Imac runs slow, beachballs frequently

Oh dear.

It starts here:

Hardware Information:

iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2015)

iMac Model: iMac16,1

1.6 GHz Intel Core i5 (i5-5250U) CPU: 2-core

8 RAM - Not upgradeable

Paraphrasing the Old West saying, "Never bring a knife to a gunfight," we can say "Never bring a stripped-down educational computer to a Creative Cloud task."

That model, with a dreadfully slow 1.6 ghz dual-core i5 processor and non-upgradeable RAM, was intended for word processing and light browsing in a classroom, not for pro apps. The very next model up, for US$200 more, would have gotten you a 2.8ghz quad-core processor. Here are benchmarks comparing those two:

That is a huge difference. Still, let us see if we can make what you have work better for you.

Both those models came with slow mechanical hard drives unless upgraded to a solid state drive at the time of purchase. That is not helping the cause, but there is something you can do about that if you are willing to spend about US$100-140 on the project.

Your current slow hard drive posted this for performance:

Performance:

System Load: 3.07 (1 min ago) 2.96 (5 min ago) 1.76 (15 min ago)

Nominal I/O speed: 5.42 MB/s

File system: 86.57 seconds

Write speed: 54 MB/s

Read speed: 54 MB/s

If you do not wish to replace the computer at this time, obtain a 6GB/sec solid state drive housed in a USB3 enclosure. Clone (not copy) the entire internal drive to the external drive using Super Duper or Carbon Copy Cloner. Set the external drive as the boot volume with the Startup Disk System Preference.

That combo will increase the data transfer speeds to about 400MB/sec. The computer will boot and open apps much faster and any C. Cloud processes that need to write to disk will be faster. However, general processing of big files will still be slow due to the very constrained processor.

If you decide a new model is in the stars, I recommend a 27-inch iMac with a factory SSD of at least 500Gb size. Buy with the base amount of RAM and get more RAM from Crucial or OWC. RAM is still upgradeable in 27-inch models, at least for now.

The report is intended to be posted here. It can contain subtle clues apparent to those of us who have reviewed hundreds of such reports. It was designed from Day 1 not to disclose any security or personal information.

How to post the report:

Run EtreCheck and select “Report" from the left-hand pane (scroll down to the bottom of that pane to find):

When its report displays, click the "Share Report" icon from EtreCheck’s toolbar and then "Copy report” from the resulting dropdown.

⚠️ Please DO NOT highlight the text in the report before using Etrecheck’s “Copy report” command—that will garble the formatting and make the report slower and harder to evaluate.

NOTE: Changes in late 2018 to the forum software require you use the “Additional Text" icon (see example below) to embed the report into a post:

Paste the report into the resulting “Additional Text” window:

Also detail what is slow. Startup? App launching? Browsing? Any apps running slowly once open? Etc.

You ask a good question. Yes, sometimes EtreCheck will report that the hard drive may be failing when it is not. That is because it is running very slow and not able, at that time, to properly do essential processes. Therefore, EtreCheck's report is valid, even if the conclusion is wrong. Did you post your report here on the forum? There are some very savvy people here who can evaluate it and then offer some help. They may have you uninstall certain damaging apps or turn off certain automatic functions which are interfering with the computer's operation.

Someone may offer some additional suggestions, but I offer the following. You have an older computer with only 8GB of RAM installed. (I would not upgrade to Catalina, as it uses more RAM.) There is no provision to add more RAM You have an older mechanical hard drive which runs very slowly at 5400 RPM. You could install a faster solid state (SSD) external drive and install your OS on it, then use it as the start up drive. That would speed up things a bit. Additionally I hope the following is helpful to you in dealing with a slow computer. Often times there is a specific cause for slowness and other times any of the following actions may be helpful. They are “maintenance” steps which are often ignored by many people.

·      It is important to occasionally restart a Mac. Ideally, once a week or more often. This does some system cleaning.

·      Regularly clearing the history of your browsers can help as all the data is stored in RAM. Clearing frees up RAM for system use.

·      Some people seldom empty their trash. If you haven’t, then do so. Also empty your email trash.

·      Some programs use a lot of RAM. (Like many Adobe apps and games.) When using them, close any other apps not being used.

·      Doing a restart in the Safe Mode can clear a number of problems. This is done by holding down the Shift key at start up. This process can take up to ten minutes while the computer is doing its maintenance and cleans the cache. You may then restart normally.

·      It is also a good idea to periodically run the Disk Utility app. If it reports some issues, then rerun it repeatedly as needed until the final report is ok.

·      On some computers such as yours the problem is simply that there is not enough RAM installed for RAM hungry programs that are being used. Note: your computer is not able to have RAM user installed. A RAM upgrade must be done by a qualified Apple service specialist, and the cost can be substantial, if they will even do it.

I hope these suggestions are helpful and enable you to speed up your computer at least a little bit.