Slow Mac after upgrading to Sonoma 14.0 OS

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

The slowness on the start up is at least in part related to the fact that this mac has a "Fusion Drive".

Also:

Configuration profiles found - This computer may have configuration profiles installed.

Is this a personal or work machine? Configuration profiles are usually used only in machines managed by a corporation or school, and not in personal macs.

For a more detailed report, you should grant Etrecheck "Full Disk Access" in System Settings->Privacy and Security, and then run a new report, after checking "Allow Full Drive Access" in Etrecheck->Settings->Privacy.

Configuration Profiles installed on this computer generally mean the computer is Controlled by a Mobile Digital Management Service ( MDM )

The computer Serial Number is Register to that service and either is Owned by a Company, University or Organization

With this piece of information in hand - there is very little we Volunteers can do nor can Apple

Suggest communicating with your the company ID Department or the MDM Administrator for this or any other Computer or Software Issue

It it their computer to manage and trouble shot issues

Configuration profiles found - This computer may have configuration profiles installed.

Configuration Profiles:

  This computer may have configuration profiles installed.

Remote Apple Events: Enabled

  Remote Management: Enabled

  Screen sharing: Enabled

  Remote login: Enabled

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.

milind37 wrote:

There is no one as such who manages my computer. Mine is a small business and I use it for that purpose. The use is email in Mail app, MS Office, Web browsing on safari and so on. No special softwares being used. Not in sharing with anyone in LAN. It is rather not connected to the LAN.

Ok, so what are those configuration profiles? Did you install them?

Go to System Settings, and search for Profiles if you are unsure.

If and Only if this computer was Not A Brand New and Never Previously Owned computer.

Even if your Wipe the Drive 100% Clean of All Data and reinstall the Operating System again

If the Serial Number of this computer WAS Registered a MDM service

They could at any time Invoke Installing their Profiles on this computer

That could explain how the Profiles are appearing on this computer

The Only way to have the Profiles removed forever would to trace back from Original First Owner of the computer Who the MDM Service was

Then communicate with the MDM to Remove the Serial Number from their DataBase

Same issue. Slow due to kernel-task hovering at 400 %CPU (in Activity Monitor). Only started happening right after upgrading to Sonoma.

I cleaned up my iMac from old apps etc, and now it sometimes goes away, only to come back with a vengeance.

May not happen as much when logging in using another one of the profiles.

You should upgrade the RAM. It's criminal to only have 8GB. The new OS may be occupying a little more memory, but I've had an iMac and upgraded from 8GB to 24 and it was a night and day difference. I agree with the owl that the drive may be a slowdown, but it isn't as much of an issue when you have ample memory. The problem of non-SSD is exacerbated when you don't have enough memory because the comp writes and reads from the drive to make up for not having enough RAM.

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?

I thought I eventually fixed it, only for it to come back, but now much later than before (my iMac works fine for an hour or so before it hits the high % CPU). Bringing it for a check up to the shop. Very frustrating when my experience with Apple products was pretty much "plug and play" until now.

Exactly the same issue on a 2020 M1 MacBook Air, 16Gb memory, 837.52 GB available of 994.66 GB storage.

Finder impossibly slow; MS Word also impossibly slow; basic functions (drag and drop, attaching files to email, saving and moving documents etc.) all practically unusable.

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.)

Hi Philips,

I already experienced slowness on my 2019 iMac before the system upgrade to Sonoma 14.0 but it just got much worse, until wallpaper won't display. I did approach Apple service centre in 2021 or 2022 about upgrading the RAM and I was told this is not possible for the model I have. Will external SSD be compatible? Mine is a home computer, and I am not good at installing programme or setting up one. What do you suggest me to do?

Hi everyone. I have an iMac 3 GHz Intel Core i5 6 core - radeon Pro 570X 4 GB, 64 GB 2667 MHz DDR4. Having had the same problem (more than 7 minutes to get everything started right at startup), I reinstalled everything from scratch. It went perfectly. I reintroduced some programs from backup and found the problems. In particular, a message appears while I restart it saying "installation progress". However I have no intention of reinstalling everything. "CleanMyMac" only highlights two files that it can't delete (because I don't have privileges and can't unlock them) when I do maintenance.