How do I fix the spinning beachball and slow performance on my MacBook Air M1?

Bogusnot wrote:

My MacBook Air, M1, Tahoe v.26.3.1 is terribly slow and sorely afflicted by the Spinning Beachball. I ran a Mac Diagnostic tool and all came back w/ the green checkmarks for each category.

FYI, the only useful diagnostic result is one which reports a problem.

I would like to run Disk Utility but kept getting a note about running while in recovery. I searched for how-tos but found them unclear.

Here is an Apple article with instructions:

How to repair a Mac storage device with Disk Utility - Apple Support

Even if the First Aid summary says everything is "Ok", click "Show Details" and scroll through the report to see if there are any errors or warnings. If there are, then run First Aid again until they are gone. If after several scans they remain, then they cannot be repaired. At that point it may require erasing the disk or part of it depending on where the errors...if errors/warnings are only in a snapshot, then they can usually be ignored since they will eventually disappear once the snapshot is deleted.

What else might I be able to do to correct this issue? I not facile with tech but I can follow guidance, so please keep that in mind!

Booting the computer into Safe Mode will disable most third party software & sometimes even some Apple hardware/software as well. If Safe Mode doesn't have the problem, then most likely the issue is due to third party software.

I only provided the above information for educational purposes.

I would follow @MrHoffman's suggestion to post an EtreCheck report here since it will save a lot of time since you already have this thread open.

Please download and run (free) EtreCheck, and share the results to the clipboard. Then open a new reply here, and press the Additional Text button that looks like a printed page, and paste and post the hardware and software configuration report here. From that, we can get a little more detail about what is installed and what is running here.

Among the usual causes for beachballs are add-on security apps, and which can be unnecessary and problematic.

It is possible there are processes running in the background that are using significant resources. Check Activity Monitor, CPU tab (sort by % CPU) and Memory tab (sort by Memory) to see what's running hard.

Activity Monitor User Guide for Mac - Apple Support

Bogusnot wrote:

Update! After looking over the Etre report and also running a Disk Utility via the recovery modem, I deleted a number of apps that I don't even use plus AdBlock and Honey. Lo and behold, no more spinning ball or sluggishness! Thanks for the support and guidance.

Good job! Thanks for the update.

Sorry about the multiple posts w/ the same info. I couldn't tell if the Etre Report was actually posted as I kept getting a red warning that the post didn't go through and to try again later.

Unfortunately I think the Apple forums may have been having issues when you posted the EtreCheck report. I can see an Apple link for the report, but it is dead. If would like us to review the EtreCheck report, then try posting it again....preferably a new report so that it will include the changes you made when fixing the system, but I can understand if you don't since you are no longer having system issues.

Here is how to add the EtreCheck report to the forum, including pictures:

https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-250000211

What was posted was the header. There’s more data involved in the report.