I installed Catalina 2 days ago and now my 2019 iMac is very slow, click to open an app, wait 4 or 5 seconds and nothing happens, then the spinning rainbow wheel of death appears for a few more seconds, then the app opens. This evens happens when opening System Preferences or Activity Monitor. I have restarted multiple times and the iMac has been left shut down for a few hours before restarting.
iMac Line (2012 and Later)
Late 2013 21.5" iMac, 8 GB Ram, 1TB HDD. After update to Catalina 10.15.1, the thing was turning into a brick. Nothing worked, Office 365 took 3-4 attempts to launch and only did so after 10 minutes. Chrome, Firefox, Safari were crashing continuously. Creative Cloud, Photoshop, Lightroom, a nightmare. Performance was slow and buggy across the board. Wanted to throw the thing out of the window but, being stubborn, decided that no machine and some crappy software were going to beat me. The age of Terminator ain't not quite here yet. Started in Safe Mode, suddenly everything worked, like a gazelle compared to a Soviet agricultural tractor of the 1950s. It wasn't a matter of CPU or Memory usage, which were all well within the green. Here's what worked for me:
In System Preferences:
Turned off Siri, since I don't use it.
Turned off font smoothing and dynamic desktop.
Removed most of the extensions that I wasn't using anyway, almost 90% of them.
Turned off Notifications for all the things that I didn't care to know about in real time.
Made sure that there were no unneeded Login Items under the User and Group preferences (which in my case were none).
Changed the DNS servers in my WiFi connection to Cloudflare's faster ones (1.1.1.1, 1.0.0.1 and their IPv6 equivalents).
This improved things somewhat, but it was still not performing as expected.
Then:
Removed all the Adobe and Creative Cloud processes that were running in the background and prevented them from launching at login in the first place by deleting all Adobe launchers in HD/Library/LaunchDaemons, HD/Library/LaunchAgents and usr/Library/LaunchAgents. That did it. Restart, and suddenly everything worked. The Verifying App dialog now takes 2-3 minutes instead of an hour, Office 365 launches in 20 seconds, all three browsers launch in seconds as well. Adobe apparently is not yet fully compatible with Catalina and just messes everything up in the background. Will use GIMP for the time being. If I have to use Photoshop or Lightroom for some reason, will have to do a quick file cleanup afterwards - like cleaning up after your dog. Now the birds are out, the sun shines, and I feel like a better human being. Hope this helps!
You are right, of course, I just wondered where the information had come from.
I always had Norton Antivirus in the past but I also have Little Snitch and Norton, in their infinite wisdom, decided Little Snitch was also antivirus and I couldn't have two antivirus so wouldn't install.
I had exactly the same problem with Bitdefender so I now have Trend Micro but it really does slow everything down. Maybe it is time to try Sophos if Trend Micro doesn't improve.
Thank you so much. I have just followed your instructions and having done most of the deleting and switching off that you suggest and I feel that I now have my Mac back! Maybe not 100% as fast as it was pre Catalina but much much faster than it was post Catalina.
Thanks again.
I just recently migrated my system that was on a mid 2010 Mac (yes really) onto a 2017 Mac with Catalina installed. Deleting and upgrading a ton of applications in the process obv. I was used to a slow Mac before and was expecting a massive upgrade in speed but now it’s slower then ever. I want to try all the options you recommended but I used adobe photoshop for my work. And unfortunately now you HAVE to download creative cloud and the new Adobe 2020 that’s all on their ****** iCloud system and I have a feeling that’s what’s slowing down my system. My guess is there is no work around except deleting all adobe products that will get my Mac working like yours :/
any suggestions?
If i delete those adobe launchers that you listed, will that mess up my Photoshop? I’m always wary of deleting components of an application...I use the newest adobe photoshop 2020
However you mentioned you still USE photoshop, you just have to re-clean the launch agents each time? So is having a working version of photoshop and a faster running computer possible??
i started to read the last reply with high hopes... and finally its just about an old hard drive... snif :(
glad you found your problem :D
but i have the same issue (macbook pro late 2013) but i have 16gb of ram and an 512 ssd and Crapalina is showing me her beautiful colorful spinning wheel in finder !!! Chrome has become Internet Explorer 5.0, Adobe Photoshop is now CorelDraw and my macbook pro is now a pc running Vista :( And the best part is that i did a clean install !!! Catastrophic update. Plus all the quicklook plugin arent working anymore...
Thanks for your help. I don't know much about this sort of stuff but it doesn't look to me like I'm using much memory?
Thanks for your help, it confirms that as far as I can see there is nothing going on o cause this go slow.
Partially resolved! After the last update the boot speed has come back to normal (28s for complete boot). The ssd remains slow, 2000 Mb/s of reading speed (instead of 2500 Mb/s with mojave).
I wish that was a viable fix for me, but alas, I'm not running any antivirus software. Thanks for the tip though regardless!
I'm so glad that this seems to be the issue, but alas, I use iCloud for all my business & personal information, so there's absolutely no way I can shut it off. I hope Apple fixes this soon.
TimGsy, glad it worked! Good luck and happy holidays!
Catalina messed up my iMac. Are all the smart engineers at Apple died with Jobs? Really steaming right now. Can't do anything.
this is insanely slow..now stalled
iMac with Catalina
then after another 30 minutes..it even gets slower
plenty of disk space, memory and disk check ok...very strange, all since Catalina update
my imac seems a little slower too , getting sliming rainbow wheel a lot , never got it before and apps seem to take longer to open.
i ran clean my mac with no help. wonder if spotlight is busy indexing things . memory pressure is in the green also
iMac slow after Catalina instal.
