iMac Memory Issues?
Hi there,
I have a late 2012, 27 inch iMac, with a 3TB fusion drive and 32GB of RAM. I'm only using around 650GB of my Hard Drive's storage and rarely, if ever, push the limits of my RAM. I also keep my files fairly organised and regularly scan for viruses and malware. I should also note that even though my computer is nearly 6 years old, the hard drive was replaced with a fresh one last June (2017) so only has a year or so of wear on it.
Despite all of the above I have been having problems with my Mac that I think might stem from a hardware issue. Over the last month or so, Finder has been incredibly buggy - when moving large or multiple files around it will become slow and glitchy - the screen wil freeze for a second before executing my commands or I will get a spinning beachball that renders me unable to click anything else - this means that throughout the day, I have to re-launch Finder multiple times.
In trying to solve this problem, the other day, I checked Activity Monitor and noticed that Finder would, after a little usage, balloon up to using anywhere between 800mb-1.4GB of my RAM's memory. In light of this, I have done multiple safe-boots, PRAM, and SMC resets as well as 2 clean installs of Sierrra and stripped my programs down to the bare essentials. I have even quit using Chrome. Whilst this has definitely improved the situation - Finder stabilises at around 400MB for normal usage - Finder is still displaying problems when dealing with medium/large folders. When copying folders upwards of 10GB - Finder's CPU usage will shoot up to 90/100%+ and be unusable for the duration of the job - I will either get a beach ball, or it will be unbearably slow to respond. Once the job is finished, normal pace resumes. This does not always increase its memory usage - but, twice, its memory usage has imediately surged up to 1.4GB and remained at that, even after doing the job.
At one point today, I also saw that MDS_Stores was using over 1GB of memory (even though Spotlight was not indexing), so I disabled indexing, which did reduce my Memory usage by around 3GB, but did not at all solve my problems.
I have noticed lately that my computer also seems to be noisier - ocasionally, there is a faint growl coming from the left-hand side of the machine - its not always there and is only discernable in dead silence. Is it normal for a hard drive to make this kind of noise? Worryingly, I remember noticing the exact same noise a year ago when my hard drive originally failed.
I have spoken to Apple's tech support and they were adamant that it isn't a hardware problem and that a clean install of Sierra would fix my issues - but it simply hasn't. Alongside this, when I run Sierra on my external, bootable drive, these problems don't *seem* to persist (although, I obviously don't use it that exensively).
I would take it in to an Apple store, but the nearest one to me is a £40 train journey away and I don't want to haul it all the way there for them to tell me they can't find anything wrong with it.
Has anyone else had similar issues? Would doing another clean install, but with High Sierra yield different results?
For reference, I have posted firstly: Ram usage from the other night, illustrating my original problem, and secondly, a screenshot of Finder using 100% of my CPU to copy a mere 10GB of MP3 files a moment ago.
Whilst my Mac is by enlarge working perfectly - all programs boot up and run smoothly - the fact that Finder is so unreliable is driving me crazy. I am a loss as to what I should do to fix this - any and all help is greatly appreciated.
Kind Regards,
James
iMac, macOS Sierra (10.12.6), none
