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iMac suddenly sluggish

T

TohMac

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jan 2, 2019
109
28
Somewhere in the Universe
iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch) Purchased Dec 25, 2014 making it 4 years as of last week.

10.12.6
3.5 GHz Intel Core i5
8 GB installed ( can do 8gb more if really needed)


It has been running perfectly until one of the upgrades about 6 weeks ago.
Has become sluggish in this very short time.
As it is my main computer I do need it to work as well as it once did.
Other than a short time daily of converting media files, which does not seem to be a drag on the machine, I do need multiple web pages open and the ability to download files without it becoming sluggish as it has done.

Yes, I know it's now 4 years old but is there any point to upgrading memory, or doing anything at all to get it back to where it was and if so, how much longer will that last before i give up and buy a new one?
(don't really want to do that quite yet if I don't have to)

Would a reinstall even help? Never had to reinstall it as it has worked perfectly until recently.

What are my best options at this point? Would there even be any point in selling this at this point in time?
Etc.


Any/all input welcome please!
 
fusion drive or ssd?
using activity manager, can you estimate memory usage and pressure?
 
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Fusion. I didnt bother to upgrade to SSD at time of purchase and it has performed perfectly until an OSX upgrade, I think in the middle of November.

Physical Memory: 8.00 GB
Memory Used: 5.21 GB
Cached Files: 2.67 GB
Swamp Used: 61.0 MB

Edit:

Will see if this imgur screenshot works here and/or if it helps. ( a bit big, sorry )

Co7SbBV.png
 
10.14.1 was released on 30 October
10.14.2 was released on 3 December.

Is your memory pressure red, yellow or green?
what's your cpu load?
 
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As soon as I installed one upgrade I noticed it was sluggish. Maybe it was in October? Installed another hoping that would fix it but it was worse.

Here is my last update and there are no other pending ones at the moment.

upMogwe.png


I dont know how to tell if my memory pressure (?) is red yellow or green

lGRTnye.png


Chrome I agree might be slowing this down.
Not all that happy with Chrome lately.
I'm not fond of Safari though so maybe it's time for a Firefox installation?

I will look up how to boot into recovery mode and run Disk First aid over the drives.

I will take a peek at the other apps mentioned to.
 
I had the exact same thing happen in September, same exact machine. I tried more memory, (8 to 16) and no change. The Apple diagnostics showed nothing wrong, I wound up having to do a full wipe and fresh install of macOS, and it seemed to be OK. I went ahead and traded it in on a new one since AppleCare was almost up and I didn’t want to risk another issue. Also, it had to have a new logic board put in under warranty the first year.
 
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I dont have AppleCare any longer but might consider a fresh install and selling it if it is worth selling and put that towards a new one. In perfect condition but my first choice would be to have it working properly again!
 
My 1TB Fusion Drive went bad and had some of the same symptoms as you.

It behaved as if there was bad sectors on the HDD part of the Fusion Drive. When I would do a wipe and clean install, everything went back to normal, but after a while, the issues came back.

My issues started as just appearing to be sluggish, slow boots, and then eventually fails during boots and then no boots at all.
 
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I'm wondering if the OP's SSD portion (of the fusion drive) has become full-up with files, forcing much of the reading/writing to the internal platter-based hard drive?

OP:
A suggestion that I believe will give you much more satisfying performance:
Buy an external USB3 SSD, perhaps 500gb in size, and set that up to become the boot drive. These aren't expensive. I'd suggest a Sandisk Extreme USB3 SSD.
It will need a copy of the OS, your apps, and a basic account.
Leave all your "large libraries" (movies, music, pics) on the internal drive, they will still work fine.
Keep the boot SSD "lean and clean".
Things will go much better that way.
 
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I will give that some thought. I just dont know if I have the time, let alone the energy to learn how to do that, and do it effectively the first time. Maybe I am wrong but I am sort of under the impression you really need to upgrade a computer every 4 or so years anyhow? (Right? Wrong?) If so, keep one such as this as a secondary unit at which time, if less an important computer, I would have more time to futz around with it.
Have saved all of the above info and will investigate each post again in a couple of days.
Right now I am editing, correcting it all before i backup all my files, which needs to be updated now anyhow.

I might try a new install once I am cleaned up and see how that works...if it saves it, somewhat, I might then look at the SSD. I think I have a rather new good SSD that i installed into an older MBP 2011 too late for i never did use that MPB afterwards so I dont want to make the same mistake leaving it too late on a main computer.
 
My 4 yr old iMac started behaving the same way (about 6 months ago) as the OP's system did. I thought it was an OS upgrade, but it turned out to be a failing non-Fusion harddrive. I ended up buying an external SSD, and cloning the internal drive to it and now boot from that. Not only is it now healthy (re-purposed as a dedicated Plex server) it is significantly faster than it was when it was new!
 
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Well that seems to be the general consensus here so I guess I better start learning how to to all of the above. I used to fiddle very well with Windows, 20 years ago but since going Mac, I rarely needed to....if you dont use it, you lose it.....I've lost it!
 
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Try making a new user account. Shut down and start up into that account only and see if it's still sluggish with general tasks. Don't sign in with your iCloud account because that may trigger all kinds of syncing (photos, files, mail) that will skew the results.

If this new virgin account is running great, it's probably something in your main user account. If the new user account is also slow, it might point to something deeper with your system.

I just went through much the same thing. I'd migrated my user account onto my iMac off my old Mini years before and updated the OS many times, so things were just generally getting slow. I couldn't find any specific culprit, but there was lots of really old stuff on there. So I created a brand new user account and set everything up from scratch. MASSIVE improvement. The old account is still there in case there's some preference or something I need to retrieve.

The other thing that jumps out is that you have 8GB of RAM -- since you have basically the only current Mac with user-accessible RAM, pop another 8GB or more in there and you'll be very glad you did. I have 32 and it's just great, even when I have a ton of stuff open.

* Fusion Drive like yours, but an older one that has a full 128GB of flash alongside the 1TB HDD (which maybe yours does too?)
[doublepost=1546538326][/doublepost]
sracer said:
My 4 yr old iMac started behaving the same way (about 6 months ago) as the OP's system did. I thought it was an OS upgrade, but it turned out to be a failing non-Fusion harddrive. I ended up buying an external SSD, and cloning the internal drive to it and now boot from that. Not only is it now healthy (re-purposed as a dedicated Plex server) it is significantly faster than it was when it was new!
Click to expand...
How are you connecting the SSD, Thunderbolt?
 
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Going to pick up that sandisk myself but in the meantime, I haven't yet had time to test the drive out, per some great suggestions in this thread. This week I will have more time.

I have stopped using Chrome. Earlier in the thread someone mentioned Chrome could be part of the problem. Since using only Safari, the problem has decreased considerably. It seems that both Chrome and Handbrake were the two hogs, although before the updates in November or so, neither were.
Struggling with the limitations of Safari though.
 
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