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Hello, I have been having problems with my 2019 iMac always takes forever to start up and applications such as Microsoft Word and Excel take forever to load. I have provided an EtreCheck. Thank you for your help.
I don't see any of the usual suspects but do see some processes that are using up a lot of CPU resources:
Accountsd: How to Fix High CPU Usage on Mac - MacRumors
The bird process which is asssociated with iCloud and iCloud Drive. Do you have iCloud drive enabled?
mdsync: it's associated with Spotlight. It's has some high CPU usage so try the following:
1 - How to rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac - Apple Support
2 - boot into Safe Mode by booting with the Shift key held down and then reboot normally.
NOTE: if you have a wireless keyboard with rechargeable batteries you should connect it with its charging cable to assure a boot into Safe Mode.
Welcome to the Apple Support Communities.
First, thank you for posting an EtreCheck report!
➡️ First, there is no evidence that the Mac is being backed up with Time Machine. You need a backup. If you don't have an external drive for a backup, get a high-quality, 7200 RPM drive, such as an OWC Mercury Elite Pro - MacSales.com (OWC).
➡️ You may have some adware. Run the Malwarebytes tool to remove any.
➡️ You have orphan files that can be deleted. Follow the EtreCheck prompts to remove orphan files. The location for them should be at the very bottom of your EtreCheck report.
➡️ It appears your APFS file structure may have some issues or extra volumes. Please go to Disk Utility, and select "View" > "Show All Devices". Select each device (or entry shown), and take a screenshot of it (Take a screenshot on your Mac - Apple Support) and upload them all here using the "Image Insertion" tool.
➡️ External drives may be causing performance issues. Disconnect them, and see if anything improves.
➡️ Delete the NordVPN app. VPNs make your connection less secure and private and can cause issues.
➡️ You have some high CPU activity:
mdsync 99.82 % (Apple) —> "mdsync" is part of macOS Spotlight and it may be causing issues. Please Rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac - Apple Support for your internal Fusion Drive. External drives might be causing Spotlight issues. You could try to exclude them from being indexed: Change Spotlight preferences on Mac - Apple Support.
➡️ The following processes have also been crashing:
bird —> Part of iCloud. Have you recently turned on iCloud or added lots of files to iCloud?
accountsd —> Part of macOS Internet Accounts (Mail, Calendar, etc.). Have you added any Accounts recently?
➡️ Also, startup in Safe Mode, login, and restart into normal mode.
How long exactly does Microsoft Word/Excel take to open? Do other Apps take a long time to open? What is this iMac used for?
Cheers,
Jack
I would try testing with any external hard drives disconnected. I believe this is the third report this week of a Samsung external SSD involved in a "slow" report from an otherwise healthy computer.
Free/cheap VPNs often extract a performance penalty.
Check your Spotlight preferences. There are items indexed by default that many people do not need to be searched. This article discusses Spotlight preferences and excluding some items from indexing might help the "mdsync" issue.
Change Spotlight preferences on Mac - Apple Support
The same preference pane lets you exclude some locations from the search. As external drives are slower than your Fusion drive, you may wish to direct Spotlight not to index the externals.
8 GB and a Fusion hard disk is not quite the usual slow iMac configuration, but it’s close.
On the plus side, it’s vastly easier to add memory to a 27”, than the 21.5” iMac we usually see with a slow configuration.
Adding 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) is ~USD$90, 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) is ~USD$170 via OWC.
And this iMac is new enough to have fast I/O, even if that hard disk is (like ~all hard disks) really slow, so the Thunderbolt or USB 3.x (not USB 2.0!) SSD upgrade mentioned above can work well.
There are easier ways to compromise your privacy and your security than a VPN, too. Some of the VPN providers around have logged while claiming they didn’t log, some (including Nord) have been breached, and some appear to be derailing if not attempting to access encrypted traffic, and the use of well-known VPN credentials renders the provided security much less robust than many might otherwise prefer. And who knows what traffic scanning is going on.
It's the disk speed that directly affects boot speed and application and document open speed. Additional memory kicks in when things are open and you're processing documents. Additional memory lets more apps open documents at the same time.
Old Toad wrote:
It's the disk speed that directly affects boot speed and application and document open speed. Additional memory kicks in when things are open and you're processing documents. Additional memory lets more apps open documents at the same time.
Disk speed is definitely a factor and a big one here (and the SSD upgrade is likely the biggest benefit), while available physical memory allows larger caches to try to reduce some of the I/O involved. Additional memory also means the system doesn’t need to off-load contents to storage when starting up an app, too. It’s also part of why unallocated and unused “free” memory is counter-intuitively money- and performance-wasteful.
The apps take around 10 seconds
That is not a terrible time for Microsoft Apps to open. On one of my Macs booting from an external SSD, Microsoft Apps take 8-11 seconds to open from a fresh restart. After the initial open, they take less than 5 seconds to open.
start up takes around 30 seconds.
Again, not a terrible startup time at all!
Cheers,
Jack
30 seconds for a boot with your setup isn't unusual. I have a 2017 iMac with an internal SSD and my boot times vary between 25-30 seconds.
However, the 10 second app launch seems long. I took another look at your Etrecheck report and see you have a VPN installed and running. Unless you're using a true VPN tunnel, such as between you and your employer's or bank's servers, they are useless from a privacy standpoint: Public VPN's are anything but private. And they can be resource hogs. I'd uninstall it unless your employer or bank requires it then use it only when accessing those servers.
Also you have a number of items set to launch at boot. Reduce them to the absolute minimum so as to reduce the CPU demands
Thank you for your help. The apps take around 10 seconds to open and the start up takes around 30 seconds.
I have tried re-installing the whole io onto the fusion disk but that never fixed the problem. Also, I tried downloading the whole thing on the SSD but that also didn't work.
So you say I just have to buy more RAM?
Thank you for the comment. I don't know maybe I might be a bit impatient sometimes.
Is the 10 second App open time for all Apps or just Microsoft Apps?
Well, sometimes it varies between 5-15 seconds at startup and sometimes with having multiple files open (like 4-6). In general, I feel like something is wrong.
iMac has slow start up and takes too long to open applications
