Stuttering scrolling, space switching, mission control

Hi Plasma Prestige,

Thanks for using the Apple Support Communities. I'm sorry to hear you are having these issues with your MacBook Pro. If you continue to have graphics or lag issues across multiple UI elements, and you are not seeing any obvious system resource issues in Activity Monitor, you may want to try testing in both Safe Mode and in a new test user to see if the issues persist. You may find the information and steps outlined in the following articles helpful:

OS X El Capitan: Start up in safe mode

Try safe mode if your Mac doesn't finish starting up - Apple Support

How to test an issue in another user account on your Mac - Apple Support

Regards

First, have a backup. Flaky problems such as this can sometimes be a hardware problem. If Time Machine or some other scheduled backup tool is not running, get that going first, and get backups going. This usually is not a hardware problem, but it can be.

If Safe Mode doesn't clear this... Usual cause for these is add-on software, anti-malware tools or anti-virus tools, performance accelerators or cache cleaners or other enhancements, or there's some application that's consuming excessive system resources. Use Console.app and Activity Monitor.app to look for applications or processes that are very busy, and for repeating blocks of errors. (Much of what Console.app shows can be arcane and scary — can all that can be entirely normal, too. If you decide to post any of that Console.app output here, please post just a single block of the repeating messages, and please check the contents for any sensitive or confidential data before posting. Please don't post more than maybe a hundred lines of text, and don't post long runs of repeating errors.)

If Safe Mode and if removing the add-ons doesn't help here, then download the Etrecheck tool and post — cut-and-paste — the diagnostic report here. Etrecheck has some checks for certain types of hardware errors, and shows a configuration report for the system. Etrecheck tries to avoid posting anything confidential or sensitive, but check before posting. If you want to know what you're using with this tool before trying it, look around the forums for previous discussions and postings from the tool.

The official explanation of Safe Mode.... Safe Mode flushes various performance-related caches (causing them to later be rebuilt), and disables most add-on kernel software. In aggregate, it's a decent way to figure out whether the core of the OS and the hardware appears to be working, or if there's something wrong with the caches or some of the add-on software.

I might have a solution for the lag problem.

So I've had this problem with my Macbook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015) OS X El Capitan, the lag was just horrific, switching fullscreens was a nightmare and everything just seemed to lag lag and then lag some more, I've tried tons of solutions suggested by many forums, from reseting the PRAM and SMC to trying to change the display's resolution and even tried to erase and reinstall the OS but unfortunately none worked, I've literally spent weeks trying to figure out a solution, until I started noticing that the lag was the worst during daytime and that it was an intermittent lag, and one day I was sick of how much automatically adjusted brightness was annoying so I just turned it off and to my surprise the lag immediately stopped, it turns out that that feature was the culprit and the lag appeared only when the screen brightness was changing automatically and now my Macbook works like a charm, so here's what you can do:

Go to System preferences - Displays, and uncheck "Automatically adjusted brightness" in the "Display" tab.

I hope this works for you as well.