2019 Intel i9 MacBook Pro extremely slow after waking up from sleep

Disconnect all external devices in case one of them is causing a problem since two devices could have a compatibility issue between them.

Run Disk Utility on the hidden Container. Within Disk Utility you may need to click "View" and select "Show All Devices" before the hidden Container appears on the left pane of Disk Utility. Even if First Aid says everything is "Ok", click "Show Details" and scroll through the report to see if any unfixed errors are listed. If there are errors, then run First Aid again until they are gone....you may need to run First Aid while booted into Recovery Mode in order to fix some errors, otherwise you will need to erase the whole physical SSD (Intel Macs only) followed by reinstalling macOS & restoring from a backup.

Try running DriveDx (free trial period) to check the health of the internal SSD. Post the complete DriveDx text report here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper on the forum editing toolbar.

Something is definitely causing an extremely high system load and very poor SSD performance. At least when the EtreCheck report was created, most of those VPNs were not loaded (ExpressVPN & Tunnelblick were both loaded). Any of the items listed as "running" or "loaded" could potentially be the culprit.

Contactsd was shown to be using 170% CPU...that seems odd to me.

You are also running low on Free storage space on the boot drive. While you are above the 20GB minimum, you are not too far from it with 27GB of Free space....that space can disappear very quickly with some workloads.

Try running the Apple Diagnostics to see if any hardware issues are detected.

You are also behind on the Sonoma updates....14.4 was just released. See if it makes any difference.

You can try a DFU firmware Revive which resets the T2 security chip & system firmware. I doubt this will make any difference, but worth a try anyway. Just make sure to have a good backup just to be safe even though it should not be data destructive, but if the laptop has a hardware issue, then all bets are off.

How to revive or restore Mac firmware - Apple Support

If you have a spare external USB3 SSD, then try installing macOS onto the external SSD and see how the system works while booted to the external SSD. If booting from the external SSD does not show the issues, then either something is wrong with the installed apps or configuration of the main boot drive, or the internal SSD or file system is at fault.

Issues that won't show up in this report, but can cause the symptoms are a bad SSD, or a power issue of some sort, or a bad Logic Board (SSD is integrated onto the Logic Board). Unfortunately the Logic Boards of the MBPro 16" (2019) model do have a much higher rate of failure than any other model, but so far there are no Kernel Panic reports listed or "ProxiedDevice-Bridge" panic logs which are common with those Logic Board failures.

dreadnautxbuddha wrote:

1. There are times where my machine becomes completely unusable. One symptom of this is when I wake up in the morning to work, and then when I try to wake my Mac from sleep by moving my mouse or pressing on my keyboard, nothing is happening. When this happens, I already know that my Mac is acting up and that it’ll be extremely laggy. I have to press the power button for it to completely wake up and then I’ll notice that the lock screen’s background is either not moving, or stuttering.

My solution to this is to just put my Mac to sleep again, wait a few seconds, then wake it up (by either pressing the power button or moving my mouse). If the animation is not as laggy as before, I know that I can login in peace with only slight lag. Otherwise, if I proceed to log in while everything’s laggy, I’ll see that my CPU usage is almost at 100% (or greater at times) and that I cannot use my Mac. Clicking on an app takes forever. I can’t even switch to my browser.

I made an etrecheck report during this “laggy” period and I attached the result.

I’m already thinking of either wiping my machine, reinstalling MacOS, and restoring from my Time Machine backup, or buying a new Mac, both of which I’d like to really avoid so if there’s any solution out there that can fix this without me having to nuke my machine or buy a new one, I’ll greatly appreciate it. 

Note: This issue has been happening for the past year and the slowness is really frustrating. I am not sure if this is related, but I’ve got this Magento project where I develop using PHPStorm, and I can’t really do anything at times.

Things I’ve tried:

SMC and NVRAM reset: It worked initially, and performance has improved a bit, but things got bad like before after a couple of days

2. Safe mode: I think going in safe mode has improved things, but similar to the SMC and NVRAM reset, things got bad like before after a couple of days

3. Uninstalling turbo boost switcher: I’ve had some issues before with this app which the dev community has helped me greatly in solving

4. Opening up my Mac: For the first two years (I think) that I got my Mac, I ran it in clamshell mode. I noticed later on that it is bad for airflow, so I opened it up, and I saw some noticeable improvements in terms of thermal throtling

5. Cleaning my Mac: At least twice a year, I open up my Mac’s backplate to rid it of dust. I do this usually when performance relatively deteriorates

<EtreCheck Report.log>

I quick look— I see a plethora of added third party

I see multiple VPN:

<Tunnelblick>

<Cisco AnyConnect>

<ExpressVPN>

<WireGuard>

<homebrew> seems to cause a lot of issue in these forums...

<Virtualbox> I always had issue with

<Alfred 5>...(?)

Uninstall all third party apps that are Cleaners/Optimizers/VPN/Anti-Virus

all known to cause issues on the macOS

The SSD looks Ok although you definitely have written a lot to it (711 TB). Unfortunately we don't know how much can be written to these Apple OEM SSDs, but they tend to allow more than most other common SSDs. Plus even common SSDs have been known to write PBs of data before failing. It does not help that the SSD is not giving us any indication since the "Worst" value has not budged (I would think it should have by now if it was monitoring that attribute). I still believe the SSD is probably Ok.

You should also do the clean up by removing that one Homebrew file listed in the CleanUP section of the EtreCheck report:

Clean up:

~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.mysql.plist

First Aid definitely is showing lots of "Warnings", much more than we normally see in those First Aid scans. Hard to say if they are causing the issue or are just another symptom of the problem. Normally "warnings" can be ignored and most of those warnings are with just one of the Time Machine backup snapshots which will go away as soon as TM deletes that snapshot from your internal SSD once the backup has been successfully transferred to external media. So those "warnings" are probably irrelevant.