My 2018 MacBook 2.6 i7 with 32 GB of RAM slows to an absolute crawl under Big Sur when I am downloading any files - almost totally unresponsive, if I try to open any programs it takes a minute for them to open, webpages don't load for a minutes, dock animations freeze, it's almost unusable. As soon as I stop downloading, it goes back to normal. Did Big Sur as a clean install, I've reset PRAM and SMC, I've looked at the activity monitor and it shows nothing unusual. Any ideas for a fix? I download music files fairly regularly and updating has nearly hobbled my machine. I'm running 11.2.1
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
2018 MacBook slows to crawl when downloading files
- Thread starter trickness
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
I know you said activity monitor doesn't show anything abnormal, but is it possible, even if you have to take pics with a phone vs screenshots because of slowness, that you could show the disk usage tab while this is al going on? Also, are you having activity monitor show all processes or just the current user's?
Showing just current user but there are no other users. Thought it might be kernel task but that never really goes that high, certainly not over 100% like some other users have posted with kernel task issues.
Here are screen grabs of the machine while downloading files from Pro Studio Masters. Literally took two minutes to open a webpage, I timed it. Took Spotify over a minute to start a song after clicking play. Normally both these things happen almost instantaneously.
Attachments
Since you don't have another user account on the machine, could you create a temporary one and see if things reproduce there as well?
