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My late-2013 Macbook Pro 13" has been increasingly laggy and slow for the last several months. Replacing the SSD helped a little, but now it is beach-balling even opening a single new tab. Overall CPU usage is low (mostly WindowServer) but I was alarmed to see the amount of disk writes that kernel_task is doing (about 20GB per day).

Checking with smartctl then showed that over the 4 months since I replaced the SSD, it has done over 70TB of writes! I have no idea what it could be writing. My usual apps are Google Chrome, Terminal, Preview (for pdfs) and TeXshop and background apps (Dropbox, Google Drive, etc). How can I figure out what is lagging everything/causing kernel_task to do so many writes?

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  • What version of macOS? How much memory? Could be excessive paging.
    – historystamp
    Commented Nov 16, 2019 at 23:15
  • Catalina, but since I only installed that recently, I suspect the disk writes problem was happening under Mojave also (and probably before I replaced the SSD, as well) I have 16GB memory, which I would assume is probably enough, but it is pretty usual that I use all of it (I assume mostly caching)
    – Joe Bebel
    Commented Nov 16, 2019 at 23:32

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It's probably Dropbox or Google Drive. I've seen similar problems. Typically it's caused by Dropbox or Google Drive repeatedly downloading the same files over-and-over. They are both somewhat buggy programs.

Do you have any symbolic links in either your Dropbox or Google Drive? Neither deal well with symlinks; Dropbox specifically does not support them. (See https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Files-folders/Symbolic-link-on-Mac/td-p/27496 and https://help.dropbox.com/installs-integrations/sync-uploads/symlinks).

You can find symbolic links from the Terminal with this command:

find $HOME -type -l -print

or to see where it points:

find $HOME -type -l -ls

You can also run a program that monitors all writes to your hard drive by file, to diagnose the problem youself. Turn off System Integrity Protection and run opensnoop or iofileb.d.

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  • No symbolic links intentionally, but I suppose I don't know for sure. I could stop using each of them for a day or two and see if it improves, also.
    – Joe Bebel
    Commented Nov 16, 2019 at 23:35
  • Certainly try quitting the programs. Look at my edit, also.
    – vy32
    Commented Nov 16, 2019 at 23:47
  • I use Keyboard Maestro to start Dropbox after startup and quit it 5 minutes later when everything is synced. Also Nextcloud is only started temporarily this way when something was written in its synchronized directories. Helped a lot to end unnecessary activity from both programs.
    – lejonet
    Commented Nov 17, 2019 at 9:10
  • I finally got both apps to the point where they don't hog my system. I am unfortunately forced to run DropBox, Google Drive, and Box.
    – vy32
    Commented Nov 18, 2019 at 2:37

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