I bought extra RAM for my new iMac 27" Inch however it's made it slower than ever

In a different recent thread:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251352703

the EtreCheck report shows up as a box

and has no links showing in the status bar.

In the current thread, hovering over the "report" icon show a link labeled "attachment."

which is why I thought the OP used the "link insertion" tool instead of the "additional text" tool.

When it happened before the link would open in a new table with some scrambled formatting. For some reason Safari is not doing that now.

Ram is not designed to improve performance so the problem is likely due to something else. Please do the following.

Please navigate to the Mac App Store or navigate to www.Etrecheck.com and download the free version of EtreCheck. Once you have you downloaded the app and installed it, please run the report and save it. This report will help us get a good idea what has been installed on your system and help us be able to diagnose what may be wrong.

When you have your report, you can attach it when you reply to this message and we can then review it and help you determine what is needed to get your system running well again. 

For instructions on how to download your EtreCheck report and attach it to your reply to this message please click https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-250000211

For anyone unable to access the EtreCheck report from the browser you can use the Terminal app and "curl" to download it (or "wget" on Linux).

I'm not a Mac software expert, but I don't see anything that stands out.

I'm wondering if maybe the hard drive in the Fusion Drive setup may have a problem or if you do have a memory issue. Even though you bought Crucial memory it doesn't mean those specific modules are guaranteed to work on a Mac. If you want to confirm those memory modules are compatible with a Mac, then contact Crucial tech support and have Crucial verify they are compatible with your particular iMac. You need to take a photo of the labels of those memory modules so Crucial can determine if they are compatible and are genuine Crucial modules.

Try running the Apple Diagnostics. If the diagnostics don't find a problem then run DriveDX and post the report for the internal hard drive here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper.

You can also try disconnecting your external drives and devices just in case one of those devices is interfering.

Fusion drives just aren’t all that good for big files and write-intensive workloads.

Some of the Google stuff installed here is corrupt.

I’d remove Malware Bytes and test again.

Also booting into Safe Mode, and testing there.

Having 21 GB free RAM—more than half of what’s installed here—points to performance issues being elsewhere.

Most of that current RAM usage is for caching, too.

Maybe software, but I’d suspect that the Fusion drive is just too slow for your needs.

Or maybe the Fusion drive is failing, and Diagnostics and DriveDX (as mentioned above) would be interesting there.

And no, Safari can’t get at that ASC attachment. Apple has yet to resolve that bug.

Trying repost:

MrHoffman wrote:

......

And no, Safari can’t get at that ASC attachment. Apple has yet to resolve that bug.

Trying repost:

<EtreCheck (wonky format) report—ignore (LF) stuff.log>

Same error with your link. Did you use the Link Attachment icon or the Additional Text icon? That may be the issue. Testing with one of mine:

Nope. posted that with the Additional text icon and it still went to a link ASC cannot display in Safari. This is a variant of an issue we had last year, where the link opened in to a web page with scrambled formatting even thought OP used the correct tool.

This was not happening two weeks ago.

Thanks, b,

I also see two but cannot open either. I think an old problem has come back. I get this with Safari 13.1 on a 2017 iMac running os10.14.6. It sees it as a attachment, not a text block

Waiting a few minutes does not help.

Just tested with the latest FireFox and it opens the report just fine but I don't like FF for working the forums. In Safari it is intermittent. They must have moved some furniture again!

I used the intended attached-text mechanism.

I have and do and will undoubtedly make dumb mistakes, but do usually get the attached-text-versus-embeded-links stuff correct.

There’s a redirect (seemingly) buried in the attachment rendering process, as it appears the attachment text data is returned and then flashes off to a blank server timeout page. To further troubleshoot this (from outside Apple), I need to switch to a Mac and its HTTP tooling to check the redirects, as this iPad lacks the necessary HTTP diagnostics tools loaded (recommendations welcome, etc), and the local Mac does have the necessary HTTP tracing capabilities. I’m not really inclined to the GET commands manually, and don’t have s_client handy on iPadOS to even try that.

When this ASC mess arises, I am able to access the attached contents using some hackery with an HTTPS connection and a an HTTP GET command, though that’s a hassle.

This mess has been happening occasionally for a while, which probably means something stuffed in a cache somewhere.

Attached shows your attached text is working right now, and shows which button I used to attach text.

This of course has exactly nothing to do with this iMac poor-performance thread, and we can continue this ASC-and-busted-attachments discussion in another forum. We both know of one that’d be better suited to these conversations, of course.

Pending resolution of this ASC attached-text bug, posting the report on pastebin is the usual work-around.

And, another question: is this RAM specifically manufactured for Macs? When I googled the part number, it showed up, but on the general Crucial page, not the "memory for mac" page. Macs are very particular about their RAM.

And, FWIW, Chrome is an absolute resource hog - it will take whatever you got and gobble it up. But, let's wait until we can take a look at the etrecheck report for other "usual suspects".

That has been a long standing issue, as in the Community Operations thread at: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251259334

Your report did not post. Please use the "Additional Text" Icon, not the "attachment" icon:

It's working on my MBA - actually was posted twice in a row and the full report is there.

Interesting - I use Firefox because there are some things in Safari that I do not care for.

FF 51.0.1 could open it but not others...