iMac Suddenly Super Slow

[AaronH]

Hey guys,

Has anyone run into an issue where your iMac is suddenly super slow? I can't figure it out. I have ~97% CPU available, ~8GB of RAM available and no way to tell disk usage in activity monitor. I'm running OS X Sierra 10.12.6.

Its mostly evident with Finder. Renaming things takes minutes. Several of them. I can select an item, rename it, and it won't show the new name for a few minutes. It also takes a while to open a file. Doesn't matter if its InDesign or Acrobat or whatever. I double click, see the icon get large and fade (You know how it looks when you do that right?) And then nothing. Even if the app is already open... the file takes 1 minute or so to actually open.

Its a little faster on the desktop vs a network volume. But still slow.

Any ideas?

[David]

Have you tried using the disk utility to do the first aid (resets permissions, cleans caches, etc). Sometimes helps.

[Joe]

I'm not sure if Disk Utility in Sierra does that still or not. In Mojave it no longer has a repair permissions option. I would run Onyx on it to repair permissions, clean caches and other utilities and see if it helps. I have seen this behavior before when a hard drive is about to die.

https://www.titanium-software.fr/en/onyx.html

[AaronH]

Alright Thanks Joe. I'll try it.

David, I haven't tried Disk Utility. I kinda forgot about it since it stopped fixing permissions.

[Joe]

To get Disk Utility to do any repairs you have to boot into recovery mode to do it.

[AaronH]

Oh gotcha.

Well Onix and Disk Utility say my startup disk is fine. I'm not sure what the issue could be then.

Edit: I've been working on my desktop for the last half hour to an hour and it seems to be as fast as it was before. I wonder if something was hung up in the cache or something. I'll go back to working on the network and see if it's still slow.

[Joe]

You may want to run the utilities in Onyx to purge your system, font, and application cache and any other routines that may help. I think they have an auto setting that does a bunch of stuff like that. Run it and then it will require a reboot. Onyx can fix quite a bit of stuff.

[AaronH]

Ah ok. I was a little afraid to do any of those not knowing if it would cause harm.

Thanks Joe!

[Joe]

Some of them can actually make your computer a bit slower after the first reboot as it cleans all the crap out cache and temp folders so it has to rebuild some fresh data in those places after the reboot. In the long run you are better off running these about one a month at least to get a clean fresh start. (sounds like a commercial there )

[born2print]

As in the beachball thread, similar here, running 10.11.6, 16GB ram, etc...

IT blames Chrome (our official browser of choice btw)

I think it's Finder!! I've even caught it by leaving the force quit window open. I still don't get what the finder is SOOOOO busy doing that it can't let me do such simple tasks?!
This frigging bloat trend needs to turn around.

[born2print]

...and really bummed to hear it won't get any better when I update this mac OS  :cry:

[Joe]

I've been trying to find time to do a fresh install of Mojave. When I installed I installed it over Sierra. And ever since then every time I double click anything there is about 2 second wait before anything happens. They couldn't have designed it to do that right? So a fresh install should tell me if it is designed that way (stupid) or funky (poor coding) because it wasn't a clean install. But yeah the bloat has gotten out of hand. I'm talking to you Adobe. And Apple. And Kodak. And a bunch of you others too!

[born2print]

AMEN! Especially Apple. I remember when PShop came on a handful of floppies. 

[Joe]

Yes...Illustrator 1 came on a single 5.25" floppy disk. Seriously! 

[AaronH]

Man after running Onyx, my iMac is lightning fast. It feels like its brand new!

Thanks Joe!