Upgrade an SSD to improve speed

1—This:

Drives:

disk0 - CT2000BX500SSD1 2.00 TB (Solid State - TRIM: No)

holds two clues. The Crucial BX500 series does not have a good rep for performance or reliability, The Crucial MX series are far superior and desirable. If you upgrade the SSD, go for the MX series or an OWC option.

You should engage TRIMforce or your writes speeds can decline to glacial levels. See:

https://eshop.macsales.com/blog/31619-how-to-execute-trimforce-command-with-your-owc-ssd/

NOTE: After engaging TRIM, you need to start your Mac in Safe Mode and let it "soak" in safe mode for 30-60 minutes before testing. I had to do safe mode several times when I did the SSD conversion, but the speeds have stayed on the nominals for five years.

Right now, your drive's Read speed score is on nominal but your Writes are starting to slow by about 15-20%. Been there—had that happen. TRIM is your friend.

2—This is fixable at home:

Diagnostics Information (past 60 days):

2024-08-26 15:44:20 photoanalysisd High CPU Use (4 times)

See this outside page for info and what to do:

What is "photoanalysisd" and why is it using 77% of my CPU?

3—This:

[Loaded] com.trusteer.rapport.rapportd.plist (Trusteer LTD - installed 2019-10-27)

Trusteer has NEVER worked properly on macOS. It originally only messed with Safari; at some point it expanded its negative influence to the entire OS. For a while, their techs participated here trying to diagnose the Mac issues, but that stopped when they were sold to IBM. It must go. Removal instructions:

https://trusteer.my.salesforce-sites.com/support/trusteer?lc=en_US

If your bank insists on your using Trusteer Endpoint Protection, their IT people are unaware of serious Mac issues that date back some 20 years. Do you really want them protecting your money and credit?

4— The "Retirement Community":

Internet Plug-ins:

JavaAppletPlugin: (?)

iPhotoPhotocast: 7.0 (Apple - installed 2010-03-31)

NP_2020Player_IKEA: 5.0.94.0 (? - installed 2011-10-26)

DivXBrowserPlugin: 2.0 (? - installed 2009-11-16)

SharePointBrowserPlugin: 14.2.2 (? - installed 2012-05-31)

Google Earth Web Plug-in: 7.1 (? - installed 2013-10-07)

Scorch: 6.1.0 (? - installed 2010-04-23)

Silverlight: 5.1.50901.0 (? - installed 2017-05-23)

DirectorShockwave: 11.6.3r633 (? - installed 2011-12-07)

Musicnotes: 1.18.6 (? - installed 2010-04-27)

Look at the install dates. With one exception, they are older than your computer, likely moved by Migration Assistant. There is some evidence reported here that outdated version of DivX can slow system functions.

If you still use those, update them; if not, give 'em the boot.

5—Config files

Configuration Files:

/etc/hosts - Count: 6

That is also fixable. See this excellent User Tip on the subject by the author of EtreCheck:

Fixing a hacked /etc/hosts file - Apple Community

Tenzing-1010 wrote:

But now, the hard drive is at 85% capacity and the machine is now unbearably slow.

15% of 2TB is 300 GB. That should be more than enough to assure optimum system and app performance. It's more likely due to 3rd party apps like "cleaning", "optimizing", "speed-up", anti-virus or VPN apps.

Please download and run Etrecheck.  The free version is sufficient.

Copy the report as shown in this animated screenshot

and use the Additional Text button to paste the report in your reply.

Then we can examine the report and see if we can determine the cause of the problem.

Tenzing-1010 wrote:

Would you either:

1.) Upgrade the SSD to something larger to get improved performance. Would this work?

2.) Buy a new iMac

3.) Another solution? Please advise.

1) Perhaps if you think it's worth it to spend more time and money upgrading the 2017 21.5" iMac to a 4T SSD.

2) That works, just keep in mind that currently the new iMac's only offer 2T as a storage upgrade option.

The Mac Mini M2 Pro and Mac Studio both offer 4T and 8T storage upgrade options.

3) Move your largest user media library to an external drive to free up internal storage space.

Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support

Change where your music files are stored on Mac - Apple Support

Move your iMovie for Mac library - Apple Support

Uninstall Trusteer per their directions , then run etrecheck again to see what chaff it left.

Delete these files & restart...

/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.parallels.mobile.dispatcher.launchdaemon.plist

/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.microsoft.EdgeUpdater.update.system.plist

/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.parallels.mobile.kextloader.launchdaemon.plist

/Library/LaunchAgents/com.smarttech.boardservice.plist

/Library/LaunchAgents/com.smarttech.smartnotification.plist

/Library/LaunchAgents/com.smarttech.ink.plist

/Library/LaunchAgents/com.smarttech.SBWDKService.plist

~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.logmein.GoToMeeting.G2MUpdate.plist

~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.akamai.single-user-client.plist

~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.dropbox.DropboxMacUpdate.agent.plist

~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.parallels.mobile.startgui.launchagent.plist

~ tilde indicates your home folder

Apple hid the Users' Library folders...

Method 1:

1 From the Finder, select the Go menu at top of the screen, and choose Go to Folder.

2 In the window that opens, enter ~/Library, and click Go.

Or…

Use the Command-Shift-period

You have a totally unnecessary app installed, Trusteer. First, 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.  

Unless you're using a true VPN tunnel, such as between you and your employer's, school's or bank's servers, they provide false security from a privacy standpoint.  Read these two articles: Public VPN's are anything but private and Security Risks: The Dangers of Using Free VPNs (eccu.edu)

You also have some Seagate software installed.

[Running] com.seagate.toolkit.plist (Seagate Technologies LLC - installed 2024-07-18)

If it came with an external Seagate drive it is not needed and can interfere with the system's disk handling features. Uninstall it according to the developer's instructions.

Are you using the Torch browser? If you are it' crashing multiple time per day:

2024-08-23 05:40:37 TorchUpdater Crash (50 times)

First occurrence: 2024-08-21 17:37:30

Others are having problems with Tourch: What is TorchUpdater? It Keeps Crashing.Apple Support Community

If you're using it don't. User either Safari, Brave or Firefox. Don't use Chrome as it's a know resource hog and will slow down your Mac which all of these have:

 Write speed: 414 MB/s

 Read speed: 494 MB/s

Uninstall Chrome, Torch and Trusteer according to the developer's instructions. You can check to see if you've removed all of the supporting files by downloading and running the shareware app Find Any File to search for any files with the application's or the developer's name in the file name.  For aforementioned software you'd do the following search(es): 

1 - Name contains trusteer

2 - Name contains torch

3 - Name contains chrome

Any files that are found can be dragged from the search results window to the Desktop or Trash bin in the Dock for deletion.

FAF can search areas that Spotlight can't like invisible folders, system folders and packages.  

If you get warnings that the file can't be deleted because it is in use or used by another app boot into Safe Mode according to How to use safe mode on your Mac and delete from there.

Note:  if you have a wireless keyboard with rechargeable batteries connect it with its charging cable before booting into Safe Mode.  This makes it act as a wired keyboard as will assure a successful boot into Safe Mode.

When you're done rerun Etrecheck and check to see that all of the supporting files for those three apps have been removed and check the Read and Write speed. Report back with the results.

If you have 300 GB of free space on a 2 TB SSD, lack of free space should not be the cause for the machine being "unbearably slow." That shouldn't be close enough to the brim to trigger a huge performance drop-off.

Replacing the hard drive with a SSD should have eliminated the most common cause of slowness on that machine; and 32 GB is a lot of RAM. It sounds like either you are running some very heavy workload for which you will want a very beefy new Mac, or there is some problem with your system (not just the age of its CPU and GPU), or both.

Hi,

Try to startup in Safe mode, then normal boot which could make your iMac faster, though even if you upgrade internal SSD, it wouldn't speed up your iMac, I guess.

If you are not satisfy your iMac speed, you should get new iMac.

"This computer has multiple antivirus apps installed." – Generally not a good idea. Even one anti-virus app may drag performance down if it is continually scanning all of the time, but if there are multiple scans running at the same time, that could be causing you some grief.

Top Processes Snapshot by CPU:

Process (count) CPU (Source - Location)

ApplicationsStorageExtension 68.16 % (Apple)

kernel_task 24.17 % (Apple)

EtreCheckPro 17.00 % (Etresoft, Inc.)

WindowServer 10.72 % (Apple)

Microsoft Outlook 10.50 % (App Store)

I wonder what that thing was doing. 68.16% is an awful lot of CPU time to be using for anything that's not sitting there grinding through a very heavy load. From the sound of it, some storage-related task is sucking down more than 2/3rd of your CPU's cycles!

You appear to have enough RAM for what you were running. 32 GB of RAM. 16.20 GB used, 15.80 GB available (11.09 GB had cached information in it, 4.71 GB was completely free). Swap used was only 84 MB.

Installd still crashing... installd is a component of Apple's framework for managing programs and updates, known as PackageKit. It is, in other words, the Mac App Store's auto-update feature. The software that is installed on your computer will be listed, and it will compare every version to Apple's servers.

Disable automatic updates for a test.

rooksd is something installed by "Trusteer".