El Capitan running slowly?

Mine was helped with an NVRAM reset. Well, we'll see.....

Mine worked with some several changes:

- completely deactivate iCloud Drive (no big deal, I was not using it anyway)

- deselected most of spotlight categories which I didn't care about

- added both external drives to privacy, preventing spotlight to index them (this solved my eject error issue)

- updated office 2016 to the latest update 15.15, apparently preventing outlook to crush anymore while shortening launch time

Now my rMBP 13" mid2014 works as it did under Yosemite.

I'm attaching some screenshots for a better view.

Hope all these helps, guys.

Cheers,

Adrian

I have updated Ms Office 2016 too and this has solved most of my problems. Word and Outlook and other MS programmes are crashing far less often now. This is reassuring. Having said that I am still wondering why we were gratified with this El Capitan update. Mind you it could be worse. I upgraded my retina iPad 2 with IOS9 and now it is completely unusable. Next time round I will prevent from upgrading to a new version of the OS until other programmes scream for it.

Same thing on my 2008 Mac Pro 8 core. El Capitan is a total slug, about 20% slower than Snow Leopard. I think that most of the claims of added speed come from websites that don't want to lose Apple advertising or free hardware for their reviews.

On my old 7,1 Macbook Pro, 10.11 works great. On my 6 month old 27" iMac, Mail takes 100-200% of CPU and causes all other apps to freeze when open. If Mail is closed, everything is fine. If I open Mail, all apps will freeze and only a reboot will fix the issue. If I start mail first without anything else open, it will gag for about a minute of two and then will work OK but use 50-150% of CPU.

Don't get it and really wish I did not upgrade.

I have just bought a brand new iMac 21". This is not the new model from last week, but a brand new computer. As soon as I brought it home, I ran the El Capitan upgrade. I have to say that after 22 years of owning a bunch of Macs this is the very first time that I have a new machine that is not considerably faster than the previous one (a 4-year old Mac Book Air running 10.7.5 filled with all kinds of apps). This one is slower, forget "considerably"!

I installed almost nothing here and it's super slow right off the bat. No Mail is being used, no Spotlight drag, nothing unusual going on in the Activity Monitor. It took about 8 seconds to launch System Preferences. It now takes 4 after turning on Reduce Transparency in Accessibility > Display. Actually, the first thing I had to do was turn off wi-fi and dust off an ethernet cable – that helped with the internet speed weirdness. But I haven't been able to do anything about the fact that simple tasks like starting applications and opening new browser windows give me about 4 seconds of holding and occasionally beach ball spinning. I will be resetting NVRAM.

Really REALLY disappointing!

Logan;

I think this thread needs to be sifted a little. When we talk of "slow" what does that mean?

I am on a MacBook Pro - Mid 2009 - Model A1286 Part No. MC118LL/A - Purchased 12/09/2009 and here's my experience with "slow":

Startup after login-1min 30 sec.

Open finder window - 20 sec.

Open Safari- 34 sec.

Open my blog- 24 sec.

Open movies folder- 18 sec.

Open application folder- 34 sec.

Open Adobe Bridge- 1 min. 43 sec. (after opening it seemed to run fine)

Sometimes just typing here I get a 4 to 5 sec. pause. Makes it really hard to see what you are typing when the text doesn't appear for 5 sec. while you are still typing.

I still have not taken my MacBook Pro into the Apple shop to see if they can give any help. But I think in order to be of help here we need to define more specifically how slow the functions are that we are experiencing.

Ugh, yikes. Sorry to hear that, Rich 😟 Not nearly that bad here. But in my defense, your Mac is six years old. My virgin iMac was upgraded to El Capitan minutes after being plugged in and it immediately started dragging. Not cool either way, Apple, not cool.

Mine too is far slower than this. I have two macs. One macbook pro and one Imac. Neither of them worked well. And if flattened the imac.
it takes upwards of 3 minutes to even get through a login process.

Then about another 20 minutes until everything is up ad running. I have a i5 processor and 8 gig of ram.

I've tried many of your suggestions and there is not just one thing causing this. Also I've been reading the console and it seems mail and internet function is at the core of the issues. But what to people use their computer for, but mail and internet. Apple webkit is running excessively. Oddly there is a better performance between my older mac than the imac that is 2 years newer one. I just hope they fix this soon and we don't have to wait an entire year.

I can't even figure out how to roll this back to Yosemite.

I have a imac 2012 maxed out ram - and this el crappyio brought it to a stand still - its been along time since ive seen the bloody spinning beach ball - as much as ive seen it the last week - i run all adobe cc applications and the computer is my bread and butter - so when i upgraded based on reviews - and it took me back to the days of running a performa 6400 i was not amused - i have done all the the things mentioned in the responses here - but just tonight and it may be complete coincidence - i ran the rebuild feature in mac mail and my mac touch wood appears to back to its snappy self - i dont have to wait 10 mins for applications to open anymore - word seems to function as it used - and firefox opens in seconds rather than hours...... i also created a new user closed it down and went back to my original account - if that helped im not sure - but the disk is no longer constantly humming as tho - its loading / checking / indexing - so rebuild you mail and see if it helps .....

Thanks this did the trick!

IMPORTANT PERFORMANCE NOTES: 1. There are changes to default settings that are happening with the new El Capitan. Upon installation you will be prompted to accept the now-default setting to use FileVault which will encrypt your entire drive. This is probably the result of Apple's laudable ongoing efforts to secure the Mac from attacks. But this takes a long time initially as the drive is being encrypted and will slow the computer down thereafter. Unless you are keeping national security secrets on your Mac and are expecting a major hacking attack, choose to NOT use FileVault. If you have already activated it during installation, TURN FILEVAULT OFF. It will take awhile to decrypt the drive but it will be faster afterwards.

2. For a long time now Apple has set default Energy Saver settings to put the hard drive to sleep as often as possible. This is a serious performance bummer and the first thing I do when setting up a client's Mac is change the Energy Saver settings so that the drive does not spin down so often. Uncheck "Put Hard Drives to sleep when possible" and move the Computer Sleep slider way to the right so that the drive runs for a few hours before stopping. Otherwise, frequently reading from and writing to the drive will result in the rainbow spinning cursor as the drive spins up. It makes the Mac seem VERY sluggish. Yes, it will use a tiny bit more electricity if the drive is spinning more of the time but this is offset by the energy you will not be expending pounding your Mac with your frustrated fist. NOTE: this is not an issue with Macs using SSDs

I Checked and file vault was not enabled and still el capitan makes machine run slow, and now I find my version of suitcase fusion is not working with El Capitan anymore.

I tried everything (adjusted settings in mail and spotlight, reset vram, new installation of it OS X, updated of MS Office etc.). I thought more than once I had the solution - but every time the OS got slow (to an unusable state) again...

In the App Store section I read that logging out of iTunes (and eventually back again and agreeing to the new license) helped. I updated to 12.3.1 and logged out of iTunes. It helped!

Apple issued a new version of El Capitan this morning which corrects many bugs including that which made Office 365 crash all over the place like mad. I downloaded it this very morning and so far, so good. You should try it too.