firewire audio interface on os x el capitan affecting system performance

I own a mid 2009 macbook pro and use a firewire Saffire LE as my interface. Recently I've been feeling that the computer's been getting kind of slow. I notice it especially when I'm on FB writing messages - typing in text lags visibly and obviously. I always thought it had something to do with modern web applications being huge and resource hungry and I figured that even 8GB of memory and an SSD is not enough anymore to nicely run these things.

But yesterday I noticed something different - I didn't have the interface hooked up and everything seemed noticeably smoother. None of that typing lag bullshit. Also what happened is that after when I plugged in my headphones, Firefox crashed totally out of the blue. The third thing I've noticed is that computer games ran more smoothly without the FW interface.

I googled this thing a bit today and while there's not a lot of information about this thing happening to other people, I did find some articles talking about Apple discontinuing firewire driver support and specifically El Capitan having some bugs and errors. Particularly this article got me thinking that something weird might be going on.

Unfortunately my MBP is exactly old enough not to be eligible for Sierra (although I hear I could be hacked to be), so now I'm thinking if it's worth to ditch the FW interface and to get a USB one and improve my system performance. Does anyone else have experience with this?

I run a 2009 imac with Mountain Lion and a sapphire pro 40. All smooth all round. I don't have games or anything on there though just music and internet.

I also use a similar age macbook with el capitan for editing music in the lounge or on the go. No interface needed. But, I find el capitan slow and kinda sluggish. I would go back to mountain lion in an instant but I need one of the computers to have at least el capitan for OS updates like arturia etc...

I have never felt that the sapphire or mixcontrol software made any difference to anything (I used pro24 before pro40) but as soon as I upgraded to el capitan I noticed a big difference.

Not sure that helps any though.

Thanks for the information.

I don't really play games too often either, but one of the more newer and resource hungry ones definitely seemed to be running more smoothly when there was no firewire interface attached. There's a Muffwiggler post that warns about Apogee dropping support for FW in El Capitan because Apple is no longer developing the driver. Saffire LE is pretty much absent from Focusrite's list of stuff that's supported on El Capitan, so it's kind of plausible that there could be some issues. Right now everything's more or less working though on the audio side, I was just wondering if it's the FW interface that's been a drag on my laptop's performance. Paying 200€ for a new USB audio interface beats getting a new 2000€ laptop. :)

By the way, are your FW interfaces running on custom drivers or are they using Apple's builtin driver? Mine is the latter, I've never seen a Focusrite Saffire LE driver available anywhere.

Just looked up the LE, never seen that one before. Seems to have it's own thing going on aside from the other saffires. With these, the mixcontrol software deals with everything and is super smooth. zero latency is great.

Maybe look into getting a cheap second hand saffire pro if you want to stick with firewire for the meantime. I sold my pro24 for £100 and you can pick up pro40's for £200. Newer ones are obviously USB and still use mixcontrol.

They are solid decent sounding bits of kit, perfect for people not wanting highly polished results from high quality conversion.

Originally I got the FW interface because I had a feeling that I'd get better latency and stability out of it. Before I had a USB M-Audio Fast Track Pro, which I replaced after crapped itself out several times during a dj set. I think times have changed now and USB3.0 and newer stuff is pretty much similar to FW anyway. I'm not planning to switch away from Apple computers any time soon so with them dropping FW stuff it seems logical that my next interface will be USB. Will continue to use the Saffire LE for now I guess.

browsers always chew up resources and act, for me, in inconsistent ways when it comes to weird behavior.  safari, firefox, chrome.. all vary in ways they effect audio processes. firefox is like a whole separate operating system.. facebook seems that way as well.  i stick to safari these days

generally.. all my DAWs work better when there's no browser open.  i use a FW interface as well and get weirdness now and then.. usually it's when apple puts out a security update. i'm also on el capitan.. 10.11.6.

It's not so much that the browser slows stuff down, but rather the even if I am just listening to music and the FW interface is attached, there's a typing lag in FB and Skype. I've noticed this a couple of times now when I was using the laptop away from my audio setup - everything's just a little - but noticeably - more responsive.