Brand new Mac Mini is unusually slow

[twalk]

What mystified me about the original drive is that programs ran slow, not just that they were slow to open or access the drive. It was like I was trying to run macOS 10.14 on a netbook from 2007. It wasn't the performance I expected from a slow hard drive, it was way worse. I was already aware of the hard drive's slow 5400RPM speed (like those they still use in cheap, crappy laptops), but still. It's difficult to explain.

Just FYI, but the people above that said it was 100% the hard drive, were wrong

I bought and returned one of these a couple of years ago. Here's what's happening: You only have 4G of ram. When you load an app, say Safari, there goes most of your free ram... plus now your putting pressure on your disk cache space. If you run Safari and put up a small number of tabs, often like 7-8, you're now well past needing the 4G of ram that's available. At this point, macos is usually busy dumping much of the disk cache (to save memory for apps), compressing memory, and paging out to disk what it can't keep in memory at the moment

What happens then? Well, the processor gets overheated and drops down to 1.4GHz speed (little more than half it's normal speed) and macos is paging memory to the disk at a rate that the entire machine is basically running at little more than the speed of the hard drive. Note that this is a combination of the slow processor, way too low of memory, and using a hard drive

Switching from a hard drive to a SSD doesn't actually fix the processor + memory issues, it just makes the machine much more tolerable to use because the SSD is so much faster

 

[imercado]

...
What happens then? Well, the processor gets overheated and drops down to 1.4GHz speed (little more than half it's normal speed) and macos is paging memory to the disk at a rate that the entire machine is basically running at little more than the speed of the hard drive. Note that this is a combination of the slow processor, way too low of memory, and using a hard drive

Switching from a hard drive to a SSD doesn't actually fix the processor + memory issues, it just makes the machine much more tolerable to use because the SSD is so much faster

I appreciate your post, because blaming everything on just a slow hard drive has never made sense to me. My 2009 Unibody White Macbook shipped with a 5400 RPM HD and just a Core 2 duo processor, and it NEVER ran as ridiculously slow as the low end 2014 Mac Minis I have used...once they get into that "death spiral" of beach ballness. This explanation makes much more sense, especially the part about stepping down the processor speed. I can see how that "perfect storm" of slow processor plus slow memory paging could put the device into some unrecoverable circumstances on more than one occasion for me, especially when trying to do fast user switching and the machine would beach ball lock up and never recover.

I have to say, though, that many times I had this issue I was actually staring at the Activity Monitor app, and noticing that memory was NOT overutilized, and hard disk activity was practically nil, so I personally think this issue is more kernel <-> processor or maybe kernel <-> paging file mismanagement in certain circumstances when extra memory pressure is occurring.

Now I have still had these things crash even with an external SSD in a USB 3.0 port, although not as regularly. On a little whim this week, I decided to remove the SSD with Mojave and let the machine boot from High Sierra on the internal HD, but this time I forced the machine to boot into Safe Mode and have left it there. Interestingly enough, I have NOT yet encountered the never-ending beach ball death spiral, and I have been pounding on this machine semi-heavily (not terribly heavily) over the past few days. Could it be that Safe Mode disables some particular kernel extensions that might be being overprotective of the processor or be mismanaging the swap file?

Safe Mode certainly isn't a recommended go forward solution, because of the semi-annoying graphic glitching you get when running in safe mode, but I am still able to happily drive two displays and I am able to get typical web-browing and file management activities done without entering the death spiral, so who knows...maybe this is an acceptable workaround for someone without the budget or the means to get at an SSD in their moment of need?

 

[IowaLynn]

This is a very old post, but it seems that installing an SSD actually did solve the problem (or at least having a completely clean installation of macOS solved most of it), as now the computer runs at the same level as my MacBook Pro. I installed a Samsung 860 (can't remember if it's Evo or Pro or something else) and now, it's very responsive and it even seems to run faster, which I wouldn't have expected.

MacOS is designed for SSDs 10.14 using APFS while HFS+ is slower than molasses

$89 for Samsung T5 SSD USBC drive is great for running or as backup clone.

If there’s $$ for memory and internal SSD all the better.

 

[imercado]

Safe Mode certainly isn't a recommended go forward solution...
...maybe this is an acceptable workaround for someone without the budget or the means to get at an SSD in their moment of need?

Had to provide an update after I force fed Big Sur Beta 6 down the throat of this persnickety underpowered 2014 Mac Mini. Same story holds true as before. When I boot into normal (non "Safe") mode, performance is horrendous with massive wait times for application starts and seemingly straightforward tasks like opening a new browser tab. As an example of a "massive wait time", clicking on the WiFi icon in the menu bar for the first time after rebooting results in a five second delay before displaying the WiFi network choices.

Now...reboot into Safe Mode. It's a whole different ball game. Apps start much more quickly. Web browsing is much more responsive. Clicking the WiFi icon in the menu bar for the first time after rebooting only requires a two second delay before displaying the WiFi network choices.

As we were surmising earlier in this thread nearly a year ago...it's not just the hard disk that's to blame. It's almost as if there is intentional sabotaging of the machine's performance that magically goes away when booted into Safe Mode.