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Problem description: My six-year-old Mac mini has become unusably slow over the last several months. Increasingly often (sometimes more than once a day now), one program will beachball, and within minutes every program running will do the same, one after another, forcing me to either wait 20-30 minutes until it starts responding again and allows me to force quit everything & restart, or simply hold the reset button. There seems to be no consistency as to which applications (or how many) are running when this happens. This could be a fluke but also could be relevant: After one recent freeze/restart, my hard drive went from showing 130 GB free to showing 85 GB free. I attempted to run Disk Utility but it froze again before I was successful. After the second restart, it went back to showing 130 GB free. I did scan with Disk Utility then and it found no problems at all. I was hoping some rogue process might have left traces behind, but no such luck. Attempted fixes: - Moved/deleted files to have over 100 GB free on my built-in 1 TB conventional hard drive. This seemed to help a little but did not eliminate it. - Scanned said drive with Disk Utility. No errors found. - Checked for anything sketchy in Login Items, Security & Privacy, etc. - Left Activity Monitor on to check resource utilization. It never seems to go above 20-30% processor usage even when everything starts beachballing. Same with memory usage. I can't find any suspicious processes using more-than-expected resources. - Ran all the maintenance/rebuilding tasks in OnyX. - Disconnected everything but the mouse, keyboard and monitor in an attempt to see if some external device was at fault. Nope, still happens. - Used a temperature/fan monitor to check if the hardware was running hot or fans were failing to kick in. The only time it ever approached high temperatures was when I did "yes > /dev/null" to test it, and the fans accelerated properly. Plus, no part of the machine feels physically hot even when the freezes happen. BUT -- leaving the computer off for several hours seems to make it go away for a day or so. Again, "seems" is the operative word here; I haven't done any strictly scientific testing on this. - Ran Apple Diagnostics. No problems. - Reset NVRAM and SMC. After a few months of this I finally did a wipe & reinstall from the recovery partition. I didn't even use Migration Assistant to bring over my old user folder or applications. It was great for about two weeks and then it gradually started to freeze again (increasingly often). Recent changes: Nothing that would coincide with when this started. Programs I run frequently: Safari, Messages, Notes, VLC, Transmission, Wine -- Operating system: Mac OS Mojave 10.14.6 (can't upgrade to Catalina because I use Wine for a bunch of stuff) System specs: Mac mini (Late 2014) - 2.6 GHz Intel Core i5, 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3, Intel Iris 1536 MB, 1 TB conventional hard drive Location: US I have Googled and read the FAQ: Yes
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Sep 18, 2020 06:20
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| # ? Apr 24, 2024 23:14 |
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It's possible the HDD has issues that disk utility is not seeing. The standard recommendation these days is to upgrade to an SSD.
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Sep 19, 2020 23:42
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outside of an SSD upgrade, I would look at also replacing the thermal grease on the CPU, it could be getting slow because it is getting hot and throttling. Have you checked what the temps are after running it for a while?
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Oct 10, 2020 01:45
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Did you run the extended apple diagnosics test?
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Oct 14, 2020 12:48
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