I upgraded to Snow Leopard as soon as I could and immediately felt there was a big slow down with lots of Spinning Beachballs, etc. Terminal showed between 5 and 12 stuck processes at all times and the whole system ran like a dog.
After a lot of digging around I solved the issue by getting off FileVault. I travel a lot and don’t want somebody to be able to get all my data when the inevitable happens and I lose my laptop. I’m not certain whether it’s my machine (I didn’t do a clean install for Snow Leopard) or 10.6(.1) itself. Either way, even if I created a new user with FileVault I saw stuck processes, without FileVault they are very rare.
Sharing with the world in case you too are in this boat.
PS: Yes, I did run Disk Utility and fix preferences both before & after install. SMARTD is showing no problems either.
I beleive I have the same problem… my system is soooooo slow after I upgrade, and I guess is the filevault. I also run some defrag, but no bg change.
I have the same exact problem. I have a >1TB disk image using FileVault (along with my user's home folder) on Snow Leopard. The computer will occasionally freeze on I/O (the application is irrelevant), giving the spinning beachball cursor–then eventually it will unlock and everything will resume.At first I thought it was the hard drive itself that had the problem, but switching drives and monitoring SMART proves otherwise. It's FileVault. I don't remember these issues under Leopard.Has anyone tried TrueCrypt (for the Mac, obviously)?
My biggest issue with Snow Leopard is Safari. Sometimes opening up a new tab or a new window leads to a spinning beach ball and hard drive thrashing for 1-3 minutes.