Spinning Beach Ball appears all the time

Determine if the problems also persist 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.

If the problems continue after restarting your Mac normally, proceed as below.

Back up your Mac if you have not done so already. To learn how to do that read https://www.apple.com/support/backup/. To learn how to use Time Machine read Use Time Machine to back up or restore your Mac.

If your Mac is momentarily unresponsive, consider the following.

Launch the Console app - it is in your Utilities folder. You can find it by selecting Utilities from the Finder's Go menu.

If the log list column on the left is not already displayed, show the log list by selecting Show Log List from Console's View menu. Select Show Toolbar if it is not already shown.

Locate system.log in the list and select it. Many date and time-stamped entries will appear, hundreds of them, and you must find the entries relevant to your Mac's problem.

To do that click the Clear Display button in the Toolbar. All previously displayed log entries will be disappear.

Next: Perform whatever actions cause the Mac to exhibit the slow behavior. If the problem is caused by errors logged by the system, the Console window will show them being recorded in system.log.

One or more of them, along with their time stamps, may reveal the reason for the problem you describe.

Copy and paste those log entries in a reply. If hundreds of the same repetitive messages appear, please edit them before posting. There should be no need for more than a few log entries.

Most of the entries will be cryptic but will contain information you might consider personal such as your Mac's name. If you do not want that information to appear, delete or obscure it when posting your reply. Leave enough information so that the entries can be deciphered.

When you see a beachball cursor or the slowness is especially bad, note the exact time: hour, minute, second.

These instructions must be carried out as an administrator. If you have only one user account, you are the administrator.

Launch the Console application in any one of the following ways:

☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)

☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.

☞ Open LaunchPad and start typing the name.

The title of the Console window should be All Messages. If it isn't, select

SYSTEM LOG QUERIES ▹ All Messages

from the log list on the left. If you don't see that list, select

View ▹ Show Log List

from the menu bar at the top of the screen.

Each message in the log begins with the date and time when it was entered. Scroll back to the time you noted above.

Select the messages entered from then until the end of the episode, or until they start to repeat, whichever comes first.

Copy the messages to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.

The log contains a vast amount of information, almost all of it useless for solving any particular problem. When posting a log extract, be selective. A few dozen lines are almost always more than enough.

Please don't indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.

Please don't post screenshots of log messages—post the text.

Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

When you post the log extract, you might see an error message on the web page: "You have included content in your post that is not permitted," or "The message contains invalid characters." That's a bug in the forum software. Please post the text on Pastebin, then post a link here to the page you created.

If you have an account on Pastebin, please don't select Private from the Paste Exposure menu on the page, because then no one but you will be able to see it.