LKHill wrote:
I find that within a few days after a reboot on my 2019 16 GB iMac that the Dock becomes increasingly unresponsive. At first there is a delay of 1-2 seconds, and eventually I have to move the mouse around in the Dock to get it to appear.
I notice that it seems to get worse when I have a lot of documents open, especially TextEdit docs: 5-7 of these will palpably slow down the Dock response, and quitting TextEdit will often fix it. But this is true to a lesser degree with large Excel spreadsheets and Word documents.
I bought a 16GB, 6-core iMac to be powerful enough to have as many documents and Chrome tabs open at the same time as I want. What is the problem?
You can try from Terminal, copy and paste:
killall Dock
You can try Relaunching the Finder from the >Force Quit>Finder>Relaunch
—Rebooting
—Troubleshoot further:
—Try a SafeBoot https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201262
Takes noticeable longer to get to the login screen, does a 5-15 minute disk repair before it fully boots up, and certain system caches get cleared and rebuilt, including dynamic loader cache, etc.
Login and test. Reboot as normal and test as caches get rebuilt.
In Safe mode third party system modifications and system accelerations are disabled, it removes malware, etc hampering smooth operation, however a reboot will put it back to normal mode.
This test will tell you if third party interference; extensions etc are not loaded in safe boot mode.
—Test issue in another user (or guest user) account https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/set-up-other-users-on-your-mac-mtusr001/mac
This will tell you if it a universal issue or isolated to your user/admin account.
Uninstall all third party apps that are Cleaners/Optimizers/VPN/Anti-Virus all known to cause issues