10.13.6 killing both my iMacs with slowness

[Bravo2zero]

I’ve got 2 iMacs
2.8ghtz 4gb ram
2.7ghtz 4gb ram

It’s now taking approximately 2hrs 30mins for them to boot after updating to 10.13.6. When they were on 10.13.5 maybe 4 mins boot to fully usable state with the HDD just idling.

Web pages are taking 45min to load on a 300mb 5ghtz speed connection

App Store I left loading up at 10pm last night and 6am this morning still hasn’t loaded just a spinning clock finger globe.

 

[BrianBaughn]

4 minutes would drive me crazy these days.

Since you have two similar iMacs exhibiting the same behavior it seems you have hit the wall.

When was the update done? Is is possible that Spotlight indexing is contributing, in a major way, to the slowdown? I don’t know if that would even affect startup.

You have two things working against you on those machines. First is the slow, spinner hard drives and second is the inadequate amount of RAM. When a computer starts paging…using hard drive space for RAM purposes…and it has a spinner hard drive the slowdown can be horrible.

8GB or more of RAM would be my first suggestion. Not far behind that would be SSDs instead of spinner HDs.

You could post an Etrecheck report here to let folks see if there’s anything installed that might be contributing.

 

[Bravo2zero]

4 minutes would drive me crazy these days.

Since you have two similar iMacs exhibiting the same behavior it seems you have hit the wall.

When was the update done? Is is possible that Spotlight indexing is contributing, in a major way, to the slowdown? I don’t know if that would even affect startup.

You have two things working against you on those machines. First is the slow, spinner hard drives and second is the inadequate amount of RAM. When a computer starts paging…using hard drive space for RAM purposes…and it has a spinner hard drive the slowdown can be horrible.

8GB or more of RAM would be my first suggestion. Not far behind that would be SSDs instead of spinner HDs.

You could post an Etrecheck report here to let folks see if there’s anything installed that might be contributing.

It seems an issue with 10.13.6 as both machines worked before upgrade on Sunday. Last night was first power on and both same condition speed wise. The machines are glowing hot too to the point I had to put on a 3rd party fan control.

I’ve been reading on Apple forum and people with i7’s 32gb ram and SSD’s are experiencing same issue.

 

[BrianBaughn]

It seems an issue with 10.13.6 as both machines worked before upgrade on Sunday. Last night was first power on and both same condition speed wise. The machines are glowing hot too to the point I had to put on a 3rd party fan control.

I’ve been reading on Apple forum and people with i7’s 32gb ram and SSD’s are experiencing same issue.

Some of those users have posted Etrecheck reports. You could compare your report with theirs to see if there's any correlation.

 

[Razzerman]

How old are the imacs?

 

[Fishrrman]

OP:
What kind of drives are INSIDE the iMacs (both of them)?

Are they platter-based hard drives?
In that case, they're going to be slow with recent versions of the Mac OS.

But ANY Mac that takes "two hours and 30 minutes" to boot has something wrong with it. My 2012 Mini boots in about 15 seconds.

Perhaps it's time to wipe those drives clean, and "start over"...

 

[Bravo2zero]

OP:
What kind of drives are INSIDE the iMacs (both of them)?

Are they platter-based hard drives?
In that case, they're going to be slow with recent versions of the Mac OS.

But ANY Mac that takes "two hours and 30 minutes" to boot has something wrong with it. My 2012 Mini boots in about 15 seconds.

Perhaps it's time to wipe those drives clean, and "start over"...

Sorted it , popped on 10.14 and they are now flying machines again despite the age. My main is a Mac mini 2012 , 2.5ghtz i5 - 16gb hypereX ram and 2x HyperX red drives which boots in about 9 seconds. The 2 iMacs are the kids ones just for homework so nothing really installed other than MS office 2016, as soon as 10.13.6 installed they went pulling teeth slow where you felt like launching the thing out of the window.

Now they boot back to about 3mins from button pressed to usable so all good. There has to be issues without a doubt with 10.13.6 causing major lag.

 

[BLUEDOG314]

I would say to run SMART Utility to check the HDDs' health. 8GB of ram is definitely a good idea. If your hardware is healthy, never underestimate the value of a backup, clean install, and manual migration of data and reinstall of all apps.

 

[HDFan]

There has to be issues without a doubt with 10.13.6 causing major lag.

I would interpret your results that there is some software, extension, whatever that does not play well with 10.13.6. Although it has only been released for less than 2 weeks, I would think that such an extreme MacOS problem would have been reported by other if it were an OS issue. Hopefully upgrading to the next MacOS release in September works for you.

If your hardware is healthy, never underestimate the value of a backup, clean install, and manual migration of data and reinstall of all apps.

If it does repeat then BlueDog314's suggestion would be your best bet. You can do the teardown debugging (keep removing things until you find a problem), but a fresh install is probably better.