Console message: "Exiting out of boredom"

Not enough free storage space can slow your Mac down.

Click your Apple menu icon top left in your screen. From the drop down menu click About This Mac > More Info > Storage

Make sure there's at least 15% free disk space.

Try removing login and starup items.

Open System Preferences > Users & Groups > Login Items

Same for HD > Library > StartupItems

Then restart your Mac.

Anti virus software installed?

talagent is unrelated to the symptoms you describe.

There are many potential reasons that a Mac may be running slower than expected. Back up your documents and everything else important to you, not that there is any reason to believe your hard disk may be failing, but the symptoms you describe may presage an impending disk failure, and you should have backups anyway.

To help determine the possible causes of this behaviour read the following. None of what follows is intended to fix anything, but it will provide the additional information required to advance troubleshooting:

Boot OS X Recovery by holding ⌘ and r (two fingers) while you start your Mac. At the Mac OS X Utilities screen, select Disk Utility. Select your startup volume (usually named "Macintosh HD") and click the Repair Disk button. Describe any errors it reports in red.

When it finishes restart your Mac and test again for operation. If it's still not behaving as you expect it should, please post the results of EtreCheck in accordance with the following instructions:

Apple Support Communities contributor etresoft wrote a very useful app to quickly gather certain system information that may help point to a cause of this problem. Go to his website, download and run EtreCheck:

http://www.etresoft.com/etrecheck

Etrecheck will be in your Downloads folder. Open it from there. You may see the following dialog box:

Click Open - etresoft contributes to this forum frequently and can be considered a trustworthy developer.

It will take a moment to run as it collects its data.

Copy and paste its output in a reply.

Do not be concerned about anything that says "Problem" or “failed” or anything else that may appear in red.

EtreCheck was designed to remove any personal information (such as your computer's name and serial numbers) but if you see anything that looks like an email address or any other personal information that should not be divulged to others, please delete or obscure that information when you post the reply.

When you are finished with EtreCheck, quit the program. It occupies very little space, and you can keep it or drag it to the Trash as you wish.

After completing the above please determine if the problems also occur in "Safe Mode":

• Safe Mode or "Safe Boot" is a troubleshooting mode that bypasses all third party system extensions and loads only required system components. Read about it: Starting up in Safe Mode
• You must disable FileVault before you can start your Mac in Safe Mode.
• Starting your Mac in Safe Mode will take longer than usual, graphics will not render smoothly, audio is disabled on some Macs, and some programs (iTunes for example) may not work at all.
• Merely starting your Mac in Safe Mode is not intended to resolve the problem, it's to observe its performance without certain additional components.
• To end Safe Mode restart your Mac normally. Shutdown will take longer as well.

System performance problems for reasons that cannot be isolated to any other cause justify an SMC reset. Be sure to read the procedure carefully and follow all the steps exactly as written, even if they seem inapplicable or trivial.

wildtulips wrote:

Not clear if they are related to the slowness I've been experiencing, can anybody enlighten me?

Talagent appears to be part of The App Lifecycle (loading state on login etc).

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/Manpages/ man8/talagent.8.html

Mine also exits out of boredom and the log's modified time is right after boot.

I addition to John Galt's post I'd suggest trying a new user account…

Create a new user account in 'System Preferences > Users & groups', give it the name test. Login as that test user & see if it works better than before.

YES indicates the problem may be inside your user account (login items, launch agents).

NO indicates the problem may be further up in the system or third party software

Your Mac looks pretty clean, there are a few items loading into the system level, they can effect everything so you will need to pay attention to removing or making sure they are up to date & 10.9 compatible. If you remove them look for uninstallers on the developers site, see if they have an uninstaller in the download or removal instructions, otherwise search (here & Google) for how to uninstall. Deleting apps will leave old code behind that can cause these types of issues.

All the usual caveats apply, backup before you modify the system, delete unwanted items (or move them to another disk or folder if you are worried about deleting the wrong thing) but ensure the originals are gone or updated.

Reboot for the system changes to take effect.

The critical launchd jobs & kernel extensions use reverse domain notation e.g.

com.logmein.hamachi.plist means look at http://logmein.com for updates (if you don't recognize it removing it may be appropriate)

The following kernel extension is loading into the core of the system, do you know what it is? Do you use it? Is it up to date?

wildtulips wrote:

Kernel Extensions:

com.jft.driver.PdaNetDrv (1.0.64)

The same software is loading a background job, but it is installed inside Apple's /System/Library/LaunchDaemons directory… this is not intended to be used by 3rd parties.

Problem System Launch Daemons:

[loaded] com.jft.PdaNetMac.plist

Is your Adobe & Microsoft software up to date? They also load background jobs into the system.

Launch Daemons:

[loaded] com.adobe.fpsaud.plist

[loaded] com.microsoft.office.licensing.helper.plist

Two more system level jobs (update or remove if you don't need it)

Launch Agents:

[loaded] com.pharos.notify.plist

[loaded] com.pharos.popup.plist

The next two jobs load at the 'user level' so they should only affect your user account (try logging in a test user account to rule them out - Users & groups section of System Preferences is where you create one).

Remove the failed job from ~/Library/LaunchAgents/, delete the com.apple.CSConfigDotMacCert-…plist file.

Use the Finders "Go menu > Go to Folder…" when you need to open the hidden ~/Library (your users library).

Are your Google apps up to date? Google Drive has been causing issues elsewhere.

User Launch Agents:

[failed] com.apple.CSConfigDotMacCert-[redacted]@me.com-SharedServices.Agent.plist

[loaded] com.google.keystone.agent.plist

Update Flash if it's out of date. http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/

3rd Party Preference Panes:

Flash Player

Internet Plug-ins:

Default Browser.plugin

Flash Player.plugin

FlashPlayer-10.6.plugin

QuickTime Plugin.plugin

mds_stores and mds suggest Spotlight may be indexing. This can slow a machine down, click on the Spotlight icon in the menu & see if it says it is indexing a disk. If the progress looks like it will be a while set the energy saver to not sleep & give it time to complete.

Top Processes by Memory:

66 MB mds_stores

37 MB WindowServer

37 MB com.apple.IconServicesAgent

33 MB Finder

25 MB mds

What were the results of booting Safe Mode?