Getting bad hangs/lag after several hours

[GhettoMrBob]

How about you stop trying to make me buy useless crap for my Mac? This is a 2012 iMac with a perfectly fine hard drive and it now has problems when running Mountain Lion which is an OS EARLIER than it even shipped with.

NONE of this happened until I upgraded to High Sierra, now its almost manifesting itself like a virus wherever I go... I can downgrade my OS, do a clean install, wipe the drive, reset my PRAM and SMC, and it STILL happens. If the HDD was going bad the problem would be happening more often instead of just at very specific times when Safari is loaded.

Take this scenario, I can run Parallels with Windows 10 for over 16 hours (Fallout marathon) and not have a single bit of lag. The Parallels virtual drive takes up half of my 1TB hard drive so if any of that data is bad Parallels would be acting goofy and sluggish.

I close down Parallels, come back to High Sierra and watch a little YouTube/Browse Facebook and 20-30 minutes later oh look everything is beachballing.

So please, take your SSD sales-pitch and go blow your nose with it.

If you honestly believe your HD is fine then please make a bootable Linux USB, boot into and run a SMART report from there. I can 100%, without a shadow of a doubt, guarantee that it will have read and seek errors. How do I know? I replace easily 5 a week for this exact reason.

If it’s not hardware related then answer me this: why would it follow to a COMPLETELY different operating system? The two OSes have nothing to do with each other. What’s the underlying common denominator? You guessed it, hardware.

When troubleshooting you have to start somewhere. That godforsaken HD is the first place I’d start. You wouldn’t even need to move to a SSD, just off of that particular drive. Another thing to consider, HDs are wear items just like tires on your car. Generally best replaced before 5 years....your iMac is a 2012. Would you keep driving on the same tires til you’re riding on the rim and then complain?

 

[VanNess]

I think it's HS generally. I'm running a 2015 iMac i7, 2 gig fusion, and the best video card you could get for that machine at the time, 16 gig ram. I upgraded to HS as of 13.1. I'm a heavy user of quick look and the first thing I noticed was quick look lagging after about a week or so of uptime when viewing jpegs. Then the whole system seems to lag generally. Not a major lag but definitely noticeable, mostly finder related. Should be noted that I never shut down or restart unless necessary. Other issues include garbled audio when converting some MP4s edited in QuickTime to mov.

In any event rolled back to sierra and all of the issues noted above disappeared. Every single one. My experience with Apple software upgrade cycles is that some years go fairly well and some years, well better wait until next year.

 

[Andreaux]

You asked for help. Good ideas were offered. You ignored them all. You’re on your own now. Good luck.

Luckily you're not the only ones helping out here, right?


[doublepost=1517012334][/doublepost]I don't want to prematurely be excited, but since I switched IPv6 from 'Automatic' to 'Link-local only' and switched back to the stock Apple GPU drivers (yes, I made the mistake of doing 2 changes in a single troubleshooting step), I haven't had the issue coming for the last 5 hours or so and TM is just backing up as I write this and no lag of any sort has shown up... which is quite nice. I'll get back to the NVIDIA Web Driver tomorrow and see it anything changes...

 

[GhettoMrBob]

Luckily you're not the only ones helping out here, right?


[doublepost=1517012334][/doublepost]I don't want to prematurely be excited, but since I switched IPv6 from 'Automatic' to 'Link-local only' and switched back to the stock Apple GPU drivers (yes, I made the mistake of doing 2 changes in a single troubleshooting step), I haven't had the issue coming for the last 5 hours or so and TM is just backing up as I write this and no lag of any sort has shown up... which is quite nice. I'll get back to the NVIDIA Web Driver tomorrow and see it anything changes...

Good to hear. I’ve only seen this on one or two macs and not limited to High Sierra but have seen this issue on quite a few Windows machines as well as routers.

 

[Andreaux]

Well actually I'm able to confirm that the issue seems to be gone. I switched back to the NVIDIA Web Drivers this morning so the only change that was left was turning off IPv6... There was a Security Update today and had to update the NVIDIA drivers as well, but I've worked all day without experiencing the lags and lockups I had until yesterday...
Hope this helps anyone.