While I’ve always been in the habit of rebooting Windows machines regularly I’ve never needed to do it for my Macs. However, that seems to have changed –

After some days (weeks?) it gets very sluggish and web browsing becomes a complete pain – rendering a webpage goes from taking a couple of seconds to over 10. I’m usually using Chrome/sometimes Safari. Closing and restarting the web browser isn’t enough – seemingly need to reboot.

I have a few things always running in the background (Dropbox, Google Drive, iTunes, Garmin)

Anyone else getting the same? Any suggestions?

Install Windows?

(Sorry, I’m a bad man, I couldn’t resist.)

IME (with wife’s MBP) is that dropbox / google drive apps are a drag on the machine. I rarely reboot my Mac Mini as I generally sleep the machine. No such sluggishness problems. Note I do tend to open / close (ie shut down) Safari from time to time. I do not use a google drive app but access it via Safari when I need it.

IME (with wife’s MBP) is that dropbox / google drive apps are a drag on the machine.

I wonder if an issue with latest versions – I’ve had them running for years but this has only become an issue in last few months.

Had very similar with an iMac – has only happened since we updated to the latest OSX – everything was smooth before!!!!!

Certain websites are a huge drag. One website in particular will cripple my MBP if it’s it open in a firefox tab. I can barely view it without first installing ad blocking software.

A further thought do you have power saving switched on in Safari ? I wonder if there is lots of stuff running in the background on other tabs ?

Have you had a look in the Utilities to see what is happening with memory/CPU etc when you are experiencing the issues? Web browsing is a significant drain on a machines memory, especially with multiple tabs open.

If you are using Chrome it also has it’s own task monitor system that will help you figure out what is happening, simply click the three dots top right of the browser > More Tools > Task manager.

Have you ran an AV/Malware scan recently to check that is clear and also checked for updates?

You could try a pRAM or SMC reset.

Failing that, take a look at dumping your browser preferences. Also, Chrome (if that’s what you are using) has a habit of hogging RAM whilst also keeping previous versions in archive within the app package (IIRC) where you’ll end up with GB’s worth or old Chrome versions, and can slow things down a bit.

I always blame Flash. I never let Flash content load without user interaction.

I’ve found my own 2015 MBP loads some websites sluggishly when on fast cable or a leased line connection. The same goes for a Lenovo Carbon X1 using Chrome. For my Mac I added in the Safari extensions ghostery and adguard. Loading is slick now.

It is worth opening up activity monitor to see the CPU load. Chrome can be demanding and sometimes seems to end up with almost runaway processes. Also, do you have sufficient free disk space for caching?

Rebooting seems extreme.

After yesterday’s reboot it’s still running fine. I’d had a good look at Activity Monitor and couldn’t see anything in there. Didn’t *appear* to be out of memory (machine has 8GB)

I’ll keep an eye on Chrome’s own task monitor. I had a dodgy extension installed a few weeks back that was giving me ad malware on Google searches but that was uninstalled (all I have now is Awesome Screenshot and a Soundcloud Music downloader which both seem ok).