I have started to get the same problem on two machines in the office…any ideas out there?

There are 2 machines both running Snow Leopard. XP Pro is accessed using VMFusion. This setup has been running fine for 2 to 3 years.

In the last few days they have both begun to run very slowly.

I have opened Activity Monitor/System Memory. It shows that I have 4GB RAM with only a few MB ‘Free”. The ‘Wired’ reading is usually quite high say 1.6GB if that means anything.

As a fix I can Repair Disk Permissions and it all goes back to normal only for the problem to reappear within 24 hours. It has beaten us all here.

Looking at the programs running, there is nothing that comes close to 4GB.

How full are your hard drives? It seems that a classic symptom of slow running is full hard drives. They seem to recommend keeping at least 25% free capacity on the hard drive.

As per @wobliscot – typically this slow running is a combination of full RAM and nearly full hard-disk as when the ram is used the OS swaps out memory to the hard disk and if that’s getting full the machine slows right down. Step 1 would be to cleanse the hard drive of unwanted files and empty the trash too.

I have a 2009 Mac Mini and with 2GB RAM and 90% full HD and it ran very slowly. I recently switched RAM for 8GB and put a 750gb hard drive in – components were bought online and followed videos and used macrumours forums / ifixit for help. Machine is transformed.

It’s worthwhile zapping/resetting your NVRam…

1. Shut down your Mac.
2. Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command (?), Option, P, and R. You will need to hold these keys down simultaneously in step 4.
3. Turn on the computer.
4. Press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys before the gray screen appears.
5. Hold the keys down until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for the second time.
6. Release the keys.

NVRam can cause issues like this.

Contact VMWare support, your fix makes no sense in itself since permissions are either correct and the system works or not and it doesn’t. Maybe it helps briefly via the byproduct of it flushing disk cache and freeing up some memory.

I’m not sure whether Wired Usage is expected when using Fusion as I don’t have my mac with me, but basically it is non-pageable memory, e.g. kernel memory structures which must not be swapped to disk.

Have you done any system or vmware updates recently?

Make sure you have All Processes not My Processes or Windowed selected when you use the Activity Monitor.

NVRam can cause issues like this.

How?

Nothing personal, but whenever any Mac problem is posted, the first two answers are always zap your PRAM and reset permissions. The modern equivalent of ’rebuilding your desktop’. 😆

Been away for a bit. Thnaks for the answers….I’ll have a proper read and see what happens.

HDD have masses of room left….maybe 100GB