El Capitan running slowly?

The solution for me was to remove all that I didn't recognize in the firewall.

My late 2008 MacBook is now back to normal.

And if something want to connect somewhere but can't, I will know where to look.

I was having the same problem (excruciatingly slow response to keyboard input, spinning ball etc.) read through the comments, tried many of them including enabling TRIM on my SSD hard drive, but none of the suggestions seemed to help. Then it hit me: clear the browsing data in Safari and Chrome. Voila! Everything is much faster now, even in applications other than Safari and Chrome. Not sure exactly why browsing data would affect other programs but it did. Might not work for everyone but worth trying.

Hello Miguel.apple!

This absolutely fixed my problem. Bravo!

What I think happens is the first time you run mail it converts all your email files from V2 to V3, and in the process it logs every single message. In my case I have about 6 GB of mail scattered across a dozen accounts, and two of the 40+ log files exceeded 2GB in size (the need for compression is obvious!). The compression was happening inside the mail app, and eventually when it runs out of RAM it starts to swap to disk, using up (in my case) more than 30 GB of disk without actually creating any zip files.

the ongoing conversation about PRAM reset I don't think is related to this issue. The zip files that were successfully created before this El Capitan release were all timestamped at midnight, and I think that the PRAM reset will just delay the problem until the following midnight. Of course, you might be asleep then and not notice :-)

i also think that under normal use conditions the compression would only try to zip up a routine days worth of logs - a few megabytes maybe. That first time, though, the log files will be much, much larger....

doug

hi guys - I've been having this problem for a while too since upgrading?! 😠

I'm using an iMac (late 2012) 3.2GHz Intel Core i5 with 8 GB ram so the fix (MacBook) from Kenylady doesn't work for me. 😢

I DO NOT USE MAIL. I use outlook for my email and so the Mail log file delete didn't work either...

this is becoming unbearable to work with now as I'm constantly getting the spinning wheel of death, even just moving from app to app?!

any help would be much appreciated!!

thanks

JT

Hi All,

I"m back. This has gotten so bad that I've not how to flatten my laptop and my backups won't restore.

I'm worried about going and buying a new macbook because it will have this same OS on it. Does anyone have a conclusive list of what to do to address this.

I"m really at whits end after losing 2 computers to this nightmare.

Apple, I sure hope your willing to fix this and it doesn't take a whole year.

So my problem turned out to be the log files. They had ballooned to 20 gigs and were killing the whole computer. I now have to delete them every 2-3 hours otherwise, they become a problem. The recent update did not help.

Well, What can i say. I have tried every thing that you all suggested. I have been very patient with this iMac. Through all the upgrades etc that APPLE have given us & the conclusion after 5 years is that this iMac is the biggest pile of F****** S*** on the market. Running from new, Snow leopard and SAFARI was a pain as it would crash etc regularly. I don't use many apps (3-5) but never all at the same time. I don,t use mail, iCloud or anything like that. Music i have just under i days worth if i play it all. Spotlight is not used either. I have 407Gb of free space on my drive. Even full deck solitaire crashes. I up graded to Yosemite no change. I upgraded to El Capitan, even worse,total rubbish. It can,t even see my security camera now. Yosemite did as did all previous versions. Look at activity monitor and nothing is using no-where near all the memory. So WHAT IS THE PROBLEM APPLE ????????.

Now why did i buy my iMac. Well because i need a fast reliable computer for my amateur radio app was the main reason. By reading all the various threads on the various sites it seems that i;m not the only one having all these problems. I paid about a grand for this thing and can honestly say it is the worst investment i have ever had. Its going in the bin now and i am going to run my old windows xp machine as its at least ultra reliable with no crashes etc.

If you feel the same as i do about the very hyped up stuff from apple say so. I think they are taking the P***..

By the way i do leave this thing on 24/7 so it should always do its maintenance.

RE: Sprintmicks comments

I have had my iMac since 2010 and two years ago my iMac started running real slow after an upgrade. I actually did a factory reset cause in my mind thats what I would do with my PC after a year. It was a regular event when I had my PC- A glass of wine and factory reset then slow process of re installing all drivers and software - took days. Anyway this did not work for my iMac then my husband asked me how much memory is in that thing. I had 8GB that I purchased it with and never upgraded. But all the upgrades said it would work on 8 so didn't think it was necessary. Memory is fairly cheap these days so I figured I would go ahead an max out my memory to total of 16GB. Well it was like I had a new iMac. I can run Photoshop, Illustrator, Bridge, Corel Painter, Fusion Suitcase, safari and iMessage at the same time no problem. I am a graphic designer and digital artist and I put my iMac through rigorous workout. I will admit this last el capitan did slow it down but the update they had last week seems to have resolved it. If you have maxed out your ram and tried everything in this thread you need to go to a reputable apple/pc technician. I spent 3000 on my iMac and it should run for years, you shouldn't have to recycle apple computers - they should last for many years. Mine will be 6 years old soon and it works great now.

Yep. This thing was maxed out on memory soon after i got it. Had it serviced a couple of times aswell . Anyway its good to hear you got your's sorted..

Over Half an hour to write this. Anyone want to buy some beachballs..

Fast as a Snail on Superglue !!!

Miguel.apple,

Is there a way to permenately fix this?

Mine keep respawning

sprintmick;

You obviously have something terribly wrong with your machine. I have had apple products since 1978 when I opened my print shop. I have had almost every model since then. They have served me well.

I too have problems right now with slow response on my MacBook Pro 2009. But I am pretty much convinced it is because I am running the system from an SD card. I think I have learned that this new system requires a lot of interaction with the HD for a whole passel of functions and the SD card just does not have a fast enough throughput. You may want to check your HD for problems in that regard. But I think the only way you will get your machine to run properly is to take it in to an Apple dealer and have it thoroughly checked out and repaired.

I am also a ham radio operator and likewise have had no problems with Mac in this regard.

It has taken a few days but my problems with El Capitan have been resolved and my MBP is now running well. I trashed old anti virus software. Removed log files and cleaned out mail and followed all the advice that was on the forum. Not sure exactly what did the trick but after days of looking at the spinning ball of death and many restarts, I am back to a happy Mac.

Thanks for all the input. It is a good community:)

Well when it went in for a service they said everything checked out ok.. However i have decided that i am not going to be beaten by a machine so its off to the service centre again. When it came back the last couple of times it was ok for about a week the first time & a whole 3 days last time..By the sound of things it is not a common problem thats causing all the slow running & lockups.. I've also ordered another full set of memory just incase there's an intermittent fault there..

Anyway hear's hoping that i will get to the bottom of things and she runs as she should soon. If that ever happens i will post whats been the cause of all the problems.

Cheers for now.😕

okay so i got fed up and i wiped the entire computer out. It will not restore a backup properly. However, freshly installed it seems to be running okay.

I did have to redownload 84,000 pieces of mail but it seems to have handled that fine this time. (with Imap that is going to have to factored in more and more to the OS people's thought process)

I will see how it does after a few days. Only sad part is it would not restore from time machine

Hi. I was having this same problem. Lots of spinning beach balls all the time. I have 4 different Macs and upgraded all of them to El Capitan. They all have the same basic setup. Same applications etc. But my early 2011 MacBook Pro go the beachball problem and ran super slow. My other 3 Macs were fine.

My 2011 Mac would slow down on everything. For instance, at one point I tried Force Quit a non-responding program. I clicked on the Apple menu, but the computer froze on the Recent Items menu. It was trying to load that and couldn't. I could not even move past that menu to get to Force Quit. I had to hold down the power to restart.

I tried the various solutions posted here. Reset PRAM. That didn't seem to do anything; my computer stayed slow. My mail logs were not large and didn't seem to be the problem.

Using Activity Monitor I found that Dropbox was taking a lot of CPU power. Initially it was the program using the most memory, but only 15-30%, so I didn't think it was a problem. But later I saw it jump to 80% and then 116%. I had recently copied some large Photos libraries into Dropbox. They were older photo libraries I wanted to back up. I wasn't even using them. But they were big 40 GB and 75 GB. I believe Dropbox was taking tons of memory to sync those photo library files. Exiting Dropbox immediately brought back my computer's speed. And once I moved those photo library files back off of Dropbox, I could keep Dropbox running, but it wasn't slowing everything else down. The syncing by Dropbox of so many files seemed to be the problem.

Now my computer is running fast again. And it is basically beach ball free!

My advice is to run Activity Monitor (in your Utilities Folder). Sort by % CPU and see what is using the most memory. That is probably what is causing your computer to slowdown. It might be Dropbox or something else, but that will help you identify the problem program. Hopefully then you can update the program or do something else to solve the problem. I believe the speed problems many people have had are linked to a few programs acting as memory hogs. That was definitely the case for me.

Good luck everyone. And thanks to all of you who post in the Apple Support Communities. I have found many answers to troubling problems here over the years!