iMac Unusably slow after High Sierra Upgrade

High Sierra rendered my 2012 MB Pro nearly useless, while my 2011 iMac with identical i5 CPU, system and applications hummed along smoothly. The problem turns out to be that the OS is optimized for SSD storage, and it will bog down horribly if storage I/O isn't as fast as it expects. I upgraded the MB Pro to an SSD, and the machine instantly became wildly fast and glitch-free. The 4 GB of RAM is more than enough for routine work, w/ MS Office, a browser, and Acrobat reader all in use - probably because caching is so effective with an SSD.

The giveaway was the one difference between the machines: the iMac already had an SSD. The upgrade is a no-brainer at today's prices; my 500 GB SSD was $45 delivered. More effective than a memory upgrade, and cheaper to boot. Just do it, folks.

Frank, yes. "Factual and correct", not by a long shot - you're talking out of your butt right there. Fact: High Sierra can crap out on a virgin installation of the OS, without any third party software whatsoever, if you install it on a conventional hard drive. That's what happened to my 2011 MacBook Pro. Activity monitor showed nothing out of the ordinary, all diagnostic tests came up clean, but the machine was atrociously slow.

The problem is that High Sierra is optimized for SSD storage, which is now Apple's factory default. It expects very fast I/O, and bogs down when it tries its tricks on a HDD - or at least on certain HDDs that don't play well with the OS. (I suspect that the size of the disk's cache is relevant, but I haven't got experience or data to back that up.) HDDs and Fusion drives can't implement APFS, and that may be part of the problem.

Bottom line: some HDDs just don't work with High Sierra. The choices are to upgrade to an SSD, which improves performance tremendously, try another HDD and hope you get lucky, or revert to an older OS, and plod along at your old pace.

Is your file format structure APFS with a SSD?

Apple introduced the new disk format structure in high sierra and that has cause me issues. You may find that erasing the disk to extended journal in disk utility will solve the issue.

You can clone the data using carbon copy cloner to a external and boot from the external by a restart with the option key held down and format the Mac drive using disk utility to extended journal (HFS+). Then clone the data back to the computer. This helped me and until I see a improvment upgrade from Apple I think HFS+ is a safe way to go.

I seen this issue on a bunch of macs. It may be due to the type of data thats on the computer and the way APFS analyzes the data. Until the verdic is out I recommend using HFS+ extended format with high sierra if you experience a useless machine after the upgrade. Also note that if you have a SSD installed in the computer when upgrading by default High Sierra changes the format on the drive to APFS. It either gets corrupted some how and causes the computer to slow to a halt or the way it indexes data is adding too many resources and slowing down everything. In either case its not a useful computer and changing the file structure to the older OS extended journaled solved my computer slow boot (15 min) and slow usage due to high CPU resources.

I fixed my issue by removing iCloud documents and data

Backup your desktop and documents folder first

Either by copy paste to downloads or external USB hard drive

Then go apple logo

preferences

iCloud

Turn off documents in the cloud and data

It will ask you to save a copy so choose yes

The reason your mac slowed down is because you were reading your macs documents and desktop entirely from your iCloud

I do not know why this is on by default when you login with your iCloud account when first booting up your new mac

It should sync not run entirely off the cloud

Very bad design by this new version of the operating system

Hi,

I ran EtreCheck. It told me that my machine was slow! I also ran the Apple Diagnostic tests on my HDD and it told me there was nothing wrong, so I tried to create a bootable clone using SuperDuper with the intention of starting my machine from that to see if it really was hardware. SuperDuper failed. I emailed Dave at SuperDuper and he told me that the error indicated that my drive was failing. He suggested that I should try to copy the file that had caused SuperDuper to fail manually, and that proved that it was a disk problem. I purchased the iMac HDD upgrade kit from MacSales and swapped out my HDD. Running like a dream now. Incidentally, I also have HighSierra running on a new MackBook Pro and I haven't had any problems with that.

You could try creating a bootable clone if you have an external drive, then boot from that. If it runs ok it could indicate a disk problem.

S

For what it's worth do not forget the one "big" change that High-Sierra brought with it is a conversion of the storage to APFS. The change (claimed to be advantageous for SSDs) is a radical departure from the way things used to be (e.g., there are no more "physically distinct" partitions and the storage space is "virtually and continuously" allocated to a partition or another. From what I have seen it brings not distinct advantage in performance to magnetic disk storage (not for a simple home machine), and as it was done may result in making a slightly older iMAC with "fusion" disk almost unusable. During my upgrade I (apple's installer?) "unlinked" the two components of the fusion drive (HD and SSD) and left them so declaring failure. I did restart the process - and it did upgrade the system using only the HD.

The performance was awful (similar to a dying disk). After several days, and looking at some description of the entities making up a "fusion drive" I realised that I have to recreate a thing called "Core Storage Volume" (that is the fusion-drive) out of the HD and SSD with the command-line disk utility (that results in complete data loss so it should be done only after a backup). After that and restoring the old content (on the fusion drive formatted HPFS+) the machine is running as it should (BTW better as a "pure SSD" MBP with the same I7 - Apple did a great caching job with the fusion drive). For this thread - I would suggest you look at the changes that happened with the upgrade - High Sierra is not slower than Sierra - but a mishap might have happened during upgrade - not your fault but probably fixable. The two major background processed - spotlight and picture feature recognition are not really the slowdown culprits and adjust nicely to the load.

I had this same situation today on a 27-inch Late 2013 iMac running High Sierra 10.13.3.

Over the past week I'd noticed the iMac getting very sluggish, but somehow getting itself back to normal again. Today the iMac became unusably sluggish. I reset the SMC and the iMac booted as normal. Then I reset the PRAM, and I got the lockup on the startup progress bar that the OP described.

Eventually I got it working with a method that has worked for many here, by booting into recovery mode and running Disk First Aid. It took **forever** to boot into recovery mode -- I almost figured it was a lockup. Then I got the black screen with the cursor arrow flickering in the upper left hand corner. I clicked the mouse and saw the recovery mode ui.

You have been "hijacked." Your Desktop and Documents Folder are now in Apple's Servers (iCloud Drive). Do NOT turn off iCloud drive until you have copied these things back onto your hard drive, otherwise they could be lost for good.

Don't just drag them back either - copy them back or you could end up with nothing but shortcuts.

After you have confirmed that they are back on your drive, then you can go to system preferences and turn OFF iCloud Drive. It's just one of the questionable things that Apple is doing lately - moving these without your knowledge or permission.

Possible Fixes for High Sierra

You should try each, one at a time, then test to see if the problem is fixed before going on to the next.

Be sure to backup your files before proceeding if possible.

1. Shutdown the computer, wait 30 seconds, restart the computer.
2. Resetting your Mac’s PRAM and NVRAM
3. Reset the System Management Controller (SMC)
4. Start the computer in Safe Mode, then restart normally. This is slower than a standard startup.
5. Repair the disk by booting from the Recovery HD. Immediately after the chime hold down the Command and R keys until the Utility Menu appears. Choose Disk Utility and click on the Continue button. Select the indented (usually, Macintosh HD) volume entry from the side list. Click on the First Aid button in the toolbar. Wait for the Done button to appear. Quit Disk Utility and return to the Utility Menu. Restart the computer from the Apple Menu.
6. Create a New User Account Open Users & Groups preferences. Click on the lock icon and enter your Admin password when prompted. On the left under Current User click on the Add [+] button below Login Options. Setup a new Admin user account. Upon completion log out of your current account then log into the new account. If your problems cease, then consider switching to the new account and transferring your files to it - Transferring files from one User Account to another.
7. Download and Install 10.13.1 High Sierra Update
8. Reinstall OS X by booting from the Recovery HD using the Command and R keys. When the Utility Menu appears select Reinstall OS X then click on the Continue button.
9. Erase and Install OS X Restart the computer. Immediately after the chime hold down the CommandandRkeys until the Apple logo appears. When the Utility Menu appears:

1. Select Disk Utility from the Utility Menu and click on Continue button.
2. When Disk Utility loads select the drive (out-dented entry) from the Device list.
3. Click on the Erase icon in Disk Utility's toolbar. A panel will drop down.
4. Set the Format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.)
5. Click on the Apply button, then wait for the Done button to activate and click on it.
6. Quit Disk Utility and return to the Utility Menu.
7. Select Install OS X and click on the Continue button.

Ways to help make a slow Mac faster

1. 17 Reasons Why Your Mac Runs Slower Than it Should
2. Slow Mac Performance? This Article Solves It!
3. Fix slow start-ups in OS X | MacFixIt - CNET Reviews
4. How to fix slow shutdown and startup times. | MacTip.net
5. 6 Easy Tips to Speed Up OS X Yosemite on Your Mac
6. OS X El Capitan- If your Mac runs slowly
7. Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on Performance
8. Tips to Fix Issues that affect Mac Performance
9. Avoid using any third-party cleanup software. Usually, this software does more bad than good. You don't need it. All computers become slower over time even under normal use. Experienced users erase the hard drive and do a clean install from scratch from time to time; or whenever installing a major OS upgrade. Doing so means you must maintain regular and multiple backups.
10. If you have enabled iCloud Disk and are storing your Documents and Data in iCloud, then consider turning that off and signing out of iCloud. It can slow down the computer considerably. Please see the following from the user, fotomac: "The solution was to SIGN OUT of iCloud and my problem STOPPED! NO MORE SPINNING BEACHBALL! My computer's speed increased to what it should be and all my Apps now work!"
11. Add more RAM or cut back on the number of concurrently running applications and utilities. Remove unnecessary anti-malware software and any software that promises to clean your Mac. Check for runaway processes: Runaway applications can shorten battery runtime, affect performance, and increase heat and fan activity. Also, visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on dealing with The Spinning Beach Ball of Death.
12. The Ultimate Fix: Backup everything, erase the drive, reinstall OS X, and restore your data from the backup. Reinstall third-party software from original media/scratch.

Hi,

etrecheck report quotes:

"Stuck iCloud - This machine has a large number of pending iCloud transfers."

Try to let time to your Mac to complete all these iCloud transfers (at some hour where all the country isn't trying to do same) (assuming iCloud is actually accessible, otherwise this could also explain why all is stuck...).

"com.malwarebytes.MBAMHelperTool.plist" probably (er, certainly, actually) thwarts the macOS-integrated malware removal tool, MRT, new "feature" of macOS, and which is already, by itself, a notable memory hog... I suspect that duplicating the same function that, even when it is programmed by Apple nerds, is already able to eat 30GB of your RAM, with a possibly (more) badly programmed process (yet) could be not the wiser idea...

Post Scriptum: And for pity sake, send the infamous CleanMyMac to the Great Trashbin of History, like Barney-15E has you advised. Note: forget your instinctive sympathy/antipathy about some user who gives you a good advice, when it is good, just follow it. I mean: it's a user forum full of testosterone, here, not a polite assistance link. Example: I definitely won't spend my holidays at fishing with Barney-15E, but I can confirm personally that in 25 years I never, ever, got any warning from the (badly named) "SMART" status, on machines — Linux — where this function was up and running, *before* my disks be good for the garbage can.

Best Regards.

I think I found an explanation of the problem! I also pasted the Etrecheck report below, but it does not show anything interesting.

I have several Mac computers with High Sierra, but only one of them, the MacBookPro is slow. I compared the tasks, services and threads among computers - this is quite a long and boring work. Some of the error messages show rather poor code, some examples here:

22 Jul 2018 at 16:04:24 com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: Could not import service from caller: path = /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.platform.ptmd.plist, caller = launchd.1, error = 138: Service cannot be loaded on this hardware

22 Jul 2018 at 16:04:24 com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: com.apple.CoreRAID (lint): The HideUntilCheckIn property is an architectural performance issue. Please transition away from it.

22 Jul 2018 at 16:04:24 com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: ThrottleInterval set to zero. You're not that important. Ignoring.

22 Jul 2018 at 16:04:24 com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: The TimeOut key is no longer respected. It never did anything anyway.

22 Jul 2018 at 16:04:24 com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: The HopefullyExitsLast key is no longer respected. Please remove it.

22 Jul 2018 at 16:04:24 com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: Please switch away from OnDemand to KeepAlive.

Is this my Mac? "Never did anything anyway"??? "Cannot import services into hardware"???

Anyhow these problems have been present in all my computers alike, so this is not the reason for the slow response.

Finally I found the following: the OS writes a lot of log text into different files. The MacBook Pro computer from 2013 has a slower SSD and the files are encrypted. On the other computers I don't have encrypted files. The encryption and writing into a slow SSD is the delay I see when I type some command. This delay is not shown in the Activity Monitor since it is a low level OS function. To test this hypothesis, I removed the encryption of the disk (Security & Privacy / File Vault set to Off), and the computer is much more responsive now. There are still some extra percent of CPU power used somewhere, I will find this as well. But it can be that all the log writing and the poor coding makes the difference.

Clearly, here one needs to balance encryption of the hard disk against speed, but in my case I select speed since it is not acceptable that I type something and I see the result on the screen after 5 seconds.

All in all, according to my experience, using older versions of the OS or alternatively Ubuntu is a more effective solution. Apple must improve a lot to keep being competitive according to me.

Please let me know if one of you see something relevant in the EtreCheck or in the logs that could help. Thank's!

EtreCheck version: 4.3.6 (4D041)

Report generated: 2018-07-23 01:17:11

Download EtreCheck from https://etrecheck.com

Runtime: 3:40

Performance: Good

Problem: Computer is too slow

Major Issues: None

Minor Issues:

These issues do not need immediate attention but they may indicate future problems.

Unsigned files - There are unsigned software file installed. They appear to be legitimate but should be reviewed.

32-bit Apps - This machine has 32-bits apps that may have problems in the future.

Hardware Information:

MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Late 2013)

MacBook Pro Model: MacBookPro11,1

1 2,6 GHz Intel Core i5 (i5-4288U) CPU: 2-core

8 GB RAM - Not upgradeable

BANK 0/DIMM0 - 4 GB DDR3 1600 ok

BANK 1/DIMM0 - 4 GB DDR3 1600 ok

Battery: Health = Normal - Cycle count = 19

Video Information:

Intel Iris - VRAM: 1536 MB

Color LCD

Drives:

disk0 - APPLE SSD SM0512F 500.28 GB (Solid State - TRIM: Yes)

Internal PCI 5.0 GT/s x2 Serial ATA

disk0s1 - EFI (MS-DOS FAT32) [EFI] 210 MB

disk0s2 500.07 GB

disk1s1 - Macintosh HD (APFS) 500.07 GB (44.35 GB used)

disk1s2 - Preboot (APFS) [APFS Preboot] 500.07 GB (21 MB used)

disk1s3 - Recovery (APFS) [Recovery] 500.07 GB (519 MB used)

disk1s4 - VM (APFS) [APFS VM] 500.07 GB (1.07 GB used)

Mounted Volumes:

disk1s1 - Macintosh HD 500.07 GB (453.95 GB free)

APFS

Mount point: /

disk1s4 - VM [APFS VM] 500.07 GB (453.95 GB free)

APFS

Mount point: /private/var/vm

Network:

Interface en4: Thunderbolt Ethernet

Interface en5: Apple USB Ethernet Adapter

Interface en0: Wi-Fi

802.11 a/b/g/n/ac

One IPv4 address

Proxy Auto Discovery

Interface en3: Bluetooth PAN

Interface bridge0: Thunderbolt Bridge

iCloud Quota: 2.97 GB available

System Software:

macOS High Sierra 10.13.6 (17G65)

Time since boot: About 12 hours

System Load: 1.41 (1 min ago) 1.55 (5 min ago) 1.89 (15 min ago)

Security:

Unsigned Files:

Launchd: /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.microsoft.office.licensing.helper.plist

Executable: /Library/PrivilegedHelperTools/com.microsoft.office.licensing.helper

Details: Exact match found in the whitelist - probably OK

32-bit Applications:

26 32-bit apps

System Launch Agents:

System Launch Daemons:

Launch Daemons:

User Login Items:

SpeechSynthesisServer Application (? - installed 2018-07-11)

(/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks /SpeechSynthesis.framework/Versions/A/SpeechSynthesisServer.app)

Internet Plug-ins:

iPhotoPhotocast: (installed 2007-06-15)

QuickTime Plugin: (installed 2018-07-11)

AdobePDFViewer: (installed 2012-01-15)

OfficeLiveBrowserPlugin: (installed 2009-10-23)

SharePointBrowserPlugin: (installed 2017-10-05)

Silverlight: (installed 2013-12-14)

JavaAppletPlugin: (installed 2014-04-30)

Time Machine:

Skip System Files: No

Mobile backups: Yes

Auto backup: Yes

Volumes being backed up:

Macintosh HD: Disk size: 500.07 GB - Disk used: 46.12 GB

Destinations:

L*****T [Local] (Last used)

Total size: 999.86 GB

Total number of backups: 7

Oldest backup: 2018-02-04 14:59:46

Last backup: 2018-07-22 13:22:08

Top Processes by CPU:

Top Processes by Memory:

Top Processes by Network Use:

Top Processes by Energy Use:

Virtual Memory Information:

Software Installs (past 30 days):

End of report

Hello again!

All of you with slow High Sierra, don't despair, the problem can be solved! I just fixed my computer with the kind help of two support people from Apple in Sweden (Robert and Johanna - a pleasure to speak with them, I am almost looking forward towards the next problem 🙂). Maybe there are easier ways to do it, but my experience to fix the slow computer was the following:

- I have several computers, I upgraded all of them to High Sierra (a Mac mini, a Macbook 12" and a Macbook Pro late 2013). Only the MacBook pro became very slow, the others are ok, they are as fast as before. So I concluded that it must be some difference in the installation

- Here comes the key observation I got from the Apple Support. The OS writes a lot of files into the disk all the time and if the disk has problems, then the computer is slow. I did a "First Aid" test using the Disk Utility found under Applications / Utilities. The test will conclude with a message "Test successful" and some green "OK" sign. However, this does not mean the disk is ok, it just mean the test was done without a crash. I think this is a logical problem with the design of this test program: it should come out red and with a strong warning if the disk is wrong since a wrong disk is a serious problem. The key action to do is that after the test one should click on "Show Details" and see if there are actually errors on the disk. In my case there were several errors, for example with the fsroot. Thus the procedure for me was to reformat the disk and then put back everything from a Time Machine backup. I think when upgrading to High Sierra, sometimes the conversion to the new disk format introduced with High Sierra is not going as planned and that is why the computer is slow.

- I did the operation with the following steps:

1. I made a backup using Time Machine

2. I restarted the computer using <cmd> R and in the menu I selected a restore of the original OS

3. I restarted with the original OS and then upgraded to High Sierra. I checked that the disk is OK with First Aid

4. I restarted again with <cmd> R and I selected the menu to restore from Time Machine. Then I got back everything working perfectly.

I hope this will help!

Before throwing the Mac out the window download and run Etrecheck. Copy and paste the results into your reply. Etrecheck is a diagnostic tool that was developed by one of the most respected users here in the ASC and recommended by Apple Support to provide a snapshot of the system and help identify the more obvious culprits that can adversely affect a Mac's performance.

I have been advised that before scrapping you should investigate changing the disc drive to a solid state drive and maybe adding more memory . The drive wears out after a while and ends up with bad sectors. The system takes a long time to find its way through these bad sectors. Replacing the drive is much cheaper than a new machine. A local tech person also speeded up my machine a bit by re..........ing my drive. Can't remember exactly what now! Look for a good local independent local Mac repair specialist! It should give your iMac a few more years of acceptable use!🙂