Slow Mac after upgrading to Sonoma 14.0 OS

There is another discussion on noticeable system performance degradation following Sonoma installations in a private non-Apple forum I belong to of which I am forbidden from posting any links to. however unlike here, where the most casual reference to a (intentionally mispelled) dev bay duh pro gram whereupon the only single mention of such was "that (because of having one of my computers rendered unusable after upgrading to Slo-noma) I was not going to install it (the newest bay duh) yet on my laptop because I did not want to possibly be without a working computer". That single indirect reference was enough to have the Apple Support Community forum overlords or AI driven bots trained to police certain key words (I'm personally leaning toward the bot theory), imply I was in violation of my Apple Agreement, delete my entire post - which up until that one sentence was a rather exhaustive elaboration on my system's behavior and all the steps I had taken to remedy the slowdown to my iMac after upgrading to Slo-noma 14.0,

So to be clear, what has happened is that Information which might have been of benefit to users here was essentially censored from this forum because the very casual and vague mention of (intentionally misspelled) a "Bay duh pro gram" supposedly violated my agreement - and diverted me to the developer forums telling me to post there instead.

well, not only is that personally offensive, the very idea of how a lengthy post about my post macOS 14.0 issues and troubleshooting is even relevant or helpful on a developer forum where all the subject matter and discussion is about development topics concerning updates at least two releases beyond that with which the subject matter of my post dealt, is so devoid of intelligence, common sense or logic that, in memory of an absent friend I would dare label it "insanely' idiotic.

Anyhow,as I was saying - the local, private forum and user group I belong to won't allow me to post links but we are encouraged to share outside of the forum any information discussed that might be helpful or useful to others. the gist of the discussion speculates there are at least three separate issues or the convergence sometimes of issues, all of which are producing very noticeable performance issues with machines becoming bogged down, reports of multicore systems becoming crippled by system hangs. Even kernel panics have been reported on some computers. Even significant post upgrade issues are being reported on the M-Series versions as well. The high fan speeds, system hangs, lock-ups and procesx/processor churning seem most common in intel iMacs particularly 27' models seems be to related to a large number of initialization failures from the com.apple.distnoted.xpc.agent The new 24" M1 iMacs do not seem to be affected. One common denominator being discussed a lot for the M Series seems to be related to some driver incompatibilities and/or non-APFS and non-HSF+ drives and/or partitions present internally and eternally - as well as those who are using software abstraction layers to read/write extended non-native filesystems (like macfusion & fuse) or possibly had one of those knowingly installed previously or possibly unknowingly installed as necessary components as part of another software installation in the background. Using software to detect, identify and remove these or remnants such as Onyx has been reported to fix issues with some of those experiencing issues. Disconnecting, deleting, reformatting or converting drives and volumes to APFS is reported to have solved the issues for others. A couple members of our forum have dual boot or multi-boot systems with drives containing OS's dependent on filesystems which are not candidates for conversion or deletion. They have reported successful workarounds by cloning and virtualizing those OS's to run in QEMU, Fusion, Proxmox etc.--- which all seems a touch much to me. I am just going to either downgrade back to Ventura or do without my iMac until I learn there is an update which resolves the issues making it virtually unusable. I'll add that if this post gets deleted, it will be the end of my interest in participating further with any Apple Communiy Forums and though I've been a cult member fanboy since the late 1990's, given what seems to be a steady decline in everything from security, quality, innovation and customer service only outpaced by the agressive, predatory and deliberately shortened span of forced obsolescence and the appalling specter of corporate exploitation and greed, will likely become my complete abandonment of the entire company and brand.

Adding RAM, contrary to the opinion of one person, does not solve driver level problems of Sonoma with non-Apple Silicon. Adding RAM helps performance if, you don’t have enough to begin with, that’s all it does. I’ve got 32GB, and RAM was never my problem. Now RAM helps if you were short, but more RAM and Ventura is a much smarter move.

To reiterate, Sonoma has a very different kernel than Ventura. Intel/AMD (video) drivers do not like the new kernel. It’s just that simple. You can run an Intel machine on Sonoma, it just doesn’t work well. Really poor battery life on my machine and really poor performance. I’m a systems engineer for a living, already ripped this thing down to the process level and examined it. The kernel itself is eating my cpu time not to mention the new cloud sync processes, which are also pretty heavy.

I had all these issues with OS Sonoma . In the end I dumped the apple mail app , which found over 40,000 emails from somewhere?? trying to download them.

Installed Thunder Bird mail not the greatest app but the spinning wheel of death has gone.

Now at a point I can work and not wait watching a frozen screen , slowly going through other apps looking for conflicts . My next issue ?? trying to get my folders back to the desk top .

I wouldn't recommend Macs now, the icloud is getting out of hand .

Im not interested on whats under the hood I just want to drive the thing without spending hours looking for "fixes"

Hi milind37

i have a 2019 imac , exactly the same issues after sonoma update.

I upgraded internal memory from 8gig to 32gig. This seems to have fixed most of the problems. in hind sight I should have gone 64gig.

Also a few apps i use dont work with Sonoma .

Never thought I would say this about Apple but this Sonoma OS is total rubbish should ever have been introduced.

My 2012 imac runs perfectly on Hi Serria I only updated because my security software was out of date.

I fixed it by reformatting my Intel 2019 Mac and then reinstalling Sonoma. Everything is much faster and no more slow start up which was taking about 10 minutes. I have been very careful with what apps I’m re-downloading and keeping it basic.

Just like one of the previous commentors: I changed my hard drive to a SSD drive and the issue stopped.

I am now running Sonoma 14.3, and my problems have been resolved.

Thank you but what about Step 7

Incase it was missed and that can happen, refer to below

7 - Download the Application Etrecheck directly from the Developer.

The Application is Not a " Silver Bullet "  and is  only a tool to examine the Hardware / Software used on this computer 

This is a Diagnostic Tool that makes no changes to the computer.Hardware / Software used on this computer 

The application is free or paid from added features. 

The Report will Not Reveal Any Personal Information. 

Post back the Full Report - copy and paste - >>>> using the Additional Text Icon ( 3rd Icon to last ) <<<<

Report supplied was showing and I quote from that Last Report

I agree the machine is only doing on 4 Year Old

But the fact is, Starting in macOS 11 Big Sur, the Operating systems for Big Sur, macOS 12 Monterey, macOS 13 Ventura and now macOS 14 Sonoma seem to have designed by Apple, to Perform way better on SSD Drives

And not so well with Fusion or all Rotational Drives

By the very nature of any Drive being Mechanical and Rotational - it is inherently slower as it Spins Up and seeks space on the drive

That is the Physical Nature of spinning drives

Whereas, SSD drives do not spin or rotate

The information is provided to the best of my abilities and in the interests of the computer

What the user does with this information and or suggestion is really up to them ( you )

Hardware Information:

iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2019)

Status: Supported

it also shows

a disk3 - General USB Flash Disk 8.05 GB

External USB 480 Mbit/s USB

disk3s1 - U******K (MS-DOS FAT32) 8.05 GB (131 MB used)

Use a Third Party Software to Manage that drive

ufsd_NTFS.kext - com.paragon-software.filesystems.ntfs

I think we can, for now, focus on this: "configuration profiles found".

As P. Phillips and I have said already, this is not usually present in a personal mac.

So, please answer: is this a work mac, or a home mac? If it is a work machine, then you probably need to get help from the IT department of your organization.

Maybe a stupid suggestion, but it seems it helped me a bit (still monitoring, though):

I disabled most things in System Settings > Login Items (both Open at Login and Allow in the Background).

Have you tried that?

Even though I saw improvements on my Intel-iMac (2019) after wiping my drive and re-installing Sonoma, I was still encountering the issue (much less and less frequently).

Brought it to the shop.

Finding: I have 2 drives, one 1Tb for data and one 32Gb used by the OS.

Sonoma took all of the 32Gb, therefore triggering slowness getting to the other drive.

Fix: switch to 1 single drive. Which is what I'm going for.

Will revert back once this is completed.

(I didn't have it in me to carry on troubleshooting after hours spent on this, but if I did, I would have tried to re-install a previous version of MacOS.)

My nightmare finally ended after several days of shear torture from my Ventura to Sonoma 14.1.1 update to my Intel-based MacPro. Everything is now running very smoothly. If you're interested, I went into detail about what I did here. That link tells the whole story but briefly...

• Have only one monitor active (turn off/unplug any other monitors),
• Forget and re-pair any Bluetooth items,
• Unplug/disable Wacom tablet,
• Quit and prevent from starting up the Bartender app,
• Startup in Recovery Mode and run Disk Utility First Aid on what would be the normal startup volume,
• While still in Recovery Mode, reinstall the version of Sonoma you just installed,
• Startup in Safe Mode and restart normally,
• Run MacPilot (Maintenance tab) and MacCleanse (Cleanup tab, click on Scan) to perform under-the-hood Unix stuff and clear out useless caches, and
• Finally, just let your Mac sit and run continuously because there's a whole lotta processes running that seem to be slowing everything down but eventually (in my case, after 4 days) settles down.

I believe much of the slowness is related to display, graphics, UX/UI items that call upon Metal. (Just a guess.)

Alan Hirshberg wrote:

I solved the issue on my system. Turns out it was F-Secure Security Suite, which I get free with my cable company subscription. Now I just need to find a different anti virus that doesn't cause this issue.

I wouldn't install any anti virus apps on my Mac. I've never used one, although it's only been since 1984, so perhaps I haven't been at it long enough.

Macs do not get viruses, and about the only thing anti-virus apps will do is take your money and, later on, cause you grief why you wonder things aren't working properly. These apps CREATE more problems than they PREVENT.

M41K47YA wrote:

After completing the Sonoma update, I noticed my computer began to lag, despite the update process appearing smooth.

When you update your macOS, you don't update your 3rd party apps. See what you have in System Settings > Login Items > and disable and delete them, so nothing will start at login and stop working in the background eating up energy. And, the lag.

I just updated to 14.2 and no lag whatsoever. Also, the optimised charging came back to the correct level, that is 80%, that is, after all those reboots it had while updating, and the MBP is on the Desktop mode. Mind you, my MBP is 4 1/2 years old. 👌