Mavericks Nearly Killed My Mac – and How I Fixed It

Upgrade to Mavericks = Epic Fail

I was one of those people for whom upgrading to Maverick’s wasn’t a joy. In fact, it was a nightmare, resulting in a nearly unusable slow and sluggish machine. The system took now forever to boot up (15 minutes or longer) and once it was booted, the swirling Beach Ball became my closest and dearest friend. Every time I switched from one application to another, the dreaded Beach Ball would appear, sometimes for as long as 30 seconds. Application now took excruciatingly long to long as well, with Safari bouncing in the dock as much as 70 times (once, I counted 93) before launching. Most programs behaved in a similar manner.

What I Tried

What was curious was that my memory pressure was low, with usually about 7 gigs or more free (I have 16 gig installed on my Mac) and CPU usage was typically about 5%. Needless to say, my machine’s lagging made little sense to me. I tried the following without success:

Repairing Permissions
Resetting PRAM
Repairing the Disk
Running every Onyx maintenance and cleaning routine
Reinstalling Mavericks

But no luck.

And Then, I Remembered….

I was yanking my hair out in frustration. Finally one day, I was sifting through my notes and came across something I had written down awhile back. It entailed the modification of a system file via Terminal app to speed up a sluggish Mac after a Maverick’s installation. I hadn’t tried it yet and at this point, I was willing to give anything a go. So I gave it a try and lo and behold, I had my old, zippy Mac back! Before I give you the instructions (and you WILL have to go into Terminal), it’s important to note that this is only a temporary solution. Hopefully, Apple will fix this issue (a known issue, from what I understand) in a future update. If not, you may have to reapply this fix if there are future Mavericks upgrades so it would behoove you to put a copy of these instructions in a safe place — and if there is a fix, you will have to reverse these instructions. I also recommend that you repair your permissions before running these commands.

To Solve a Sluggish Mac after Upgrading to Mavericks

From the Finder menu click Go > Utilities
Double-click the Terminal application
Enter in the following command: sudo nano /etc/auto_master
Press the Enter key.
When requested, enter your admin password.
Use your arrow keys to move to the line that begins with /net. We are going to place the pound symbol (#) before this line to comment it out.
Type the # key so that the line now reads: #/net
To save the file, hold down the Control key and press the O key (not zero, but “oh” O = Ctrl + O)
To exit from the text editor, hold down to Control key and press X
Lastly, unflush the unmount cache by typing: sudo automount -vc
Exit the Terminal application and restart your system. Once it boots up, you should be good to go!

As mentioned above, if Apple does provide a bug fix for this issue, you will need to reverse this procedure by removing the # symbol form the /net line. So save these instructions.