I have the following mac:
- iMac (27-inch, Late 2013)
- 3.4 GHz Intel Core i5
- 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 775M 2048 MB
It has a HDD, and I have 240GB out of 1TB free space.
I'm on OS X El Capitan (10.11.3).
Since some time this mac has been very, very frustratingly slow. It takes about 15 minutes to go from a clean boot to getting firefox up and running. Especially starting applications is painful. It's a bit hard to quantify though, because at other times it seems ok. There's a big perception/psychology part to it.
I'm considering doing a fresh install, and perhaps go with an older OS X. But I'm also just extremely curious what's causing this. I can't figure it out. I know HDD's are slower, but the machine was fine when I got it, and I find it hard to believe that newer OS X's are so much worse.
Here's a few things I've done:
- Turn off time machine, for good measure.
- Turn off dropbox. My dropbox is rather large and I noticed it can be a pretty big factor when it's indexing.
- I don't use FileFault.
- 1Password is in the startup items, nothing more.
- I recently did a scan of my disk in recovery mode, to ensure that the disk wasn't failing. S.M.A.R.T. says verified.
There's nothing out of the ordinary in Activity Manager / htop. CPU and Memory both seem reasonable. Also worth mentioning that if I start a game like Starcraft or Cities Skylines, these applications perform pretty well once started. Starting them takes a long time though.
I'm basically at a loss why my fairly new Mac is worse at running applications as back when I got my first white macbook in 2006, when the applications I'm running haven't changed (firefox, terminal, thunderbird), and Memory quadrupled.
I'm very comfortable with the command line, and I just want to satisfy my curiosity. What causes my computer to take 15 minutes to go from boot to Firefox? How can I measure what the computer spends time on? Are there maybe obvious performance improvements I missed?
diskutil list
output:
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.0 TB disk0
1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 999.3 GB disk0s2
3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3
A few (maybe) interesting items from system.log:
I got a bunch of these:
Mar 20 19:13:18 localhost kernel[0]: Sandbox: launchd(1) System Policy: deny(1) file-write-flags /private/var/run/dyld_shared_cache_x86_64h
Mar 20 19:13:18 localhost kernel[0]: Sandbox: launchd(1) System Policy: deny(1) file-write-unlink /private/var/run/dyld_shared_cache_x86_64h
A whole bunch of these for all my applications:
Mar 20 19:15:44 Pasta kernel[0]: Sandbox: coreduetd(74) deny(1) file-read-metadata /
Mar 20 19:15:44 --- last message repeated 23 times ---
Mar 20 19:15:44 Pasta kernel[0]: Sandbox: coreduetd(74) deny(1) file-read-metadata /Applications/App Store.app
Mar 20 19:15:44 --- last message repeated 4 times ---
Mar 20 19:15:44 Pasta kernel[0]: Sandbox: coreduetd(74) deny(1) file-read-metadata /Applications/Automator.app
Mar 20 19:15:44 --- last message repeated 4 times ---
Mar 20 19:15:44 Pasta kernel[0]: Sandbox: coreduetd(74) deny(1) file-read-metadata /Applications/Calculator.app
Mar 20 19:15:45 --- last message repeated 4 times ---
Mar 20 19:15:44 Pasta kernel[0]: Sandbox: coreduetd(74) deny(1) file-read-metadata /Applications/Calendar.app
diskutil info /dev/disk0 | grep SMART
If it says anything other than "Verified", then you drive is failing. I would also download DriveDX (free version) (binaryfruit.com/drivedx) and see what it says about your drive. Post the results to your question. – Allan Mar 20 '16 at 22:17diskutil list
.... just in case you are using CoreStorage and you have more than one drive acting as a single volume – Allan Mar 20 '16 at 22:22diskutil list
and the s.m.a.r.t. status was indeed good. But nervous about DriveDX, so I'm doing a bit of research to see what others are saying about it ;) – Evert Mar 20 '16 at 22:26