First checks for bottle necks

Take a look at these common problem areas before you go any further

One of the most common causes of a slow Mac is an app or process misbehaving, and consuming more than its fair share of resources, like memory, processor cycles, or network bandwidth. The easiest way to check for this is to use Activity Monitor.

Open it from /Applications/ Utilities, click its CPU tab, then click the %CPU column so that the arrow is pointing downwards. That will display processes in the order of how many CPU cycles they’re using, with the most active at the top. Scan the list and look for low–hanging fruit, like apps you’re not using that are consuming tens of per cent of the CPU, or browser tabs you don’t need doing the same.

To stop this, either quit the apps or close the browser tabs, or use the Quit Process button in Activity Monitor’s toolbar. Be wary of quitting processes if you don’t know what they do. If you find one is hogging cycles, search for it on Google to find out what it does.

MEMORY PRESSURE

You can apply this technique in the Memory tab. In this case there’s some additional data you can inspect: the Memory Pressure chart at the bottom of the window. This shows how much memory is in use, how much data is being compressed to make more room in memory, and how much has been swapped out to your startup disk.

If the chart is green, there’s no problem. If it’s yellow, data is being compressed. If it’s red, your Mac is using your startup disk to offload contents and free up memory. That’s only a real problem if your startup disk is low on free space — say, less than 20GB. However, using your startup disk to cache data will slow down your Mac, especially if it’s a hard disk rather than an SSD. Scan the list of processes to identify the greatest memory users and quit them if you aren’t using them. You can find out more about Activity Monitor at bit.ly/mfactmon.

Included as part of macOS, Activity Monitor presents a list of every app (or ‘process’ operating within an app or macOS itself). You can easily spot which ones are hogging your Mac’s resources.

Switch to the Memory tab in Activity Monitor, and you can see in broad terms how well your Mac is handling the demands on its memory.

Look under the Disk tab and you can track all the read and write actions taking place on your hard disk — useful for spotting unusual activity.