Do you have a lot of things built up on your computer? Overloading your system with lots of useless programs and other things tends to choke your system up from time time.
I'd recommend cleaning up your system from time to time of programs and other processes that are not really needed.
Simply having data or apps stored on the drive will have absolutely no effect on performance, unless the drive is almost full. The only thing that affects performance is what you have running at any point in time.
Also, keeping your system running 24/7 is not such a great idea, more often than not keeping it on for hours and days has shown to show problems in just about every system. Especially MacBooks, which are overloaded more easily than iMacs. I'd recommend doing a complete shutdown of your system when it is not in usage.
This is false. You can run 24/7 for months without issue on any Mac model. It is absolutely unnecessary to shut down or restart, except in specific circumstances, such as installing updates or some apps, or specific troubleshooting. Many, many users run successfully for months at a time without shutting down or restarting.
Another thing to consider is that there are maintenance scripts that run on a daily, weekly and monthly schedule. If your Mac is running or in sleep mode at the scheduled time, the scripts will run, or will run the next time your Mac is awake. If your Mac is shut down at the scheduled time, the scripts won't run until the next scheduled time. If your Mac is always shut down at those times, the scripts will never run, unless you manually run them or change the default schedule. You can manually run the scripts using the
Maintidgit widget.
It's rare that I would even leave my computer on over night. I shut it down every night.
There is no harm in letting it run overnight, even for weeks or months.
But I do have a habit of installing some programs I never use.
There's nothing wrong with installing as many apps as you want to try. In most cases, If you just want to delete an app, drag the .app file to the trash. However, if you want to completely remove all associated files/folders to free up drive space, the most effective method for complete app removal is manual deletion:
IMO and I'm not an expert, but I think it's a bug. After reading this thread about an OS having bug ...etc.
It does sound like a bug. If you're having general performance issues, this may also help:
