Apps take forever to start on OS X Mavericks Ever since I upgraded my main machine to Mavericks, every time I open a new app, two things happen:


the app takes a long time to open;
the whole system slows to a crawl until the app opens completely.


The interesting part is that this happens on an early 2011 MacBook Pro (with 4GB of RAM), while on an older machine (mid/late 2007 MBP with 2GB of RAM), also updated to Mavericks, everything is a breeze—it’s surreal! (Both machines were upgraded from Snow Leopard.)

And on top of that, Safari is completely broken—see my previous question.

What I’ve done so far:


repaired permissions;
cleared system and user cache;
reseted the SMC;
ran AppleJack;


What can I possibly do to make it work as it should?
When I see things like this I often suspect disk problems. (This is a HDD, correct?) The first symptoms of soft disk errors are often bad performance.

Open the Console and see if you see any disk errors. Also try booting into a Super Duper clone. Since a clone will have the same files, any problem would continue if it were a configuration problem. But if the problem goes away, it was likely a problem with the physical drive. As a bonus, a clone is exactly what you will need if you have a physical drive problem.