Is there a Mac Cleaner to make it go faster?

There is no Mac Cleaner that should ever be installed. They will only cause problems and the worst of them is CleanMyMac. Feel free to use the Search option at the top of this page to view the problems other users have had.

As for making your Mac more efficient, check  > System Settings > General > Login Items, and review what is being run on startup and what apps are allowed to run in the background.

For a more detailed look at your system, use this link to download EtreCheck and run the free scan and post the report here using the Additional Text option. EtreCheck was developed by a fellow user here on these forums to give a snapshot of everything that is being run on your Mac and the report does not include any personal information. Others here will be able to look at this and provide suggestions that will make your Mac run more efficient.

Using EtreCheck - Apple Community

I don't put much stock in "cleaner" apps that claim they're going to automatically find and remove stuff for you.

There are tools that you can use to find which of your own files are taking large amounts of space. E.g., while I don't use it, I have heard of "Daisy Disk" (which seems to be available through the developer's site and the App Store).

https://daisydiskapp.com/

Macs—catlike—clean themselves and have for about 20 years.

Apple built elegant and automated self-maintenance routines into macOS so you don't have to clean nor let anyone else do it. Those routines do ALL housekeeping needed, including auto-defragging.

You paid Apple good money to include that elegance. Do not pour garbage over that marvel of modern coding, and do not fall for fear marketing.

There is no reason to ever install or run any 3rd party "cleaning", "optimizing", "speed-up", anti-virus, VPN or security apps on your Mac.  This documents describe what you need to know and do in order to protect your Mac: Effective defenses against malware and other threats - Apple Community and Recognize and avoid phishing messages, phony support calls, and other scams - Apple Support.  

There are no known viruses, i.e. self propagating, for Macs.  There are, however, adware and malware which require the user to install although unwittingly most of the time thru sneaky links, etc.   

Anti Virus developers try to group all types as viruses into their ad campaigns of fear.  They do a poor job of the detecting and isolating the adware and malware.  Since there are no viruses these apps use up a lot of system resources searching for what is non-existent and adversely affect system and app performance.

There is one app, Malwarebytes, which was developed by a long time contributor to these forums and a highly respected member of the computer security community, that is designed solely to seek out adware and known malware and remove it.  The free version is more than adequate for most users.  

Please don't fall for any third party:

• Cleaning apps
• Antivirus apps
• Maintenance apps
• Security apps
• VPN apps

That is unless you would like your Mac to become slow, unstable, appear buggy and offer nothing that Mac OS cannot do all on its own. To keep your Mac running as new, simply keep it up-to-date and restart the Mac about 1x per week.Other than that, please simply use it and let Mac OS do its job.

If you suspect your iMac is not running as quickly as it should then please do the following:

It will help us get a good idea of what is causing your problem if you provide a report of your system, that way we do not have to play 20 questions with you. The report we are requesting does NOT provide any personal information and is extremely safe to use. Please navigate to www.Etrecheck.com and download the free version of EtreCheck. Once you have you downloaded the app and installed it, please run the report and save it. This report will help us get a good idea what has been installed on your system and help us be able to diagnose what may be wrong.

When you have your report, you can attach it when you reply to this message and we can then review it and help you determine what is needed to get your system running well again. 

For instructions on how to download your EtreCheck report and attach it to your reply to this message please click https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-250000211 It is helpful to us if you download the report to your Desktop.

mama2six wrote:

Can you help? My Mac is restarting quite often and I am getting the busy ball ALOT!

Seems typical performance for a low-spec (8 GB, 256 GB memory) Mac with a whole lot of heavy apps (Adobe, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft OneDrive, Google, a coupon app doing who knows what, etc.).

This Mac is very much out of memory, which usually means off-loading some of what’s been installed and active here that isn’t strictly necessary.

On little or no evidence, I’d probably start with that coupon app, and probably then OneDrive and the Google apps. I’d clean up that dangling Canva plist, too.

etresoft wrote:

Note that deleting files will not result in any performance improvement whatsoever. All it will do is slow you down because you have to restore from backup after your system is irreparably corrupted. Hopefully you have a backup after following random instructions posted on GitHub.

But at least as a side benefit, if you use "rm" to remove a bunch of files, you will likely notice that you have less free space than you did before.

Carolineoies wrote:

In fact, you can free up tons of storage space in Terminal with 'rf' command…

The rm command (not rf):

rm -rf

or with long switches:

rm —-recursive —-force

is the command line file removal command. When combined with the -r recursive switch it can delete all files in all directories in and below the file path specified. With the -f force switch, the command ignores any command syntax errors. One or more entire hierarchies of files can disappear. Quickly. With no trashcan to retrieve the files. And an errant unescaped space in a path somewhere can delete a whole lot more that might have been intended. Be cautious with rm -rf.

And caches are present to allow quicker access to data. Log and temporary files are maintained by macOS and apps, and are removed on schedule. Deleting caches and logs and such might save some storage space short term, but those temporaries and those caches are almost inevitably rebuilt and returned to use.

On the plus side, an errant rm -rf command won’t blow away macOS itself anymore, but it can definitely still damage your own data and your own apps and install. If y’all decide to use the info in that Gist, have complete backups first. (Why the risks are omitted, and why it is best to have backups are not mentioned in that Gist?)

Do NOT use 3rd party cleaning apps. They will do nothing but bork your machine.

Mac cleaning software is not nessecary, it will only slow down your Mac instead of speeding it up, so I would recommend against using any mac clean up software

The only thing that will speed up your 2017 21.5" iMac is to get an external SSD and use that as your start up drive. You could do that however because the computer is nearing old age (from a computer point of view) you may want to consider replacing it with a current mod Mac mini that would be considerably faster and not nearing obsolescence. You can get a nicely configured new one including a nice 27" display for about $1200. If you decide to get an external SSD, you will spend about $200-$300.

If you opt to go with the external SSD use the instructions in How to setup an external SSD as your startup disk and the SSD I'd recommend is the OWC Envoy Pro SX .

Hi Mama2six,

Remove Webroot. It is unnecessary and takes up a lot of background task activity.

Clean up space on your hard disk. You are right at the 15% empty point of diminishing returns where the computer will be automatically generating swap files to manage memory, and it has no place ot put them.

AVHelper is not needed either.

If you don't know what Rakutan Cash Back is for, remove it.

libdispatch.dylib: BUG IN CLIENT OF LIBDISPATCH: Unbalanced call to di

indicates you have some untested software installed on your system that should be removed, and is crashing a lot in the background.

Please start a new topic thread with any questions.

There are a bunch of scams out there designed to hack up your Mac and claim to give it a little speed boost. There are no 3rd party apps that can directly improve performance. It's simply not possible.

Carolineoies wrote:

However, you can opt for a 3rd-party Mac cleaning app if you don't want to play with commands. This types of apps will do the cleaning staff automatically, which saves time and effort.

Just because they are available does not mean you should use one. All you need to do is use the Search option on the top of this page and enter any Mac cleaning app into the search field. You will get the truth about these apps and saving time and effort has not been the case for the users who have installed them.

Caches themselves are used to optimize performance. Some in fact, if not not present or corrupted will prevent you from being able to launch Application such as System Settings/Preferences. So optimizers that do anything with system caches should be treated with kid gloves. They can in fact make your system less stable than more stable. We don't control the fact that Apple has allowed certain system cache cleaners to be available on the Mac App Store, when all are inherantly dangerous for that behavior. Some like AppleJack are the closest to being able to manage it safely, because they launch before the GUI in an administrative mode if properly setup. But any system that already is having trouble with caches, may in fact have more trouble when something non-system tries to clean them. You are better off backing up your data, and freeing up at least 15% free space, and removing non-essential applications if you are experiencing slowness.