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New 2019 iMac base Safari slow to open

370zulu

370zulu

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Nov 4, 2014
360
338
Safari is routinely slow to open on my brand new 2019 27" iMac. The iMac is i5-six core, 8GB ram and 1TB Fusion drive. This is my first Mac with a spinning hard drive.

I am sure that I need to upgrade memory and/or SSD. But I would very much appreciate some guidance from others with a similar workload.

I have seen some threads that mention memory is the easiest immediate upgrade. Is there a sweet spot for the amount of memory that makes the best performance improvement for workloads other than video, audio and photo editing? The workload is really IT sysadmin/programming work and office work with an occasional iMovie or Pixelmator edit session.

Thanks in advance.
 
I think extra ram will help it, but now sure. Has anyone ever had this issue? It seems that Safari is the only application that is experiencing this slow down. It is not happening on my MBA with the same iCloud account. I think it really points to the machine.
 
Fusion Drive is BS. Hybrid drives never worked well whoever it was from, Apple's tiering logic is quite rubbish and it runs like a hard disk most of the time.

That's your problem.

I haven't had a non-SSD iMac in ten years, and I took delivery of a misspecced iMac with a 2Tb Fusion among my upgrade batch last year. I first thought the iMac in question was broken, then looked at the box and realised it was the standard 2Tb Fusion model, not a CTO. I was quite curious so I threw various stuff at it before I sent it back, and my general consensus was that at least for me, it was completely unusable - even web browsing gets bogged down, as you're experiencing.
 
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370zulu said:
Safari is routinely slow to open on my brand new 2019 27" iMac. The iMac is i5-six core, 8GB ram and 1TB Fusion drive. This is my first Mac with a spinning hard drive.

I am sure that I need to upgrade memory and/or SSD. But I would very much appreciate some guidance from others with a similar workload.

I have seen some threads that mention memory is the easiest immediate upgrade. Is there a sweet spot for the amount of memory that makes the best performance improvement for workloads other than video, audio and photo editing? The workload is really IT sysadmin/programming work and office work with an occasional iMovie or Pixelmator edit session.

Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...
I have the 2299$ 2019 27 inch iMac Model and don't experience any such issues with the 2TB Fusion Drive. Exchange it for another one if Safari feels sluggish because it shouldn't
 
I purchase this iMac as an open box and received $423 off the list price. Is it worth pursuing having the fusion drive replaced by NMVE SSD at an Apple authorized repair shop? I know that I can add/replace the RAM, but as I understand it, the screen has to come off of the display to replace the drive.
 
It's not very wise to open up a brand-new iMac for any reason.
It will IMMEDIATELY void any warranty you have.

Are you saying you had previously used Macs with SSD's?
And you decided to "move down" to a fusion drive (with a platter-based HDD)?

Well... it's going to be slower... isn't that to be expected?
 
I did expect a performance difference (slower). It actually is not too bad. Really only Safari was a bit slow to launch. I may have figured out the issue - turns out that the Bitwarden extension was installed, but not started. After setting it to start with Safari, the initial lag has gone.

Definitely food for thought about losing the warranty. I did buy this iMac with my eyes open about the lack of specs I would normally purchase. The $400+ off the price made it an option. I figured that if I need to upgrade anything that I would accept the risk of having to pay a professional to open the machine for an SSD upgrade. RAM is really a no-brainer.

I am thinking at least 32GB, but probably 64GB. The 128GB option is just overkill for what I would ever use this machine for.

Then of course, the replacement of the Fusion drive to using NVME/PCI-e SSD only. But that is the real question for performance and capacity. I have seen some YT videos and other posts that mention breaking the Fusion setup and using NVME and a large spinning disk, but I am curious if they really mean that they are using them independent of each other as if to have two disks.
 
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gilby101 said:
That is your problem. The 2TB Fusion is better.
Click to expand...

Not to any latter-2010's level of worthwhile performance.

Given the size of the tiering SSD, It did surprise me that it got bogged down regularly - but the tiering logic maybe isn't helping: I had some Dell XPS 27's which used IRST and to my memory it wasn't quite as bad as the 2Tb Fusion drive frequently was in typical comparable Windows operation (or maybe it was just the more efficient nature of Windows 8.1), even though I think it had half the SATA SSD storage.
 
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