I have a 2018 intel i7 mini running Sonoma 14.4.1 with 32 gigs of ram that I purchased 4 years ago when they had the 2020 refresh. It always ran smoothly enough until a few months ago when it started to struggle with seemingly simple workloads. This has slowed down my productivity significantly, so I plan on buying a silicon Mac before long, however I would like to understand what is going on here; not least to ensure it doesn't happen again.
In a nutshell, if I do something like playing a Youtube video it isn't long before the fans pick up and the temperatures rise. If I then try to do something at the same time, like editing a Jpeg in Affinity Photo with a healing brush, it will all but drag to a crawl with lots of spinning ball.
After a couple of hours like this I can see 10 gigs of swap ram in the activity monitor. Restarting the computer fixes things temporarily and removes the swap ram, but then it kicks in again whenever I try to work normally.
This is all using Sonoma and it ran fine with Ventura. I did move from a 2K to a 4K display just before Christmas and that might be adding some graphic strain, but it really shouldn't. I've done all the normal stuff like resetting the NVRAM and SMC multiple times, reinstalled the OS, but all to no avail. The ram is Apple fitted and 32 gigs should be more than enough to handle two or three basic tasks at the same time.
When I look at the CPU there is never anything unusual going on but the ram usage seems to climb very quickly these days and the performance is just not there. Before long I get a lot of spinning ball and fans running hard. I did read a while back about a memory leak in Safari that was also affecting silicon users, so I'm hoping somebody has an idea of what is happening a potential fix.
In a nutshell, if I do something like playing a Youtube video it isn't long before the fans pick up and the temperatures rise. If I then try to do something at the same time, like editing a Jpeg in Affinity Photo with a healing brush, it will all but drag to a crawl with lots of spinning ball.
After a couple of hours like this I can see 10 gigs of swap ram in the activity monitor. Restarting the computer fixes things temporarily and removes the swap ram, but then it kicks in again whenever I try to work normally.
This is all using Sonoma and it ran fine with Ventura. I did move from a 2K to a 4K display just before Christmas and that might be adding some graphic strain, but it really shouldn't. I've done all the normal stuff like resetting the NVRAM and SMC multiple times, reinstalled the OS, but all to no avail. The ram is Apple fitted and 32 gigs should be more than enough to handle two or three basic tasks at the same time.
When I look at the CPU there is never anything unusual going on but the ram usage seems to climb very quickly these days and the performance is just not there. Before long I get a lot of spinning ball and fans running hard. I did read a while back about a memory leak in Safari that was also affecting silicon users, so I'm hoping somebody has an idea of what is happening a potential fix.