I have a Macbook M1/16GB and I'm getting the spinning beachball a lot

cottoncandyskys wrote:

What can I do? I have Pages open with large documents and Notes. I need this for my writing process but the spinning beachball problem is starting.

With an M1 Mac and 16 GB, you should not be seeing beachballs, even with large documents in Pages.

There are lots of experts reading these posts, and the best way to get insight here is to run Etrecheck (free diagnostic tool, download from Etresoft web site) and post the report here using the "additional text" tool below. This will provide detailed information about your setup but without any private information revealed (you can read the report before posting it here).

The culprit is often some well-intended (but sometimes problematic) "cleaning" tool like CleanMyMac or anti-virus or security software installed, VPNs, or other "efficiency" improvement tools.

you look to be "on the phone' with lots of different file syncers. These are NOT harmless in terms of performance.

Share services:

[Loaded] Send to Kindle - /Applications/Amazon Kindle.app

[Loaded] Telegram - /Applications/Telegram.app

[Loaded] Day One - /Applications/Day One.app

[Not Loaded] Gifski - /Applications/Gifski.app

[Loaded] OneNote - /Applications/Microsoft OneNote.app

File providers:

[Loaded] OneDrive File Provider - /Applications/OneDrive.app

Third-party file Sync-ers such as DropBox, BackBlaze, OneDrive, or GoogleDrive can ruin performance, but are not inherently dangerous.

They were Quickly ported from that other Operating System, and were never re-written to take advantage of the MacOS ‘File System Event Store’.  The typical brute-force search they use takes all afternoon for one pass. That relentless searching is a completely un-necessary waste of resources.

Synch and Backup programs like iCloud Drive and Time Machine that DO use the MacOS File System Event Store can find changes really quickly and be done with their work and suspend themselves. Time machine can run backups Hourly, while all those others are still beating on the file system for the first pass, four hours later. By the time those others have finished one pass, they need to start again.

Could be a number of things. Let's start by having you download and run the free version of EtreCheckPro, from > https://etrecheck.com/en/index.html

Then post that report using these instructions:  How to use the Add Text Feature When Post… - Apple Community

Someone may be able to spot something from that report. EtreCheck is completely safe and will not give up any of your personal information.

Regards.

You do not have any of the usual causes for those problems, that I can see (maybe others will detect something).

Do you have an external drive connected that you use the NTFS (Windows format) extension for? Your NTFS software dates from 2016, it almost certainly is not working properly under Sequoia. But I don't think it would be problematic unless you have NTFS drives attached.

cottoncandyskys wrote:

Thanks for having a look. I haven't connected any drives in at least the last year.

your report show you are collecting Time machine snapshots. if no drive is connected these are clogging up your hard drive:

Backup:

Time Machine information is limited without Full Disk Access

Destinations:

M*****************c [Local] (Last used)

2 local snapshots

Oldest local snapshot: 2025-01-26 14:15:05

Last local snapshot: 2025-01-26 15:17:04