I have a late 2012 Mac Mini with a 2.6GHz Core i7 chip and 16GB of RAM. 1TB hard drive (non-SSD) that is 25% full.

Lately I've been getting a lot of beachball time. It typically happens whenever I ask the computer to do a task. For example, if I want to open a document, I'll click on the File menu - and get the beachball for a few seconds before the menu appears. Or if hit Cmd-P to print and the beachball appears for a bit before the print menu appears.

The activity monitor shows memory used of 13.96GB out of 16GB and memory pressure is green. CPU usage is 76% idle.

Any suggestions for where to look to figure out why I'm getting the beachball all the time? Do I need to upgrade?

Sounds like it may be doing a lot of swapping, whether context switching between multiple applications or paging virtual memory in and out. Do you have a lot of applications running, especially big fat memory hog applications? A web browser with a lot of tabs open can suck up a lot of memory and a lot of CPU cycles for example.

A couple of operating system releases in the last few years have been very taxing on system resources. The SSD upgrade made a big difference for me, and is probably going to help you as well. Using the 'Dr. Cleaner Pro' app to free memory and clean junk files helps quite a bit. You've got enough processor power and memory that an upgrade of your Mac should't be necessary, other than replacing the non-SSD drive.

quote:

Originally posted by slosig:
Sounds like it may be doing a lot of swapping, whether context switching between multiple applications or paging virtual memory in and out. Do you have a lot of applications running, especially big fat memory hog applications? A web browser with a lot of tabs open can suck up a lot of memory and a lot of CPU cycles for example.

I do have a lot of applications running, including Chrome browser wth several windows open, including one with streaming video. BUt the activity meter doesn't show CPU usage or memory getting too high.

Do I need more RAM, better CPU, both? The mac mini is maxed out so I maybe need a new computer? If so, I may have to go back to windows...the Macs are crazy expensive to spec out with high end CPUs and max RAM.

Your computer is fine. You just need to upgrade the drive. Get an SSD.

You can buy a Samsung 500 GB SSD for about 200$ on Amazon.
Samsung 500GB

... as your CPU and memory aren't being taxed, that spinning disk is your next consideration.

Italia and DPeticca both mentioned SSD - follow that path.

The Samsung mentioned - good choice.

A lot cheaper than a new computer ... then again, a new Windows computer will give you a faster i5/i7 processor, maybe more memory ... and an SSD.

... it's one of those arguments, isn't it? $200 now on a replacement drive (SSD). Or $xxx - not $x,xxx - for something new.

Do some browsing and research - Best Buy, Fry's, Newegg, Dell on line ...

Or go get a Surface or a touch screen tablet. Who needs a keyboard? Well maybe the one app you use a couple of times ... then you might have to upgrade your WiFi/router and so on ... sorry about that.

I would monitor disk activity via the activity monitor to see if that is your bottleneck. If so, you might want to consider an SSD.

Doubt it's because you need a new HD, but it is a nice upgrade to SSD.

Assuming you have done a shut down and restart...
have you used the disk utility on it?

quote:

Originally posted by ChicagoSigMan:
I do have a lot of applications running, including Chrome browser wth several windows open, including one with streaming video. BUt the activity meter doesn't show CPU usage or memory getting too high.

Do I need more RAM, better CPU, both? The mac mini is maxed out so I maybe need a new computer? If so, I may have to go back to windows...the Macs are crazy expensive to spec out with high end CPUs and max RAM.

Guide to using Activity Monitor may be of help when trying to narrow down the culprit.

Are you running an anti-virus or similar program?

My iMac is 2008 running the latest OS. No beachball issues at all.

Some useful responses so far. Let me add mine.

First, Activity Monitor is the place to go to see what's hogging your resources. When it's open you can sort processes by CPU, RAM, Energy, Network utilization, etc. You'll likely see processes running that you may not have a clue about. Things like launchd, assistantd, identityservicesd, and the like (the "d" at the end indicates "daemon" processes - headless, faceless applications that usually start at boot time). If something is consuming a lot of resources, you can kill it. Most daemon processes will restart automatically.

Here's my helpful hint: If you don't leave your Mac running overnight, you may have clogged up your system logs. The Mac, with its Unix background, has jobs that run automatically to do "housekeeping." These jobs usually run in the 2:00am -ish time frame, and if you never let your Mac run them, things can slow down.

You can run these tasks manually, if you're okay using the command line. Simply open the terminal program and issue the command

sudo /etc/periodic/daily (you will be asked to provide your superuser password - that's usually yours)

You can also run

sudo /etc/periodic/weekly
sudo /etc/periodic/monthly

These processes clear out and archive your system logs and other cruft.

While you have your Terminal window open, why not run the following:

sudo diskutil verifyVolume / (this will do a disk check, much like Disk Utility)

I had same symptoms. Replaced with SSD. Much speedier. Owc has install video.

quote:

Originally posted by fpuhan:
Some useful responses so far. Let me add mine.

First, Activity Monitor is the place to go to see what's hogging your resources. When it's open you can sort processes by CPU, RAM, Energy, Network utilization, etc. You'll likely see processes running that you may not have a clue about. Things like launchd, assistantd, identityservicesd, and the like (the "d" at the end indicates "daemon" processes - headless, faceless applications that usually start at boot time). If something is consuming a lot of resources, you can kill it. Most daemon processes will restart automatically.

Here's my helpful hint: If you don't leave your Mac running overnight, you may have clogged up your system logs. The Mac, with its Unix background, has jobs that run automatically to do "housekeeping." These jobs usually run in the 2:00am -ish time frame, and if you never let your Mac run them, things can slow down.

You can run these tasks manually, if you're okay using the command line. Simply open the terminal program and issue the command

sudo /etc/periodic/daily (you will be asked to provide your superuser password - that's usually yours)

You can also run

sudo /etc/periodic/weekly
sudo /etc/periodic/monthly

These processes clear out and archive your system logs and other cruft.

While you have your Terminal window open, why not run the following:

sudo diskutil verifyVolume / (this will do a disk check, much like Disk Utility)

Do these jobs run if the computer is on, but asleep?

quote:

Originally posted by r0gue:

quote:

Originally posted by fpuhan:
Some useful responses so far. Let me add mine.

First, Activity Monitor is the place to go to see what's hogging your resources. When it's open you can sort processes by CPU, RAM, Energy, Network utilization, etc. You'll likely see processes running that you may not have a clue about. Things like launchd, assistantd, identityservicesd, and the like (the "d" at the end indicates "daemon" processes - headless, faceless applications that usually start at boot time). If something is consuming a lot of resources, you can kill it. Most daemon processes will restart automatically.

Here's my helpful hint: If you don't leave your Mac running overnight, you may have clogged up your system logs. The Mac, with its Unix background, has jobs that run automatically to do "housekeeping." These jobs usually run in the 2:00am -ish time frame, and if you never let your Mac run them, things can slow down.

You can run these tasks manually, if you're okay using the command line. Simply open the terminal program and issue the command

sudo /etc/periodic/daily (you will be asked to provide your superuser password - that's usually yours)

You can also run

sudo /etc/periodic/weekly
sudo /etc/periodic/monthly

These processes clear out and archive your system logs and other cruft.

While you have your Terminal window open, why not run the following:

sudo diskutil verifyVolume / (this will do a disk check, much like Disk Utility)

Do these jobs run if the computer is on, but asleep?

No. When the computer sleeps it is in low power mode. Everything "hibernates" and wakes up when the computer is awakened. For the automatic scripts to run, the computer must be actually running. On my Macs, I set the computer to never sleep, the display to sleep after twenty minutes, and the hard disk to sleep whenever possible. I also have "Power Nap" enabled. These are all set in the "Energy Saver" portion of the Preferences pane.

With only 25% of your drive storage in use, this sounds like it could be related to the "Spotlight" beachball slowdown. (Related to external drives, primarily).

Apple OSX does a lot of things well, but when it comes to external drives, (and Bootcamp/windows partitions) you can occasionally see a slowdown/beachball when doing things as you describe.

If this is the case, here's the fix-

Stop Spotlight Search Stalls & Beachballs on Macs with External Drives-

Open System Preferences from the Apple  menu.

Choose “Spotlight” and go to the “Privacy” tab – anything placed here will be excluded from Spotlight indexing and search, so we’re going to put the external drive(s) that are spinning up and slowing things down here.

Go to the Finder and drag and drop the external hard drive root icons into the Privacy tab of Spotlight.

Exit out of System Preferences and summon Spotlight as usual, there should be no more beach balling as the external drives are no longer accessed by the search function. (Which is a downside of doing this but worth a try).

One other possibility is having energy settings selected to "Put hard disks to sleep when possible". Try de-selecting this (Under energy saver). I see this happen to my wife frequently as she will open a document on an external drive and work on it for lengthy periods. When she goes to "print" the drive has sometimes gone to sleep and you'll get a similar beachball while it wakes the drive.

I do a good bit of Photoshop and video editing and I always turn off the sleep options (hard disk, display, computer sleep) when doing heavy work-

Good luck!

Please forgive the quick thread-drift,

I'm still pretty new with the Mac, (Mac-Air). Is there a quick way to show the desktop without having to minimize everything on the screen first?

quote:

Originally posted by Ronin1069:
Please forgive the quick thread-drift,

I'm still pretty new with the Mac, (Mac-Air). Is there a quick way to show the desktop without having to minimize everything on the screen first?

On older versions of OS X, it's one of the Exposé keys. Starting with OS X 10.7, Exposé has been replaced by Mission Control.

The default to instantly show desktop is F11. On a MacBook you will have to press fnF11, as the keys are used for controlling volume by default. (FN key is on the lower left side of your MB Air).

If that's not the right one, look in your System Preferences to see which one it is.

quote:

Originally posted by r0gue:

quote:

Originally posted by fpuhan:
Some useful responses so far. Let me add mine.

First, Activity Monitor is the place to go to see what's hogging your resources. When it's open you can sort processes by CPU, RAM, Energy, Network utilization, etc. You'll likely see processes running that you may not have a clue about. Things like launchd, assistantd, identityservicesd, and the like (the "d" at the end indicates "daemon" processes - headless, faceless applications that usually start at boot time). If something is consuming a lot of resources, you can kill it. Most daemon processes will restart automatically.

Here's my helpful hint: If you don't leave your Mac running overnight, you may have clogged up your system logs. The Mac, with its Unix background, has jobs that run automatically to do "housekeeping." These jobs usually run in the 2:00am -ish time frame, and if you never let your Mac run them, things can slow down.

You can run these tasks manually, if you're okay using the command line. Simply open the terminal program and issue the command

sudo /etc/periodic/daily (you will be asked to provide your superuser password - that's usually yours)

You can also run

sudo /etc/periodic/weekly
sudo /etc/periodic/monthly

These processes clear out and archive your system logs and other cruft.

While you have your Terminal window open, why not run the following:

sudo diskutil verifyVolume / (this will do a disk check, much like Disk Utility)

Do these jobs run if the computer is on, but asleep?

With respect to fphuan, while mostly accurate, his post contains several errors of fact, and misrepresents the current strategy for running periodic tasks in macOS.

First, to answer your direct question: no, these jobs do not run when the computer is sleeping.

The following refers to macOS 10.12 "Sierra." OS X versions back to Lion are similar, but not exactly the same. Snow Leopard and previous are very different.

In fact, the "jobs" listed by fpuhan, are actually folders that contain maintenance shell scripts. The folders cannot be manually "run" from the command line, but the individual scripts within them can. You can Finder -> Go -> Go to Folder... -> /etc/periodic/daily to view the daily scripts, most of then are descriptively-named. Please do not try to run them from the Finder.

The traditional BSD periodic and cron subsystems have been merged into a facility called "launchd" (Launch Daemon), with a programmatic interface through a program called launchctl.

The periodic scripts are run via the system program /usr/libexec/periodic-wrapper under the control of launchd. The system documentation explicitly warns against running this "by hand."

Launchd jobs are controlled by XML plist files in /System/Library/LaunchDaemons, specifically /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.periodic-daily.plist for the "daily" jobs. Here is what happens:

- launchd is started at boot time
- launchd reads /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.periodic-daily.plist and starts /usr/libexec/periodic-wrapper daily
- periodic-wrapper reads /etc/defaults/periodic.conf, waits until the right time, then runs the scripts in /etc/periodic/daily sending a typescript of the session to /var/log/daily.out

(this sequence as described is extremely simplified, and omits several technicalities and possibilities).

An easy way to check and see if these jobs have been run is to check for the existence of, and time stamps on their respective logs, /var/log/daily.out, [code]/var/log/weekly.out[/i], and /var/log/monthly.out. The contents of these logs may be of interest as well.

There is lots of documentation on the macOS Launch facility in man pages, and from Apple for those who want to dig into this in more detail.

quote:

Originally posted by Rinehart:

quote:

Originally posted by Ronin1069:
Please forgive the quick thread-drift,

I'm still pretty new with the Mac, (Mac-Air). Is there a quick way to show the desktop without having to minimize everything on the screen first?

On older versions of OS X, it's one of the Exposé keys. Starting with OS X 10.7, Exposé has been replaced by Mission Control.

The default to instantly show desktop is F11. On a MacBook you will have to press fnF11, as the keys are used for controlling volume by default. (FN key is on the lower left side of your MB Air).

If that's not the right one, look in your System Preferences to see which one it is.

FN + F11 = THANK YOU!!!

My machine of the same vintage was turning into a turd, doing much the same thing. I maxed out the ram and that helped a lot.