The computer has been running significantly better since I reduced motion and transparency in the display accessibility settings. After that the finder ram usage dropped quite a bit, though I noticed it would climb to 500mb if I opened a folder with a few thousand images on an external drive as the previews are offered up.
I just booted into safe mode and ran disk utility from there with no problems uncovered. The finder was only using 50mb of ram and it's the same now after restarting and working normally as I type this. To me it still looks like Safari is a bit of a ram hog on certain sites like Youtube, however it's no longer grinding everything to a halt like before if I simply opened a Jpg in Affinity Photo to make some modest adjustments.
I had run disk utility on every partition recently from recovery mode and the drives are all good. I can certainly try deleting the finder preferences as well, but the difference between now and two days ago is already like day and night.
Previously these performance hits have seemed to frequently coincide with heavy use of Safari, particularly with Youtube and also with a web design app I use that relied on webkit for the previews. I'll try pushing both now for a while and see how that works.
There was one bit of fun earlier today before booting into safe mode when I decided to try and open a big number of 16 bit tiffs in Pixelmator Pro. Eventually Pixelmator became unresponsive, but not before the swap ram hit nearly 40 gigs... I was actually reassured though that the rest of the computer didn't go into meltdown during that exercise, because it has regularly been unusable in recent months with even light working once the swap hit 10 gigs.
I just booted into safe mode and ran disk utility from there with no problems uncovered. The finder was only using 50mb of ram and it's the same now after restarting and working normally as I type this. To me it still looks like Safari is a bit of a ram hog on certain sites like Youtube, however it's no longer grinding everything to a halt like before if I simply opened a Jpg in Affinity Photo to make some modest adjustments.
I had run disk utility on every partition recently from recovery mode and the drives are all good. I can certainly try deleting the finder preferences as well, but the difference between now and two days ago is already like day and night.
Previously these performance hits have seemed to frequently coincide with heavy use of Safari, particularly with Youtube and also with a web design app I use that relied on webkit for the previews. I'll try pushing both now for a while and see how that works.
There was one bit of fun earlier today before booting into safe mode when I decided to try and open a big number of 16 bit tiffs in Pixelmator Pro. Eventually Pixelmator became unresponsive, but not before the swap ram hit nearly 40 gigs... I was actually reassured though that the rest of the computer didn't go into meltdown during that exercise, because it has regularly been unusable in recent months with even light working once the swap hit 10 gigs.