Multiple Vexing Issues (long)
About a month ago I started experiencing huge slowdowns and lags with my laptop — a 15” 2017 MacBook Pro running Monetery 12.4 (the most up to date at time of writing). I also noticed that the hard drive seemed to be filling up at an alarming rate, I was down to about 50GB free out of 1TB capacity.
I ran WhatSize and it showed that I was using 1.84GB of drive space — remarkable, considering that figure was nearly twice the drive’s capacity. When I ran WhatSize’s duplicates check, it showed that three messages were somehow replicating themselves — at that point there were over 35K (yes, thirty-five thousand) duplicate copies. I stared deleting them in batches, but that resulted in either a notice that the files could not be found because they don’t exist, and if they could be deleted, more duplicates took their place.
Eventually I ran Onyx and instructed it to Verify my Mac’s file structure, and rebuild my Mailboxes. That worked amazingly well, and cleared off just over 300GB of space - nearly a third of my drive’s capacity. I may have lost some mail in the process, but so far I haven’t found any specific messages missing. I assume it was some weird file-bloating Mail craziness.
I ran again WhatSize again and it still showed my HD was using 1.32TB — better than before but still basically impossible. The Mail library alone still allegedly takes up 750GB, which is again not possible.
Furthermore, the last Time Machine backup I was last able to successfully complete was on June 1. Since then I’ve not gotten past 48% backed up even if I’ve left the machine on for a couple days.
Otherwise things seem to run fine until the computer has been on most of the day. Mail runs very smoothly until late in the evening when it starts grinding to a halt, and I get nothing but spinning beach balls and eventually have to restart. At this point the fans start running fast and I’ll check Activity Monitor which looks like the following:
I have tried booting into safe mode, but when the computer restarts it immediately starts slowing to a crawl and the simplest commands such as opening a folder window become excruciating exercises, and eventually I can’t do anything so I have no choice but to restart. It is my understanding that this is the opposite of how booting into safe mode typically works.
I’ve posted abbreviated versions of this before, but never so comprehensive an accounting. Thank you for reading this far.
Any guesses?
MacBook Pro with Touch Bar
