Late 2015 iMac spinning colour ball & slow web pages

[Japeth180]

I need some help with my iMac it has recently started running slow, and I seem to get the spinning colour ball a lot. It seems to start with web pages. Chrome and Safari just randomly stop working - either they will stop loading webpages altogether or take ages to load. Once this happens, the whole computer then seems to jam up. The internet connection works as I've tested it on several other devices. I've run disk utility nothing is wrong with the hard drive, and then tried other resets with restarting the computer and holding down the keys. Nothing seems to work. I wondered whether I might not have enough memory to run the latest macOS Monterey but I checked the minimum requirements and it says 4gb. Any thoughts or help would be appreciated!

I am running an iMac with the following spec:

• Late 2015 27-inch
• 16GB memory
• 1TB HD - which 220GB is bootcamp 36GB avaliable. Rest is for macOS with 227GB avaliable. I rarely boot windows anymore so should remove the partition but haven't got around to it!
• macOS Monterey 12.5.1

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello and welcome.

• Have you cleared the browser caches recently?
• Do you restart on a regular basis?
• Do you have any third-party utilities like MacKeeper/CleanMyMac or antivirus installed and running?
• Is it mainly the browsers that are slow, or every application?

C

 

[Gord Webster]

I was having similar issues (on a similar vintage iMac) where I was constantly getting the Beach Ball, not just web browsers, but almost any program would cause the Beach Ball. Reading an Apple Forum, they mentioned by excluding Bootcamp from Spotlight would remedy the issue. That was the solution for my issue.
Go to: Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy and add the Bootcamp partition to "Prevent Spotlight from searching these locations:". I can't recall if I had to reboot after making that selection. But, it worked for me, and I've had only a few Beach Balls since (usually at program start-ups, and only for a second or two).
Hope that helps!

 

[Nurgle2024]

re your comment "it started with the web Pages"
the programs you mention create logs and occasionaly keep some page icons in a memory file .. best practice is to clear the history every few months.. (The files they keep mainly just the web page address, which take up very little space, but many thousands of these add up)

there are also other factors etc, and this in just one small step. and Cory is ricgh about Caches, they keep a lot more disk space data.

Regards, Sandy