Incredibly slow Mac after updating to 10.11.4?

[chiguimania]

Did this happen to someone? Days after updating my Mac to 10.11.4 it's almost
useless... It takes like 10 seconds to show the System Preferences, and it takes
almost 4 minutes to boot up.



Mac Mini (Late 2012)
16GB RAM
2,3 GHz Intel Core i7
Intel HD Graphics 4000 1536 MB

 

[Fishrrman]

I'd try turning off Spotlight, and see if that makes a difference.

This turns it off:
sudo mdutil -a -i off

Password will be required.

You can turn it back on by changing "off" to "on" above...

 

[fisherking]

reinstall, it should not be behaving like that.

 

[MacGizmo]

Something is seriously wrong, and it goes way beyond temporary Spotlight slowdowns as it indexes. That machine you have is no slouch, so there's no reason it shouldn't be running fairly smoothly.

 

[chiguimania]

This machine is a Core i7 with 16Gb RAM... it should run, and has run until now, pretty good. Tried reinstalling, I don't see difference. Gonna try turning off Spotlight. Thanks for the suggestions!

 

[fisherking]

i'd check the hard drive next...

 

[Shirasaki]

My Mac is also feeling slower than the time I use 10.11.2. Much slower and more freezes/kernel panics. Sometime when I get up, I see a folder icon with question mark inside. Sometimes when I try to do something on Mac OS X, clicking almost anywhere outside the current app will trigger a beach ball on that place, especially top menu bar and bottom dock.

Etrecheck shows 50+ apple processes are killed due to insufficient RAM. And nothing more.

I have finished a reinstall, but not clean reinstall. I will try it out one day to see if there is any difference.

 

[simonsi]

I have finished a reinstall, but not clean reinstall. I will try it out one day to see if there is any difference.

Wouldn't expect a non-clean reinstall to do anything TBH, a corrupted systems file (which is about all that would fix) would likely give a much more serious symptom than generally running slowly...
[doublepost=1459038065][/doublepost]

Did this happen to someone? Days after updating my Mac to 10.11.4 it's almost
useless... It takes like 10 seconds to show the System Preferences, and it takes
almost 4 minutes to boot up.

I'd guess you have a drive issue, backup and install something like DriveDX to see what errors are being logged.

 

[Shirasaki]

Wouldn't expect a non-clean reinstall to do anything TBH, a corrupted systems file (which is about all that would fix) would likely give a much more serious symptom than generally running slowly...

Perhaps I need to find a way to remove some apps installed on /usr/ or /var/ or the sub directories. I now use Wine. Don't know if it is the reason of more kernel panic and overall slowness.

 

[simonsi]

Just go into activity monitor and there you will see if any particular apps are chewing memory or cpu, you don't have to guess.

Computers don't generally "run slow" (except for HDD errors causing slow I/O), they have something unintended running that chews up the cpu capacity they have.

 

[Shirasaki]

Just go into activity monitor and there you will see if any particular apps are chewing memory or cpu, you don't have to guess.

Computers don't generally "run slow" (except for HDD errors causing slow I/O), they have something unintended running that chews up the cpu capacity they have.

Talking about activity monitor, I notice a process called "distnoted" causes OS X frozen after a while. I force quit it, and everything goes back to normal. But recent freeze doesnt even allow me to use Activity Monitor or change the app through keyboard shortcut. Only option is to force powering off and powering back on.

 

[MacGizmo]

Talking about activity monitor, I notice a process called "distnoted" causes OS X frozen after a while. I force quit it, and everything goes back to normal. But recent freeze doesnt even allow me to use Activity Monitor or change the app through keyboard shortcut. Only option is to force powering off and powering back on.

You really need to completely erase your drive and re-install not only the OS, but all your apps from scratch. Do not "migrate" anything (other than actual documents).

 

[Shirasaki]

You really need to completely erase your drive and re-install not only the OS, but all your apps from scratch. Do not "migrate" anything (other than actual documents).

Yeah, I agree with your opinion. There is no way to know what it is happening inside the system. And just at 20:00 AST, Mac gave me another kernel panic. This is the fourth or fifth one in about 3 weeks. System can run after a force restart, but yeah, this is not acceptable.

 

[ABC5S]

This machine is a Core i7 with 16Gb RAM... it should run, and has run until now, pretty good. Tried reinstalling, I don't see difference. Gonna try turning off Spotlight. Thanks for the suggestions!

Did you reinstall from a back up or did you install clean ? I'd do a complete wipe (clean) install and start fresh. Pain, yes, but it might be a better way to eliminate some possibilities.

 

[chiguimania]

Sometimes when I try to do something on Mac OS X, clicking almost anywhere outside the current app will trigger a beach ball on that place, especially top menu bar and bottom dock.

This is exactly what's happening to me... every time I try to do simple task or click the menu bar it spins the beach ball for a few seconds.

i'd check the hard drive next...

Already did a TechTool 8 test and First Aid in Disk Utility, no problem at all...

Just go into activity monitor and there you will see if any particular apps are chewing memory or cpu, you don't have to guess.

Nothing suspicious running at all... I removed some apps that were running in the background to see if it was that, nope.

This is the fourth or fifth one in about 3 weeks. System can run after a force restart, but yeah, this is not acceptable.

Did you try the SMC and PRAM resets? Nothing for me but it may work with your system.

I'd do a complete wipe (clean) install and start fresh. Pain, yes, but it might be a better way to eliminate some possibilities.

Yep, that may be the only thing left...

I was wondering, is there any way to downgrade from 10.11.4 to 10.11.3?

 

[Shirasaki]

This is exactly what's happening to me... every time I try to do simple task or click the menu bar it spins the beach ball for a few seconds.

Did you try the SMC and PRAM resets? Nothing for me but it may work with your system.

I didn't try pram and smc reset yet. But given the fact that I have installed a few program on /usr and /var, I suspect they are the culprits of slowing down my Mac.
I will need to do a clean reinstall and reinstall all required apps from scratch. This could be a painful process but it might help.

 

[PabIoEscobar]

My system wasn't really responsive... I did an SMC reset and it seems better now.

 

[Weaselboy]

Yep, that may be the only thing left...

I was wondering, is there any way to downgrade from 10.11.4 to 10.11.3?

I think you are running in circles a bit here and not getting any closer to a fix. If you had 10.11.3 installed and everything was working perfectly, then you updated to 10.11.4 and did absolutely nothing else (new hardware or software)... I think you likely have a failing hard drive that just happened to manifest after the OS update. OS updates like this are somewhat stressful on a drive and if you have a drive almost ready to fail, this can push it over the edge.

Just as a test, try booting to safe mode by holding the shift key at boot. That boot s stripped down system and prevents any launch or startup items from running. If you still see the beachballs and slowness in safe mode, I'm thinking you have a failed drive.

 

[MacRobert10]

Any time someone does an install of a newer OS and the system slows down, it's usually something like a bad kext file that was migrated and is now incompatible, excessive MDS indexing as the new OS indexes everything, the way the user is using the system, or something (like anti virus software) that's effectively blocking applications or system processes. It's possible the drive could be going bad, but the odds of it going bad right when an OS upgrade occurred isn't that likely - possible, but not likely.

You might want to visit this site:

http://scsc-online.com/How-To.html

Scroll down to the article titled The Signs and Symptoms of Hard Disk and Solid State Drive Problems, and click on the link. Before assuming it's HDD, SSD, or even a system problem I would read the intro page then read the links associated with User Problems and Software Problems.

If you're using a beta version of the OS then it will gather information from your system which can take a lot of time and bog the system down. I wouldn't recommend using mdutil to enable/disable indexing because it will only do so on user drives and will allow indexing on Time Machine drives to continue. If mdutil was used to disable indexing, when enabled it will start re-indexing everything from scratch and bottleneck the system. One guy somewhere on this site said it took an earlier versions of OS X something like 2 or 3 days for his system to finish it's initial indexing because he had lots of data.

Hope this helps.