is a third party device/preference/ hidden file somewhere that is having an effect and it's not an Apple issue.
I am getting close to wiping the hard drive and starting again....but live in hope.
Cheers