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I am using OSX 10.7.5 and my OSX is becoming a bit unresponsive, comparing to what it was like before. Sometimes just opening new window of browser or terminal takes few seconds or the Dock hovering effect is not fluent. At these moments I watch system resources and I still have 3G of memory free and the processor is not used at all. Can it be caused by hard drive or other IO? How can I found out which application is causing this?

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  • Do you have some virus scanner enabled.
    – Ruskes
    Apr 28, 2013 at 11:19
  • How is your widowserver doing ?
    – Ruskes
    Apr 28, 2013 at 11:27
  • No, I don't have any virus scanner. Windowserver seems to be having no troubles. But I would prefer to see some real statistics of what is blocking the system.
    – Vojtěch
    Apr 28, 2013 at 12:08
  • You are not telling us the full story. Giving comments to answers like "I tried this" is not helpful. So please elaborate in your OP what have you tried and if you are only looking for a very specific solution.
    – Ruskes
    Apr 28, 2013 at 13:53

2 Answers 2

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Use top to monitor system resources. As you mention issues with opening the browser possibly there is malware active or some other agent which is causing unwarranted network activity. To monitor this use-:

ifconfig -a  # for the network interface name to monitor

then

tcpdump -i <interface>

An alternative for network monitoring is nettop - a command line tool which I believe is available from Lion version. It's available from Apple store.

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  • Of course I have tried top, but it seems that hardly any system resources are used. Will try the tcpdump.
    – Vojtěch
    Apr 28, 2013 at 12:37
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Check the logs for clues. Even a high volume of relatively harmless error messages (itself an error!), could swamp your response time.

Edit: /var/log/system.log and /var/log/kernel.log would be most likely. Or open the Console app in Utilities and show all messages.

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  • Which logs? There are many of them on OSX.
    – Vojtěch
    Apr 28, 2013 at 12:38
  • (See my edit..)
    – JRobert
    Apr 28, 2013 at 14:44

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