Newbie question for the panel. I have a 2017 MacBook Pro 15" w/touch bar. I keep running into a problem where open apps/programs will stop working (spinning icon) one by one until the entire laptop is locked up. Am I missing something or is this just a "learning" curve with the new OS High Sierra?
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2017 MacBook Pro 15" keeps bogging down
- Thread starter homelessgator
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Its showing 5.5gb of 16gb is being used currently. I'll try the complete reinstall of High Sierra. Thank you for the advice.
Before you do that, do you have any idea if there's any installed software that could be creating problems? I've had bizarre performance issues like the one you've described and sometimes I'm able to trace it back to a single program or a couple of programs. Checking Activity Monitor for clues on resource utilization is a good place to start looking for likely culprits. Also, check your login items to see what's being loaded when you log in.
Agreed. The old saying "measure twice, cut once" is the best approach.
Also, check if you were doing anything on the web. A lot of crypto miners are inserting code on web sites that steal cycles from your machine. You go the page and it starts a script that performs their calculations and sends the results to their servers. Sites unknowing put this up when they place ads on their pages. And is another reason to block ads.
You can detect these types of issued by doing as smirking suggests and check the Activity Monitor. If the browser is using the entire CPU while you are looking at cat pictures, something is going on.
This could be the culprit, but we can’t assume because mds_stores is spotlight search and it’ll be running on and off now and then. Just keep activity monitor open and as your machine starts to slow down while you’re using it, peek at it and see what’s hogging up CPU and Memory
That is spotlight. It is likely doing it's indexing. Is this a new (less than a month or so) machine? Also do you power it off occasionally instead of just closing the display.
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It's about 6 months old. I have recently starting powering it off because of these issues to see if that helps alleviate some of the problems.
Something is definitely using your resources. If you can't figure it out, try doing a clean install.
I did a High Sierra reinstall and also deselected all options for Spotlight in Systems Preferences. I'm monitoring the Activity Monitor all the time now to see if I can find any sneaky memory hogs lurking, but so far everything seems to be working as advertised. Thanks again for all your suggestions.
Yeah, but anything can become a runaway process under the right conditions, especially an indexer.