Sluggish performance on 2019 iMac with Fusion drive (EtreCheckPro info included)

Ok, I have done a quick glance at your EtreCheck report and would like to offer the following comments/suggestions:

• The Runtime of 54:34 is not normal and may indicate an issue with the HDD portion of your Mac's Fusion Drive. As such I suggest that you add the following tool to your "troubleshooting toolbox:" DriveDx. Use it to check the HDD. If it comes up "clean" you have, at least, ruled out a defective HDD.
• Hardware Information - A combination of relatively slow (by today's standards) Intel i5 CPU plus only 6 GB of RAM is never going to provide your Mac with stellar performance.
• Configuration Files - /etc/hosts - Count: 1 This should not exist. It may indicate that some process has modified your Mac's hosts file. Either this is something you did and are aware of, or potentially was caused by malware. Ref: Fixing a hacked /etc/hosts file - etresoft ASC post
• Notifications - Bitdefender VirusScanner. Your Mac does NOT need any third-party AV app. macOS already has a number of security features and these types of apps are not necessary. Most cause more issues than resolve them.
  • How to uninstall Bitdefender for Mac - Bitdefender
  • Apple Platform Security - Apple Support
  • Securing the modern Mac: an overview - The Eclectic Light Company
• Unsigned Files
  • Launchd: /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.rim.BBDaemon.plist
  • Launchd: /Library/LaunchAgents/com.rim.BBLaunchAgent.plist
    • BlackBerry? Didn't they go out of business decades ago? Unless there is some reason you need this, I suggest deleting these plist files.
• System Extensions
  • Malwarebytes
    • I recommend that you do not run this app in the background. Instead run it manually any time you suspect that your Mac may be infected with malware ... which should be a very rare occasion.
  • Malwarebytes VPN
    • Unless you are using this for a remote connection to your corporate office or educational institution, you really do not need to use a VPN ... and in those cases, your company or university would provide you with the proper VPN client to use on your Mac.
    • This is, most likely, a SSL VPN (user-to-server) commonly available to "protect" your data while web browsing. The only thing it would protect you from would be your ISP from tracking your browsing habits. It does very little for overall security over the Internet as traffic leaving the VPN provider's server will be outside the VPN security tunnel.
• /Library/Extensions
  • RIMBBUSB.kext - com.rim.driver.BlackBerryUSBDriverInt (0.0.64)
  • RIMBBVSP.kext - com.rim.driver.BlackBerryUSBDriverVSP (0.0.64)
    • Again, if you are not using a BlueBerry device, these should be deleted.
• Launch Daemons
  • [Running] com.malwarebytes.mbam.rtprotection.daemon.plist (Malwarebytes Corporation - installed 2025-01-25)
    • This is how I know that you are running Malwarebytes with "real time" protection. It's, of course, really up to you, but this will cause an overall performance hit on your Mac.
  • [Other] com.rim.BBDaemon.plist (Not signed - installed 2011-04-09)
    • Yikes! BlackBerry again. I noted that it was installed in 2011.
• Remote Apps
  • You have a number of remote access apps loaded: GoToMeeting & Microsoft Teams, for example. If you need to use this type of app, I suggest that you consider only having one installed on your Mac.
• Internet Plug-ins
  • I suggest that you delete any plug-ins that were installed prior to 2015. For example, Microsoft no longer supports Silverlight.
• 3rd Party Preference panels
  • FUSE for OS X (OSXFUSE) (? - installed 2012-09-13)
    • I suggest deleting this.
  • Paragon NTFS for Mac OS X (? - installed 2013-01-23)
    • Unless you need to write to NTFS-formatted drives (think Windows), you should remove this as well.
• Virtual Memory Information
  • Swap Used: 7.59 GB
    • This indicates that your Mac did not have enough system RAM to run all the apps/processes at the time of this report. Instead, it needed to swap those out to the much slower HDD. This will also affect overall system performance. Either run fewer apps or increase the amount of system RAM.
• Diagnostics Information
  • Great news! Your Mac did not have any serious kernel panics in the last 60 days.
  • Most of the issues are apps that are using too much CPU power (High CPU Use) or have crashed.
  • Notice that Bitdefender is one of those High CPU Use culprits?

Ok, that should do it. Please take what I provided you as my suggestions for you to consider to do what you will with them. Good luck!

Also remove all the WD software. It has never run right on Macs. There should be a WD folder with an uninstaller.

Your VM Swap is massive, almost as much as your physical RAM. I've not seen a report with such a high Swap value. That usually only happens when someone goes half a year without restarting their computer, but yours was restarted only five hours before the test. That has to be from all the fearware you have installed.

We can't get a real picture until you evict the fearware first.

However, your iMac is close to minimum for some of those apps you have. I'm running the Affinity apps on a 2017 iMac 27 with the 4.2Ghz i7 processor, 16GB RAM, and a fast factory SSD, I'd hate to have any lower specs.

You may be bringing a knife to a gunfight.

Uninstall Bitdefender, Parallels and OneDrive, might improve. The bigger issue is your mechanical, internal Fusion Drive - too slow for today’s apps and probably failing. Best recourse is to replace your Mac with new. Replacing with external SSD is also recommended by some, wait it out for them to respond.

verig wrote:

Holding on trying DriveDx. I've tied the Disk Utilities from the normal runtime as well as Cmnd-R restart... no issues have ever been identified.

Just be aware that the Disk Utility will only check for irregularities with the file/directory structures, it doesn't go down to the physical layer of the drive. This is where DriveDx offers much more details ... but, it's certainly your call to make.

* /etc/hosts... I have an entry added by Docker. Thinking I'll remove Docker for now (was playing around with that tech)

As long as you know why the hosts file was modified, that's all that counts. FWIW, I haven't tried Docker on any of my Macs, but do so on both my Raspberry Pi and my Synology NAS. Why? Same reason as you.