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macOS Sierra Slow? Heres Why & How to Speed Sierra Up
Oct 4, 2016 - 74 Comments
Speed up slow macOS Sierra
Some Mac users who have updated to macOS Sierra have felt their computer is running
slower than it should be. If you have noticed a performance hit after upgrading to
macOS Sierra, there is likely a good reason for it, and its even more likely to
have a simple solution.
Read on to learn why macOS Sierra may be running slow (some MacBook users notice
their Mac is hot and fans are blasting away too), and what you can do about it.
5 Ways to Speed Up MacOS Sierra

OK so lets assume your Mac with macOS Sierra is running slow. Why? How? And more
importantly, what can you do it about it to speed up your computer again? Lets
review five main reasons and what to do so speed things up in Sierra again, and
also discuss some other reasons a Mac might be slow.
1: Slow Mac After Sierra Update? Fans Blazing? WAIT!

Immediately after updating to macOS Sierra, the Mac must re-index the drive for use
with Spotlight and Siri, the built-in search functions in Mac OS. This can take
quite a while to complete, particularly if you have a large hard drive with a ton
of files. It is important to just let this process complete itself, interrupting
Spotlight indexing will cause Spotlight to not work properly, and it will just
attempt to re-index again anyway.
Spotlight running in background of Sierra needs to complete
Another possible cause of a perceived slowdown after updating to macOS Sierra is

the new Photos app, which indexes and scans all photos for identifiable features
and faces. This can take quite a while as well, particularly if you have a very
large Photos app library. This is another process that you need to let complete in
order for Photos to work properly.
The solution? Wait it out. I know, waiting isnt always satisfying, but its easy
and it works! For the vast majority of users, the reason their Mac feels slow after
updating to macOS Sierra is because of the reindexing features that are going on in
the background. These tasks can consume a notable amount of CPU cycles as they
complete, leading to blazing fans, slow performance, and Mac that feels like its
running hot, but once the background tasks are finished the Mac will be speedy
again. (this can also be the case with iOS 10 sluggishness, by the way).
Clock icon
Let the Mac sit turned on overnight while its not in use, and all indexing
processes should be complete by morning with performance returned to normal.
2: Mind Your Messages

Do you use the Mac Messages app? If so, pay attention if you are receiving tons of
animated GIFs and stickers, which can arrive in abundance from an iOS 10 iPhone
user who is having fun with the new Messages stickers, gifs, effects, and other
chaos that can be sent from iOS 10 Messages app.
Messages gifs can slow down Messages app on Mac
Receiving animated GIFs in particular can cause a temporary slowdown on the Mac and
in the Messages app in particular, if those message windows are open and actively
on display and animating as intended.
Mac Messages slows down with animated gifs displayed
The good news is that the animated gifs will stop playing and pause automatically
once they are off screen in the Messages app, so just send a few messages in
response, or clear the chat log, and Messages app will be smooth again and whatever
sluggish behavior will remedy itself.
While gifs, effects, and stickers are undoubtedly fun (even though you cant send
the message effects back from a Mac for now anyway), just have a little awareness
about leaving these message windows open on the Mac.
And by the way, for the technically inclined people, you can test this out
immediately by opening a new message window and sending or receiving a few animated
gifs and leaving that chat window open in Activity Monitor you will see Messages
spike in CPU activity.
3: Use Reduce Transparency & Reduce Motion

Eye candy effects like transparent windows and overlays sure look nice, but they
can also lead to performance reduction as each new window requires more system
resources to draw and maintain. Additionally, the Mac has many motion type effects
within Mission Control and elsewhere that zip and zoom around.
Fortunately macOS Sierra allows you to turn this eye candy off, which can result in
a notable performance increase, particularly for power users who have a lot of apps
or windows open concurrently.
Open the Apple menu and go to System Preferences, then choose Accessibility
Go to Display settings
Check the box for Reduce motion and Reduce transparency
Exit out of System Preferences
Speed up slow macOS Sierra with Reduce Motion and Transparency
This will have an immediate effect on the appearance of Mac windows, titlebars,
sidebars, and other UI elements by using reduced transparency, and you wont see as
many animations throughout Mac OS either with Reduce Motion turned on as well,
which is a new option in Sierra. The result can be a speedier Mac.
4: Clean Off a Cluttered Desktop

Many Mac users store tons of files on their desktops, resulting in a very cluttered
desktop full of files and folders and other stuff.
Dont do this. It can slow down performance.
Dont have a cluttered desktop
The easiest solution to this is to drag and drop everything from the desktop into a
separate folder on the desktop, call it Clutter or Desktop stuff or whatever
you want, and then open and use that folder when you need to access your desktop
stuff. Another option is to hide all desktop icons completely using a defaults
command, but that is best for advanced users since it involves the Terminal and
disabling the Desktop feature.
5: Check Activity Monitor for Background Tasks & Oddities
If a Mac feels sluggish, the simplest way to quickly see if something is actively
consuming resources on a Mac is with Activity Monitor.
You can open Activity Monitor from /Applications/Utilities/ then go to the CPU
tab and sort by % CPU, the topmost items will show you what, if anything, is
using high amounts of CPU (shown as a percentage of CPU resources).
In this screenshot example, the mds and mds_stores processes are running and
using a notably high level of CPU these processes, along with mdworker are part
of the aforementioned Spotlight indexing that will complete itself. Until these are
finished running, the Mac may feel a bit slower than usual.
Other than normal system background tasks and apps, its possible youll find an
errant process or unusual task running and taking up a lot of CPU. If this is the
case, quit out of the application as usual, or if its a background task, you may
need to update the parent application to be compatible with Sierra.
Advanced users can force quit the app, or even uninstall and remove the app if it
wont behave at all. Absolutely do not start force quitting random tasks and
processes, the Mac has many system tasks that run in the background and if forcibly
quit it will certainly mess something up and cause bigger problems.
Consider Alternate Causes of Slowdowns

If youve tried all of the above and youre still experiencing what you consider to
be unusual slowdowns or sluggish behavior with macOS Sierra, its always possible
there is something else going on. Maybe its an incompatibility with a specific
app, maybe its Time Machine stalling out and grinding resources while it prepares
for eternity, or maybe youre experiencing a rare but truly problematic macOS
Sierra experience full of kernel errors and other headaches.
You can engage in troubleshooting various Sierra difficulties, or you can always
clean install Sierra or even downgrade macOS Sierra and revert back to the prior
Mac OS X version if you declare its all too much of a hassle.
Another aspect worth noting is that some users have reported slower perceived
internet speeds with Sierra, often with a less reliable wireless connection. If
that describes your situation, you might be able to fix a macOS Sierra wi-fi issue
with these instructions.
Did you notice a change in performance after updating to macOS Sierra? Did any slow
behavior resolve by waiting or trying the tips above? Is your Mac faster or slower
with Sierra? Let us know your experiences in the comments.
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Related articles:
MacOS Sierra 10.12.2 Beta 2 Released
macOS Sierra 10.12.1 beta 2 Released
How to Hide MacOS Sierra Update Banner from the Mac App Store
Second macOS Sierra GM Seed Available for Testers
Posted by: Paul Horowitz in Mac OS X, Tips & Tricks, Troubleshooting
74 Comments
Comments RSS Feed
Matthew says:
October 4, 2016 at 1:19 pm
Spotlight, Photos, iCloud Photos, all took about 6 hours to complete on my Mac
after Sierra installed. Then it was good to go after that. I installed in the
evening and opened Photos and noticed it was scanning stuff so I let it sit until
it finished.
Sierra performance wise runs about the same as El Capitan. Overall I find Sierra to
be more buggy and I get weird errors and have to reboot more often which is
annoying, hope an update fixes that part. Otherwise I like Sierra.
Reply
Miguel says:
November 20, 2016 at 11:46 pm
What Mac are you using? I upgraded to Sierra on my 2011 Macbook Pro 13 inch and it
was very slow even as I tried reducing all the effects and letting everything
index. Downgraded to El Capitan and its speedy. Any suggestions would be welcome
Reply
analog5 says:
June 20, 2017 at 4:55 am
I own a 2016 MacBook Pro ntb and safari loads basic sites and the homepage really
slowly. Some sites it loads fast. But Firefox is a lot faster. Its problem however
is that it crashes and also freezes up the entire system at times.
Reply
OJ says:
I found Safari running really slow with Mac Sierra, so I removed all extensions and
cleared the cache and it was fine after that.
Also Mac OS Sierra version 10 of Safari cant handle as many tabs, so dont open
too many tabs.
Reply
CFM says:
I find the same thing with Sierra. Safari is quite slow. Ive cleaned the caches,
but can you help me clean the extensions? I dont know how to do that.
Reply
Sven says:
I really like your site and appreciate your advices. But honestly, saying Do not
use your desktop as a desktop is something i cant agree with. Putting stuff on
the desktop is intuitive and shouldnt bother our expensive machines, else something
is wrong.
Reply
Paul says:
Sven, using the desktop as a desktop is fine, and having a reasonable number of
files on the desktop wont matter, but if you have hundreds of files kept cluttered
on the desktop it can become noticeable and impact performance. This is because
each desktop file and icon is drawn as an element with a live preview on the
screen, taking up resources to display. The advice is really for people who have
tons and tons of stuff on their desktops.
Reply
tuqqer says:
Its relative. You can use your desktop as a desktop with a dozen files and 6
folders and you wont see a slow down. If using your desktop means 140 files and 32
folders, youll see a slowdown.
I screenshare with colleagues Macs, and quite a few use the 140 file desktop
method. They all experience slowdowns at weird times.
But at that point, I contend that thats not using a Desktop as a Desktop. Its bad
file management.
Reply
JA says:
Increase contrast looks so MacOS 6!
Reply
Steve Dietrich says:
If I understand what the article is saying is that Apple is running facial
recognition on my photos is there a way to kill this..
Reply
Alan says:
Facial recognition happens in software on the computer locally, Apple is not
running it remotely. It is done securely on the local machine. You can not
currently disable facial recognition in Photos app, the only way to prevent that is
by not using Photos app.
Reply
Michael Vallance says:
Sierra very slow on my 2012 iMac 27; even after 5 days. Quite disappointed really.
However, it may be due to Microsoft Office as that crashes all the time so am
awaiting a M$oft update before I revert to Yosemite.
Reply
RAN says:
December 1, 2016 at 1:07 pm
Sierra was running very slow on my 13 MacBook Pro (mid-2012) and Ive noticed
issues with Microsoft Office as well, in particular with Word. Turning off Siri
seems to have helped with computer speed. If you figure out what the issue is with
Office though let me know!
Reply
Greg Csullog says:
January 9, 2017 at 2:20 pm
Since installing Sierra 10.2.2, my 2012 Mac Mini is essentially unusable. After
only a few minutes use after booting up, I see the colour wheel after just about
every character typed or mouse click. Sometimes it takes 4-5 minutes between clicks
for an app to respond. Right now I am on my 2008 iMac with El Capitan 10.11.6.
I reinstalled Sierra twice same problem with delays and the colour wheel. My next
move is to blow away my main drive (I have dual 1 TB drives) and reinstall Sierra.
If the problem persists after that then I have NO idea what to do next.
As an FYI, both my drives are encrypted and my firmware is password protected.
Reply
J Carr says:
Ive notice a general increase in speed. Things are generally snappier. No
problems so far. And, Im running it on an unsupported MacPro. (Shame on Apple
for arbitrarily cutting out so many capable machines. Im going to but a new iMac
anyway if they EVER get around to updating the hardware)
The only slowdown I notice is when the online backup program is running but this
is no different from elCap. I just pause it if it is annoying.
Reply
John Lang says:
Did you use the Sierra patch tool or go with the firmware patch? I went the
firmware route and its working very well.
Reply
Wharf Xanadu says:
Safari has some kind of issue and it is slow.
Reply
Anne says:
If I never use Siri or Spotlight it sounds like not upgrading my 2012 Mac Mini is a
good idea.
Im still debating about my iPad.
Reply
Jason says:
October 5, 2016 at 8:00 am
Im running it on a 2011 MacBook Pro without issue. Just let it bake overnight and
life will be fine.
Disable sleep after X minutes will help keep it awake over night while all the
indexing apps finish their work.
Reply
J-L says:
On the whole Sierra performs well after a problem free installation. Disk free
space went from 75 to 125 Gb. I had an issue where fans were blazing while using
Safari. After troubleshooting this turned out to be Trusteer Rapport. Switched it
off and all good.
https://discussions.apple.com/search.jspa?q=trusteer+rapport&after=month
Reply
J R Rockwell says:
There are many app and accessory incompatibilities with Sierra, especially for such
a minor OS update. At this point unless you somehow desperately need Siri on the
Mac I would not recommend anyone update until the issues have been sorted out and
apps have been updated to work together. 10.12.1 is going to be out soon but third
party app makers need to work on their part too.
Reply
Tarquin Shrapnel-Carruthers says:
Both late-2013 iMac and 2012 MBA feel sluggish. Photos facial recognition is a
disaster: the iMac, where my library is stored, is stuck on 26,013 of 48 thousand.
Reply
jolehp says:
I just found out that now we have reduce motion like on iOS.. Im suprised :D
Reply
Bernard says:
Yet another nail in the coffin of It just works.
Reply
ab65 says:
Since Ive disabled Spotlight completely from system.
(use find any file instead)
Old MBP 8.2 (16GB memory/ SSD) does his job to my contentedness.
No more mds worker nagging cpu. Not to mention Spotlight doesnt find anything in
the first place.
Reply
maccy mcmacface says:
Since I installed Sierra, my GPU failed. Mid 2011 iMac. Waiting to hear if Apple
think that European trade law applies. Coincidence? Probably but who knows?
One thing Im sure of is Ill never buy another mac cramming all those heat
generating parts into a tiny space so that they are bound to get too hot and then
making it so difficult that only an expert can fix them is not how I think good
design works. If Apple wont fix it, then its a Windows PC in a nice big open box
for me!
Reply
Warren O says:
After the upgrade, my 2013 rMBP wasnt running slow, but the fans were running full
tilt all the time. iStat showed low temps for the CPU/GPU, so it seemed like it was
running the fans unnecessarily.
I did an SMC reset, and the fans went back to normal. Other than this minor hiccup,
Sierra has been a painless and enjoyable upgrade.
Reply
RM says:
Havent upgraded yet, curious if mdworker is still a ravenous whore.
Reply
Aviral Bansal says:
After update to Sierra, started having strange problem. In mission control view I
am able to move spaces around but not apps running in full screen mode. They just
drop down and disappear from the spaces tray and and then turn up at the beginning
of the end of the test. Called Apple support and they made me reset the PROM. Has
been working fine since.
Reply
Gonuchi says:
Was it slow? That sounds like a troubleshooting issue. There is a ridiculously long
post and comment section on Sierra troubleshooting here
http://osxdaily.com/2016/09/24/troubleshooting-macos-sierra-problems/
Did Apple take your call despite not having warranty? Do they support Sierra on the
phone?
Reply
Charles says:
I believe the facial recognition agent running in Sierra is called
photoanalysisid because when the Mac is running hot and fans are loud as can be
that is often what you find taking up 100% of CPU or more, slowing down the entire
Mac. The bigger the photo library the longer photoanalysisid runs and the more it
slows down the Mac until it is finished.
I suspect if you really wanted to you could locate the photoanalysisid binary and
prevent it from running entirely and that may block the photo face scanning too,
but it could break Photos app. I have not tested it yet.
Anyway, if your Mac is hot, slow and fans loud check for photoanalysisid it needs
to run for like 10 hours to finish. Crazy.
Reply
Rachel says:
Im just noticing a few bugs on Apple Mail. It takes forever to send a messages,
and it deleted all of my signatures.
Reply
Rogier says:
1. VLC player stopped working
2. iTunesthe disaster keeps getting worse and worse. REALLY, COME ON APPLE, WTF
(every os update makes this program turn worse; I remember the last one when it
started creating many duplicates in the artists section) I have my library on an
external Toshiba Disc, which suddenly went from read & write to read only.
Also, iTunes suddenly cannot locate 1000s of files. Then: it keeps switching to the
standard iTunes Library on the Mac HD itself. iTunes also crashes/doesnt
respond. When will you start debugging this program? Yes, Im frustrated with this.
The last few updates really didnt make anything better and causes a lot of work to
fix stuff again.
Reply
Steve says:
Rogier, I had the same problem with my Toshiba drive. I had to install Tuxera
Software to be able to read and write on the NTFS format drive. Hope this helps.
Reply
ben says:
I had most of these issues and more, constantly maxing out of fan, processor, apps
running slow etc etc until i found this
https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/49163 and unplugged my external screen!
now it runs beautifully! insane but there we are
Reply
Ken says:
It says photoanalysisd 102.9% CPU. It takes several to open any folder. It has been
doing that process for 6:20:00
Reply
Paul says:
You probably have a lot of photos stored in the Photos app, it can take many hours
to finish analyzing photos for facial and feature recognition. Let it run
overnight, it should be done by morning unless you have an enormous photo library.
Reply
pinkhousegirl says:
I have upgraded to Sierra and it took about an hour to restore photo library. But I
still cant upload any photos which is very annoying as I need to do this for work.
Does anyone have any suggestions. Photo library has about 50k photos. Should I just
clock on upload and leave it (I just get a spinning wheel).
grateful for any help, thanks
Reply
Ken says:
several seconds
Reply
Gerald says:
Hi
This upgrade is catastrophic for me.It took a whole day to get back running as
before on an old MacBook, but it is even worse on a more recent iMac.
Nothing wrong shows in the activity monitor but every single application takes for
ever: uploading 3 pictures to my website dashboard has taken 1h and 13 minutes !!!
Firefox crashes 2 to 3 times an hour and even Safari freezes for extended periods.
What a mess this system makes.
Reply
Myla says:
#3 worked like a charm, thanks!
Reply
Meri says:
October 12, 2016 at 12:00 pm
Drag and drop is SO slow. I cant move files aroundtakes minutes per file.
Windowserver was taking up most of my CPUdown to 16% today so maybe the index is
finishing. Is my OS Sierra conflicting with MS office 2011is that why everything
is SO slow? Ready to downgrade OS systems unless this changes by tomorrow.
Reply
Iain says:
October 12, 2016 at 11:29 pm
My fans run constantly when I open Safari, Activity Monitor show no other
applications are hogging CPU % (e.g. uploading to iCloud, reindexing, photo facial
recognition), just safari. Any ideas why?
Reply
Carl Fontbath says:
October 13, 2016 at 10:05 am
Show all tasks for all users in Activity Monitor to get an accurate representation
of activity, kernel_task and WindowServer are often doing something busy, swapping
or drawing transparency, etc.
For Safari: Its probably Safari media, maybe a video. Dont use Flash or Java with
Safari, both will make it run poorly. Beyond that it could be an extension or plug-
in, all of which perform poorly in my experience. Remove any extensions from
Safari, clear cache, dont leave tabs open if they wont be used, etc. Using Chrome
can be a good test too.
Reply
Daniella says:
Hi there, I just updated my MacBook Pro to Sierra and I cant work anymore with my
computer !! It ist extremely slow it takes about 5 min just to open a window
what should I do Im pretty scared that it the mac will stay this way
Reply
Scott Porter says:
Best idea is not to use Safari, to be honest. Chrome is a much more capable
browser, and will not stress the CPU/batteries as much. If youre stuck in the
Apple bubble, you may not be aware of other software, but its out there if you
look!
Reply
Rob says:
Ive been running Sierra for a couple weeks now. It runs pretty much like El
Capitan. Except. Photos Faces (or People now) is very very slow. Im not sure if it
is running the new algorithm each time I open a face or if its experiencing a
problem, or if its just buggy. Anyway, thats my take on it and thats my
experience at this time.
Reply
Chloe says:
I found this tip about the secd helped:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7684723?start=0&tstart=0
Reply
kathy says:
October 25, 2016 at 10:39 am
Microsoft Outlook 2017 for Mac is ridiculously slow. Almost 5 minutes to open, and
often closes itselfand cant hit on button in dock to reopen window, even thought
its open.
Reply
lassi says:
October 27, 2016 at 12:57 am
This could be pretty much a copy-paste from any other osx update and I strongly
suspect so.
Actualy fixes would be appreciated to situations where disk reads are slow as f-
but disk bench gets 90mbyte/s easily yet copying files takes minutes when it
should take mere seconds. and apps take forever to load and they are not hogging
the cpu either, just waiting the os to switch some flag or another.
Reply
Robin says:
November 2, 2016 at 6:43 am
Maybe you could solve this not easier, but easier ;-)
Create a new user account and copy all the very needed (app) files such as
preferences to the new user.
I experienced a very fast setting.
Reply
Roxanne says:
UGH. I installed Sierra yesterday, and it destroyed an entire day of productivity
while it installed. I left it overnight to process, came back today expecting
better performance. Instead, its slower. Powerpoint wont run and constantly
freezes when I do get it running. Even opening Finder takes forever. HATE IT. Have
disabled Siri (didnt want it in the first place) but that doesnt seem to help.
This seems like the worst upgrade ever, especially for people with deadlines to
complete.
Reply
Rade Naumoski says:
December 14, 2016 at 1:45 am
Had same issues.
Need to run following commands in Terminal.
sudo mdutil -E /
This will delete & reindex Spotlight.
Allow to run overnight it takes forever.
Reply
MC says:
Hi,
Microsoft Office wont work properly with upgrading to Sierra on MacBook air.
PowerPoint is outrageously slow and Word keep on freezing. Is there a quick fix?
Many thanks in advance.
Reply
MacA says:
Not sure everyone has the same problem. After updated to Sierra, each time i turn
on my Mac, my ipad and android tablets that connected to wifi unable to to connect
to or very slow loading pages. Once I was thinking probably the server but then
nope.is my mac.each time i put my mac to sleep or turn off wifi, both ipad
and tablet working as normal but then i open my mac and start browsing, my ipad and
tablets again.very slow and sometimes lost connection too.need help here
Reply
mark sins says:
had the same issue. tried all sorts of suggestions from here and other places. Only
thing that has worked is de-installing kaspersky internet security as I noticed kav
was constantly running. I currently have no protection so will retry installing but
speed back to normal without kaspersky.
Reply
mark sins says:
Right ignore what I said about uninstalling kaspersky, the problem re-occurred. I
think i have now sussed it.
My mac is now running erfectly after doing a NVRAM reset ( alt/cmd/p/r at reboot ).
I also did an smc reset but pretty sure it was the nvram reset which cured it.
Reply
Kaitensatsuma says:
This probably isnt the place to raise the issue, but is it just me or it
infinitely odd that it is up to users to work around the issues that Apple has
introduced as a part of the new operating system? Not even solve or disable, which
are usually available, but literally have towork around or Put up with
Reply
Carlos says:
Is there any advice on the reason why macOS Sierra seems to run slower on less than
3GB RAM macs than in those with more? It seems obvious but even after clearing lots
of clutter and extensions, etc it should be performing fine but it doesnt. Just
updated my Mac Mini late 2012 and although there is plenty of storage, it comes
down to maybe not enough RAM. Or, isnt it?
Reply
Sheryl says:
My MacBook Pro is a mid 2012 model.
I implemented few of the fixes I found here and on another site and my Sierra is
running well so far on the day after installation.
Last night I did notice a few issues with freezing (not being able to click on
hyperlinks, additional tabs, other apps, etc.) that I havent seen yet today.
Before I installed Sierra I was having issues with random restarts that began a few
days after I installed Sophos antivirus. I uninstalled Sophos but waited until my
Sierra upgrade to implement a fix that seemed to work for some. I hope it works for
me too because the restarts are more than annoying.
Reply
Ron says:
My wife loved her iMac for a few years, after the OSX update I find her crying at
her desk. So far Ive spent a few hours following all the recovery advise online
here. Apple was my last hope for a usable desktop for a non tech artist, forcing
features on your user community put Apple in the same useless crap hole as
Microsoft. Now until I can get her using Linux Ill be stuck in the hell created by
business people who have no creative vision. Man I miss Steve Jobs.
Reply
Phan Steven says:
Id recommend downgrading to El Capitan or Mavericks if youre having that many
problems with Sierra. Sierra, in terms of features, does not offer much that most
people will use, but it can introduce a fair amount of issues that make it
worthwhile to downgrade rather than be annoyed or upset.
I have downgraded one of my macs from sierra to El Cap and it runs OK again. Then
another one of my Macs runs fine with Sierra. The irony is the machines are exactly
the same, they have cloned data and user preferences through Migration Assistant.
Why one works and the other doesnt, who knows, Sierra is buggy.
Reply
Bruce Bathols says:
My late 2013 21.5 iMac has always been a slow starter to boot up. Upgraded to
Sierra, and it runs even slower. Not impressed ! It now takes 3 minutes from the
boing at switch on for the Apple icon to appear, then a further 2 minutes for it
to for the boot sequence to complete. Am considering upgrading the HDD to SSD.
Memory is 8GB. I was running Parallels as I have MYOB business accounting system in
Windows. I have now totally deleted Parallels and have re-instated an old Windows
laptop for my accounting. Deleting Parallels made no difference. Anyone got clues
on this ?
Anyone got any clues on this ?
Reply
Martin says:
My MacBook Pro is very slow after the update. It takes hours to do tasks that only
is marked with a few minutes.
The system CPU usage is about 2%.
The user CPU usage is about 2%.
And the idle CPU is about 96%.
And there is no heavy programs running. But still it is unbelievably slow. And it
started shortly after the update.
I am searching for advise on how to solve it rather quickly, because Im in the
midst of writing an very big and important exam paper.
Thanks for replying in advance.
Reply
Xrisomalis says:
I have finally figured out why, after upgrading to macOS Sierra on my Mini Mac
2010, it runs slow. It is nothing more than MEMORY. This machine had 2GB of
physical memory and 300GB of storage. Sierra needs more PHYSICAL MEMORY to make
everything move fast. I purchased two (2) 4GB from Crucial which lifted my PHYSICAL
MEMORY up to 8GB. FINALLY, my MacMini is running like a champ just the way it is
supposed to be. I had read all the other threads and searched the internet for the
answer. NO ONE had every posted anything about memory. They stated it would take
time for the applications to catalogue sync blah blah blah. Now, the memory is
priced reasonably and TOTALLY simple to install. Check out a video on YouTube to
learn how to remove the old PHYSICAL MEMORY and install the new. It took me ten
minutes and couldnt wait to share this info with everyone.
Reply
cherriez88 says:
One thing to update in this article is Keyboard Slow Response when typing &
instructions to fix this issue:
Choose Apple menu > System Preferences, then click Accessibility.
Click Keyboard, then select Enable Slow Keys.
Click Options, then drag the Acceptance Delay slider to set how long you want your
Mac to wait before it responds after the key is pressed.
Source: https://support.apple.com/kb/PH18416?locale=en_US
Reply
Greg says:
I use a macbook pro Mid 2012 15 inch.
It is running exremely slow. sometimes it takes 5 to 10 seconds to see what I type
on the keyboard appearing on my screen.
I noticed my mac was running slower and slower with every update. What i hear from
apple resellers is that apple made the new OS for the new macs, it expects the use
of a SSD drive (witch is probably related with features such as the new indexation
of Photo and Siri thats not optimised for our old and slow hard drives ).
Reply
Andre Felix says:
I like to tell a story about the use of your desktop for files and folders.
1. It is using power to redraw the icons and files.
2. It looks like crap and you give the impression that you are not organized.
3. If you have a crash of your hard drive the files on the desktop are the first to
go and you will not get them back.
I had this happen (3) to me and I had to reshoot a clients images all over again as
I had put the folder with all the images on the desktop and was going to make a
backup later. Wrong move!
Reply
Roger says:
May 21, 2017 at 9:34 pm
You can use your desktop as a desktop by using aliases.
Put your files and folder in Documents and create an alias for those you have to
have on the desktop.
https://support.apple.com/kb/PH19065?locale=en_US
Reply
Attila KB says:
January 17, 2017 at 9:38 am
I tried everything you listed. I appreciate the you putting this list together, but
it did not help.
I have Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015, 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7, 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3, Intel
Iris Pro 1536 MB, and SSD
I just upgraded to Sierra it takes about 2 to 3 seconds for an image to preview

Everything is getting stuck. Whatever app I use CPU usage jumps to 99% for the
first 10 seconds.
I had El Captain before everything was lightning fast.
Reply
Baffour Ankomah says:
February 18, 2017 at 8:27 am
After installing macOS Sierra 10.12.3, I cant any longer manually control the
icons on the desktop of my macbook pro retina 13. What can I do to go back to
manually arrange the icons as I want, not as the auto-arrange wants?
Reply
Mitch says:
May 1, 2017 at 8:11 am
Nothing of all suggested solutions solved the sluggishness of my MacBook Pro (13-
inch, mid-2012) after I upgraded to OS X Sierra from OS X El Capitan. What I did
eventually after doing all the suggested solutions (from here and other sources and
from different people) was to install a fresh OS X Sierra, wiping out all the
previous OS and files entirely from the hard drive. Voila! Fast as it was when I
first used this laptop 5 years ago. The drawback is that you will have to backup
everything. I think the sluggishness is something to do with the apps installed
when the OS was El Capitan, creating some incompatibility problems with Sierra.
(Although I never considered this solution because my old apps works fast after
clean-install.)
Reply
s says:
May 27, 2017 at 7:03 am
Perceived slowdown ?? I just got a spinning colored pinwheel as I tried to type
the first word of this sentence. You make it sound like we are just idiots that
cant use a computer.
The suggestions you make are useless, and to suggest that a machine with 2GB of RAM
cant handle a messy desktop is absurd ! Do you remember the days of computers that
had 128 MB of RAM, and 300 Mhz speeds ? Even then, the slowdown from having a
cluttered desktop was minimal.
Stop trying to glorify Apples failure, and put the blame on the user.
Reply
DANIELRP says:
July 29, 2017 at 1:40 pm
I have a MacBook Pro late 2011. Everything was fine while I was running with LION
until the moment that I decided to upgrade to SIERRA on July 2017. My Mac became
slow, very slow! For your reference, it took around 8 minutes to open the browser
Safari. You can imagine?! I then phoned Apple Support and followed all their
instructions. Nothing worked!! I thought that the problem was caused by memory RAM,
as I had 4GB (2 slots with 2GB each). I then talked with several authorized Apple
offices and all them suggested me to install an SSD. I followed their suggestion
and.. it worked!! Now my MacBook is very very fast. It opens several apps at same
time in an impressive speed. I am very satisfied now. Note that I did not have to
change my memory RAM. I still have 4GB RAM. Another point of interest: my original
HD has 500GB. However, I bought a SSD of only 120GB. So, I decided to remove my
DVD and installed my original HD 500GB in its place. Now my MacBook does not read
DVD, but I have 720GB HD and a very fast notebook. This is my experience.
Reply
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macOS Sierra Slow? Heres Why & How to Speed Sierra Up
Oct 4, 2016 - 74 Comments
Speed up slow macOS Sierra
Some Mac users who have updated to macOS Sierra have felt their computer is running
slower than it should be. If you have noticed a performance hit after upgrading to
macOS Sierra, there is likely a good reason for it, and its even more likely to
have a simple solution.
Read on to learn why macOS Sierra may be running slow (some MacBook users notice
their Mac is hot and fans are blasting away too), and what you can do about it.
5 Ways to Speed Up MacOS Sierra

OK so lets assume your Mac with macOS Sierra is running slow. Why? How? And more
also discuss some other reasons a Mac might be slow.
1: Slow Mac After Sierra Update? Fans Blazing? WAIT!
Immediately after updating to macOS Sierra, the Mac must re-index the drive for use
with Spotlight and Siri, the built-in search functions in Mac OS. This can take
quite a while to complete, particularly if you have a large hard drive with a ton
of files. It is important to just let this process complete itself, interrupting
Spotlight indexing will cause Spotlight to not work properly, and it will just
attempt to re-index again anyway.
Another possible cause of a perceived slowdown after updating to macOS Sierra is

the new Photos app, which indexes and scans all photos for identifiable features
and faces. This can take quite a while as well, particularly if you have a very
large Photos app library. This is another process that you need to let complete in
order for Photos to work properly.
The solution? Wait it out. I know, waiting isnt always satisfying, but its easy
and it works! For the vast majority of users, the reason their Mac feels slow after
updating to macOS Sierra is because of the reindexing features that are going on in
the background. These tasks can consume a notable amount of CPU cycles as they
complete, leading to blazing fans, slow performance, and Mac that feels like its
running hot, but once the background tasks are finished the Mac will be speedy
again. (this can also be the case with iOS 10 sluggishness, by the way).
Clock icon
Let the Mac sit turned on overnight while its not in use, and all indexing
processes should be complete by morning with performance returned to normal.
2: Mind Your Messages

Do you use the Mac Messages app? If so, pay attention if you are receiving tons of
animated GIFs and stickers, which can arrive in abundance from an iOS 10 iPhone
user who is having fun with the new Messages stickers, gifs, effects, and other
chaos that can be sent from iOS 10 Messages app.
Messages gifs can slow down Messages app on Mac
Receiving animated GIFs in particular can cause a temporary slowdown on the Mac and
in the Messages app in particular, if those message windows are open and actively
on display and animating as intended.
Mac Messages slows down with animated gifs displayed
The good news is that the animated gifs will stop playing and pause automatically
once they are off screen in the Messages app, so just send a few messages in
response, or clear the chat log, and Messages app will be smooth again and whatever
sluggish behavior will remedy itself.
While gifs, effects, and stickers are undoubtedly fun (even though you cant send
the message effects back from a Mac for now anyway), just have a little awareness
about leaving these message windows open on the Mac.
spike in CPU activity.
3: Use Reduce Transparency & Reduce Motion

Eye candy effects like transparent windows and overlays sure look nice, but they
can also lead to performance reduction as each new window requires more system
resources to draw and maintain. Additionally, the Mac has many motion type effects
within Mission Control and elsewhere that zip and zoom around.
Fortunately macOS Sierra allows you to turn this eye candy off, which can result in
a notable performance increase, particularly for power users who have a lot of apps
or windows open concurrently.
Open the Apple menu and go to System Preferences, then choose Accessibility
Go to Display settings
Check the box for Reduce motion and Reduce transparency
Exit out of System Preferences
Speed up slow macOS Sierra with Reduce Motion and Transparency
This will have an immediate effect on the appearance of Mac windows, titlebars,
sidebars, and other UI elements by using reduced transparency, and you wont see as
many animations throughout Mac OS either with Reduce Motion turned on as well,
which is a new option in Sierra. The result can be a speedier Mac.
4: Clean Off a Cluttered Desktop

Many Mac users store tons of files on their desktops, resulting in a very cluttered
desktop full of files and folders and other stuff.
Dont do this. It can slow down performance.
Dont have a cluttered desktop
The easiest solution to this is to drag and drop everything from the desktop into a
separate folder on the desktop, call it Clutter or Desktop stuff or whatever
you want, and then open and use that folder when you need to access your desktop
stuff. Another option is to hide all desktop icons completely using a defaults
command, but that is best for advanced users since it involves the Terminal and
disabling the Desktop feature.
5: Check Activity Monitor for Background Tasks & Oddities

If a Mac feels sluggish, the simplest way to quickly see if something is actively
consuming resources on a Mac is with Activity Monitor.
You can open Activity Monitor from /Applications/Utilities/ then go to the CPU
tab and sort by % CPU, the topmost items will show you what, if anything, is
using high amounts of CPU (shown as a percentage of CPU resources).
In this screenshot example, the mds and mds_stores processes are running and
using a notably high level of CPU these processes, along with mdworker are part
of the aforementioned Spotlight indexing that will complete itself. Until these are
finished running, the Mac may feel a bit slower than usual.
Other than normal system background tasks and apps, its possible youll find an
errant process or unusual task running and taking up a lot of CPU. If this is the
case, quit out of the application as usual, or if its a background task, you may
need to update the parent application to be compatible with Sierra.
Advanced users can force quit the app, or even uninstall and remove the app if it
wont behave at all. Absolutely do not start force quitting random tasks and
processes, the Mac has many system tasks that run in the background and if forcibly
quit it will certainly mess something up and cause bigger problems.
Consider Alternate Causes of Slowdowns
If youve tried all of the above and youre still experiencing what you consider to
be unusual slowdowns or sluggish behavior with macOS Sierra, its always possible
there is something else going on. Maybe its an incompatibility with a specific
app, maybe its Time Machine stalling out and grinding resources while it prepares
for eternity, or maybe youre experiencing a rare but truly problematic macOS
Sierra experience full of kernel errors and other headaches.
You can engage in troubleshooting various Sierra difficulties, or you can always
clean install Sierra or even downgrade macOS Sierra and revert back to the prior
Mac OS X version if you declare its all too much of a hassle.
Another aspect worth noting is that some users have reported slower perceived
internet speeds with Sierra, often with a less reliable wireless connection. If
that describes your situation, you might be able to fix a macOS Sierra wi-fi issue
with these instructions.
Did you notice a change in performance after updating to macOS Sierra? Did any slow
behavior resolve by waiting or trying the tips above? Is your Mac faster or slower
with Sierra? Let us know your experiences in the comments.
below:
Subscribe
646
548
Related articles:
MacOS Sierra 10.12.2 Beta 2 Released
macOS Sierra 10.12.1 beta 2 Released
How to Hide MacOS Sierra Update Banner from the Mac App Store
Second macOS Sierra GM Seed Available for Testers
Posted by: Paul Horowitz in Mac OS X, Tips & Tricks, Troubleshooting
74 Comments
Comments RSS Feed
Matthew says:
Spotlight, Photos, iCloud Photos, all took about 6 hours to complete on my Mac
after Sierra installed. Then it was good to go after that. I installed in the
evening and opened Photos and noticed it was scanning stuff so I let it sit until
it finished.
Sierra performance wise runs about the same as El Capitan. Overall I find Sierra to
be more buggy and I get weird errors and have to reboot more often which is
annoying, hope an update fixes that part. Otherwise I like Sierra.
Reply
Miguel says:
What Mac are you using? I upgraded to Sierra on my 2011 Macbook Pro 13 inch and it
was very slow even as I tried reducing all the effects and letting everything
Reply
analog5 says:
June 20, 2017 at 4:55 am
I own a 2016 MacBook Pro ntb and safari loads basic sites and the homepage really
slowly. Some sites it loads fast. But Firefox is a lot faster. Its problem however
is that it crashes and also freezes up the entire system at times.
Reply
OJ says:
I found Safari running really slow with Mac Sierra, so I removed all extensions and
cleared the cache and it was fine after that.
Also Mac OS Sierra version 10 of Safari cant handle as many tabs, so dont open
too many tabs.
Reply
CFM says:
I find the same thing with Sierra. Safari is quite slow. Ive cleaned the caches,
but can you help me clean the extensions? I dont know how to do that.
Reply
Sven says:
I really like your site and appreciate your advices. But honestly, saying Do not
use your desktop as a desktop is something i cant agree with. Putting stuff on
the desktop is intuitive and shouldnt bother our expensive machines, else something
is wrong.
Reply
Paul says:
Sven, using the desktop as a desktop is fine, and having a reasonable number of
files on the desktop wont matter, but if you have hundreds of files kept cluttered
on the desktop it can become noticeable and impact performance. This is because
each desktop file and icon is drawn as an element with a live preview on the
screen, taking up resources to display. The advice is really for people who have
tons and tons of stuff on their desktops.
Reply
tuqqer says:
Its relative. You can use your desktop as a desktop with a dozen files and 6
folders and you wont see a slow down. If using your desktop means 140 files and 32
folders, youll see a slowdown.
method. They all experience slowdowns at weird times.
file management.
Reply
JA says:
Increase contrast looks so MacOS 6!
Reply
Steve Dietrich says:
If I understand what the article is saying is that Apple is running facial
recognition on my photos is there a way to kill this..
Reply
Alan says:
by not using Photos app.
Reply
Michael Vallance says:
awaiting a M$oft update before I revert to Yosemite.
Reply
RAN says:
Sierra was running very slow on my 13 MacBook Pro (mid-2012) and Ive noticed
issues with Microsoft Office as well, in particular with Word. Turning off Siri
seems to have helped with computer speed. If you figure out what the issue is with
Office though let me know!
Reply
Greg Csullog says:
Since installing Sierra 10.2.2, my 2012 Mac Mini is essentially unusable. After
for an app to respond. Right now I am on my 2008 iMac with El Capitan 10.11.6.
I reinstalled Sierra twice same problem with delays and the colour wheel. My next
If the problem persists after that then I have NO idea what to do next.
As an FYI, both my drives are encrypted and my firmware is password protected.
Reply
J Carr says:
Ive notice a general increase in speed. Things are generally snappier. No
anyway if they EVER get around to updating the hardware)
The only slowdown I notice is when the online backup program is running but this
is no different from elCap. I just pause it if it is annoying.
Reply
John Lang says:
Did you use the Sierra patch tool or go with the firmware patch? I went the
firmware route and its working very well.
Reply
Wharf Xanadu says:
Safari has some kind of issue and it is slow.
Reply
Anne says:
If I never use Siri or Spotlight it sounds like not upgrading my 2012 Mac Mini is a
good idea.
Im still debating about my iPad.
Reply
Jason says:
Im running it on a 2011 MacBook Pro without issue. Just let it bake overnight and
life will be fine.
Disable sleep after X minutes will help keep it awake over night while all the
indexing apps finish their work.
Reply
J-L says:
On the whole Sierra performs well after a problem free installation. Disk free
space went from 75 to 125 Gb. I had an issue where fans were blazing while using
Safari. After troubleshooting this turned out to be Trusteer Rapport. Switched it
off and all good.
https://discussions.apple.com/search.jspa?q=trusteer+rapport&after=month
Reply
J R Rockwell says:
party app makers need to work on their part too.
Reply
Tarquin Shrapnel-Carruthers says:
Both late-2013 iMac and 2012 MBA feel sluggish. Photos facial recognition is a
Reply
jolehp says:
I just found out that now we have reduce motion like on iOS.. Im suprised :D
Reply
Bernard says:
Yet another nail in the coffin of It just works.
Reply
ab65 says:
Since Ive disabled Spotlight completely from system.
(use find any file instead)
Old MBP 8.2 (16GB memory/ SSD) does his job to my contentedness.
No more mds worker nagging cpu. Not to mention Spotlight doesnt find anything in
the first place.
Reply
maccy mcmacface says:
Since I installed Sierra, my GPU failed. Mid 2011 iMac. Waiting to hear if Apple
think that European trade law applies. Coincidence? Probably but who knows?
for me!
Reply
Warren O says:
After the upgrade, my 2013 rMBP wasnt running slow, but the fans were running full
tilt all the time. iStat showed low temps for the CPU/GPU, so it seemed like it was
running the fans unnecessarily.
I did an SMC reset, and the fans went back to normal. Other than this minor hiccup,
Sierra has been a painless and enjoyable upgrade.
Reply
RM says:
Havent upgraded yet, curious if mdworker is still a ravenous whore.
Reply
Aviral Bansal says:
After update to Sierra, started having strange problem. In mission control view I
am able to move spaces around but not apps running in full screen mode. They just
drop down and disappear from the spaces tray and and then turn up at the beginning
of the end of the test. Called Apple support and they made me reset the PROM. Has
been working fine since.
Reply
Gonuchi says:
Was it slow? That sounds like a troubleshooting issue. There is a ridiculously long
post and comment section on Sierra troubleshooting here
http://osxdaily.com/2016/09/24/troubleshooting-macos-sierra-problems/
Did Apple take your call despite not having warranty? Do they support Sierra on the
phone?
Reply
Charles says:
I believe the facial recognition agent running in Sierra is called
photoanalysisid because when the Mac is running hot and fans are loud as can be
that is often what you find taking up 100% of CPU or more, slowing down the entire
Mac. The bigger the photo library the longer photoanalysisid runs and the more it
slows down the Mac until it is finished.
I suspect if you really wanted to you could locate the photoanalysisid binary and
but it could break Photos app. I have not tested it yet.
Anyway, if your Mac is hot, slow and fans loud check for photoanalysisid it needs
to run for like 10 hours to finish. Crazy.
Reply
Rachel says:
Im just noticing a few bugs on Apple Mail. It takes forever to send a messages,
and it deleted all of my signatures.
Reply
Rogier says:
1. VLC player stopped working
2. iTunesthe disaster keeps getting worse and worse. REALLY, COME ON APPLE, WTF
(every os update makes this program turn worse; I remember the last one when it
started creating many duplicates in the artists section) I have my library on an
external Toshiba Disc, which suddenly went from read & write to read only.
Also, iTunes suddenly cannot locate 1000s of files. Then: it keeps switching to the
standard iTunes Library on the Mac HD itself. iTunes also crashes/doesnt
respond. When will you start debugging this program? Yes, Im frustrated with this.
The last few updates really didnt make anything better and causes a lot of work to
fix stuff again.
Reply
Steve says:
Rogier, I had the same problem with my Toshiba drive. I had to install Tuxera
Software to be able to read and write on the NTFS format drive. Hope this helps.
Reply
ben says:
I had most of these issues and more, constantly maxing out of fan, processor, apps
running slow etc etc until i found this
https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/49163 and unplugged my external screen!
now it runs beautifully! insane but there we are
Reply
Ken says:
It says photoanalysisd 102.9% CPU. It takes several to open any folder. It has been
doing that process for 6:20:00
Reply
Paul says:
You probably have a lot of photos stored in the Photos app, it can take many hours
to finish analyzing photos for facial and feature recognition. Let it run
overnight, it should be done by morning unless you have an enormous photo library.
Reply
pinkhousegirl says:
I have upgraded to Sierra and it took about an hour to restore photo library. But I
clock on upload and leave it (I just get a spinning wheel).
grateful for any help, thanks
Reply
Ken says:
several seconds
Reply
Gerald says:
Hi
This upgrade is catastrophic for me.It took a whole day to get back running as
before on an old MacBook, but it is even worse on a more recent iMac.
Nothing wrong shows in the activity monitor but every single application takes for
ever: uploading 3 pictures to my website dashboard has taken 1h and 13 minutes !!!
Firefox crashes 2 to 3 times an hour and even Safari freezes for extended periods.
What a mess this system makes.
Reply
Myla says:
#3 worked like a charm, thanks!
Reply
Meri says:
October 12, 2016 at 12:00 pm
Drag and drop is SO slow. I cant move files aroundtakes minutes per file.
Windowserver was taking up most of my CPUdown to 16% today so maybe the index is
finishing. Is my OS Sierra conflicting with MS office 2011is that why everything
is SO slow? Ready to downgrade OS systems unless this changes by tomorrow.
Reply
Iain says:
October 12, 2016 at 11:29 pm
My fans run constantly when I open Safari, Activity Monitor show no other
recognition), just safari. Any ideas why?
Reply
Carl Fontbath says:
October 13, 2016 at 10:05 am
Show all tasks for all users in Activity Monitor to get an accurate representation
of activity, kernel_task and WindowServer are often doing something busy, swapping
or drawing transparency, etc.
For Safari: Its probably Safari media, maybe a video. Dont use Flash or Java with
Safari, both will make it run poorly. Beyond that it could be an extension or plug-
in, all of which perform poorly in my experience. Remove any extensions from
Safari, clear cache, dont leave tabs open if they wont be used, etc. Using Chrome
can be a good test too.
Reply
Daniella says:
Hi there, I just updated my MacBook Pro to Sierra and I cant work anymore with my
computer !! It ist extremely slow it takes about 5 min just to open a window
what should I do Im pretty scared that it the mac will stay this way
Reply
Scott Porter says:
Best idea is not to use Safari, to be honest. Chrome is a much more capable
browser, and will not stress the CPU/batteries as much. If youre stuck in the
Apple bubble, you may not be aware of other software, but its out there if you
look!
Reply
Rob says:
Ive been running Sierra for a couple weeks now. It runs pretty much like El
Capitan. Except. Photos Faces (or People now) is very very slow. Im not sure if it
is running the new algorithm each time I open a face or if its experiencing a
problem, or if its just buggy. Anyway, thats my take on it and thats my
experience at this time.
Reply
Chloe says:
I found this tip about the secd helped:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7684723?start=0&tstart=0
Reply
kathy says:
October 25, 2016 at 10:39 am
Microsoft Outlook 2017 for Mac is ridiculously slow. Almost 5 minutes to open, and
often closes itselfand cant hit on button in dock to reopen window, even thought
its open.
Reply
lassi says:
October 27, 2016 at 12:57 am
This could be pretty much a copy-paste from any other osx update and I strongly
suspect so.
Actualy fixes would be appreciated to situations where disk reads are slow as f-
but disk bench gets 90mbyte/s easily yet copying files takes minutes when it
should take mere seconds. and apps take forever to load and they are not hogging
the cpu either, just waiting the os to switch some flag or another.
Reply
Robin says:
Maybe you could solve this not easier, but easier ;-)
Create a new user account and copy all the very needed (app) files such as
preferences to the new user.
I experienced a very fast setting.
Reply
Roxanne says:
UGH. I installed Sierra yesterday, and it destroyed an entire day of productivity
while it installed. I left it overnight to process, came back today expecting
better performance. Instead, its slower. Powerpoint wont run and constantly
freezes when I do get it running. Even opening Finder takes forever. HATE IT. Have
disabled Siri (didnt want it in the first place) but that doesnt seem to help.
This seems like the worst upgrade ever, especially for people with deadlines to
complete.
Reply
Rade Naumoski says:
Had same issues.
Need to run following commands in Terminal.
sudo mdutil -E /
This will delete & reindex Spotlight.
Allow to run overnight it takes forever.
Reply
MC says:
Hi,
Microsoft Office wont work properly with upgrading to Sierra on MacBook air.
Many thanks in advance.
Reply
MacA says:
Not sure everyone has the same problem. After updated to Sierra, each time i turn
on my Mac, my ipad and android tablets that connected to wifi unable to to connect
to or very slow loading pages. Once I was thinking probably the server but then
nope.is my mac.each time i put my mac to sleep or turn off wifi, both ipad
and tablet working as normal but then i open my mac and start browsing, my ipad and
tablets again.very slow and sometimes lost connection too.need help here
Reply
mark sins says:
had the same issue. tried all sorts of suggestions from here and other places. Only
thing that has worked is de-installing kaspersky internet security as I noticed kav
was constantly running. I currently have no protection so will retry installing but
speed back to normal without kaspersky.
Reply
mark sins says:
Right ignore what I said about uninstalling kaspersky, the problem re-occurred. I
think i have now sussed it.
My mac is now running erfectly after doing a NVRAM reset ( alt/cmd/p/r at reboot ).
I also did an smc reset but pretty sure it was the nvram reset which cured it.
Reply
Kaitensatsuma says:
This probably isnt the place to raise the issue, but is it just me or it
infinitely odd that it is up to users to work around the issues that Apple has
introduced as a part of the new operating system? Not even solve or disable, which
are usually available, but literally have towork around or Put up with
Reply
Carlos says:
Is there any advice on the reason why macOS Sierra seems to run slower on less than
3GB RAM macs than in those with more? It seems obvious but even after clearing lots
of clutter and extensions, etc it should be performing fine but it doesnt. Just
updated my Mac Mini late 2012 and although there is plenty of storage, it comes
down to maybe not enough RAM. Or, isnt it?
Reply
Sheryl says:
My MacBook Pro is a mid 2012 model.
I implemented few of the fixes I found here and on another site and my Sierra is
running well so far on the day after installation.
Last night I did notice a few issues with freezing (not being able to click on
hyperlinks, additional tabs, other apps, etc.) that I havent seen yet today.
Before I installed Sierra I was having issues with random restarts that began a few
days after I installed Sophos antivirus. I uninstalled Sophos but waited until my
Sierra upgrade to implement a fix that seemed to work for some. I hope it works for
me too because the restarts are more than annoying.
Reply
Ron says:
My wife loved her iMac for a few years, after the OSX update I find her crying at
her desk. So far Ive spent a few hours following all the recovery advise online
here. Apple was my last hope for a usable desktop for a non tech artist, forcing
features on your user community put Apple in the same useless crap hole as
Microsoft. Now until I can get her using Linux Ill be stuck in the hell created by
business people who have no creative vision. Man I miss Steve Jobs.
Reply
Phan Steven says:
worthwhile to downgrade rather than be annoyed or upset.
I have downgraded one of my macs from sierra to El Cap and it runs OK again. Then
another one of my Macs runs fine with Sierra. The irony is the machines are exactly
the same, they have cloned data and user preferences through Migration Assistant.
Why one works and the other doesnt, who knows, Sierra is buggy.
Reply
Bruce Bathols says:
My late 2013 21.5 iMac has always been a slow starter to boot up. Upgraded to
Sierra, and it runs even slower. Not impressed ! It now takes 3 minutes from the
boing at switch on for the Apple icon to appear, then a further 2 minutes for it
to for the boot sequence to complete. Am considering upgrading the HDD to SSD.
Memory is 8GB. I was running Parallels as I have MYOB business accounting system in
Windows. I have now totally deleted Parallels and have re-instated an old Windows
laptop for my accounting. Deleting Parallels made no difference. Anyone got clues
on this ?
Anyone got any clues on this ?
Reply
Martin says:
My MacBook Pro is very slow after the update. It takes hours to do tasks that only
is marked with a few minutes.
The system CPU usage is about 2%.
The user CPU usage is about 2%.
And the idle CPU is about 96%.
started shortly after the update.
I am searching for advise on how to solve it rather quickly, because Im in the
midst of writing an very big and important exam paper.
Thanks for replying in advance.
Reply
Xrisomalis says:
I have finally figured out why, after upgrading to macOS Sierra on my Mini Mac
2010, it runs slow. It is nothing more than MEMORY. This machine had 2GB of
minutes and couldnt wait to share this info with everyone.
Reply
cherriez88 says:
One thing to update in this article is Keyboard Slow Response when typing &
instructions to fix this issue:
Choose Apple menu > System Preferences, then click Accessibility.
Click Keyboard, then select Enable Slow Keys.
Click Options, then drag the Acceptance Delay slider to set how long you want your
Mac to wait before it responds after the key is pressed.
Source: https://support.apple.com/kb/PH18416?locale=en_US
Reply
Greg says:
I use a macbook pro Mid 2012 15 inch.
It is running exremely slow. sometimes it takes 5 to 10 seconds to see what I type
on the keyboard appearing on my screen.
I noticed my mac was running slower and slower with every update. What i hear from
apple resellers is that apple made the new OS for the new macs, it expects the use
of a SSD drive (witch is probably related with features such as the new indexation
of Photo and Siri thats not optimised for our old and slow hard drives ).
Reply
Andre Felix says:
I like to tell a story about the use of your desktop for files and folders.
1. It is using power to redraw the icons and files.
2. It looks like crap and you give the impression that you are not organized.
3. If you have a crash of your hard drive the files on the desktop are the first to
go and you will not get them back.
I had this happen (3) to me and I had to reshoot a clients images all over again as
I had put the folder with all the images on the desktop and was going to make a
backup later. Wrong move!
Reply
Roger says:
May 21, 2017 at 9:34 pm
You can use your desktop as a desktop by using aliases.
Put your files and folder in Documents and create an alias for those you have to
have on the desktop.
https://support.apple.com/kb/PH19065?locale=en_US
Reply
Attila KB says:
January 17, 2017 at 9:38 am
I tried everything you listed. I appreciate the you putting this list together, but
it did not help.
I have Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015, 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7, 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3, Intel
Iris Pro 1536 MB, and SSD
I just upgraded to Sierra it takes about 2 to 3 seconds for an image to preview

first 10 seconds.
I had El Captain before everything was lightning fast.
Reply
Baffour Ankomah says:
February 18, 2017 at 8:27 am
After installing macOS Sierra 10.12.3, I cant any longer manually control the
icons on the desktop of my macbook pro retina 13. What can I do to go back to
manually arrange the icons as I want, not as the auto-arrange wants?
Reply
Mitch says:
May 1, 2017 at 8:11 am
clean-install.)
Reply
s says:
May 27, 2017 at 7:03 am
Perceived slowdown ?? I just got a spinning colored pinwheel as I tried to type
the first word of this sentence. You make it sound like we are just idiots that
cant use a computer.
The suggestions you make are useless, and to suggest that a machine with 2GB of RAM
cluttered desktop was minimal.
Stop trying to glorify Apples failure, and put the blame on the user.
Reply
DANIELRP says:
July 29, 2017 at 1:40 pm
I have a MacBook Pro late 2011. Everything was fine while I was running with LION
until the moment that I decided to upgrade to SIERRA on July 2017. My Mac became
slow, very slow! For your reference, it took around 8 minutes to open the browser
Safari. You can imagine?! I then phoned Apple Support and followed all their
instructions. Nothing worked!! I thought that the problem was caused by memory RAM,
as I had 4GB (2 slots with 2GB each). I then talked with several authorized Apple
offices and all them suggested me to install an SSD. I followed their suggestion
and.. it worked!! Now my MacBook is very very fast. It opens several apps at same
time in an impressive speed. I am very satisfied now. Note that I did not have to
change my memory RAM. I still have 4GB RAM. Another point of interest: my original
HD has 500GB. However, I bought a SSD of only 120GB. So, I decided to remove my
DVD and installed my original HD 500GB in its place. Now my MacBook does not read
DVD, but I have 720GB HD and a very fast notebook. This is my experience.
Reply
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iOS macOS Sierra Slow? Heres Why & How to Speed Sierra Up Oct 4, 2016 - 74
Comments Some Mac users who have updated to macOS Sierra have felt their
computer is running slower than it should be. If you have noticed a performance hit
after upgrading to macOS Sierra, there is likely a good reason for it, and its
even more likely to have a simple solution. Read on to learn why macOS Sierra may
be running slow (some MacBook users notice their Mac is hot and fans are blasting
away too), and what you can do about it. 5 Ways to Speed Up MacOS Sierra OK so
lets assume your Mac with macOS Sierra is running slow. Why? How? And more
also discuss some other reasons a Mac might be slow. 1: Slow Mac After Sierra
Update? Fans Blazing? WAIT! Immediately after updating to macOS Sierra, the Mac
must re-index the drive for use with Spotlight and Siri, the built-in search
functions in Mac OS. This can take quite a while to complete, particularly if you
have a large hard drive with a ton of files. It is important to just let this
process complete itself, interrupting Spotlight indexing will cause Spotlight to
not work properly, and it will just attempt to re-index again anyway. Another
possible cause of a perceived slowdown after updating to macOS Sierra is the new
Photos app, which indexes and scans all photos for identifiable features and faces.
This can take quite a while as well, particularly if you have a very large Photos
app library. This is another process that you need to let complete in order for
Photos to work properly. The solution? Wait it out. I know, waiting isnt always
satisfying, but its easy and it works! For the vast majority of users, the reason
their Mac feels slow after updating to macOS Sierra is because of the reindexing
features that are going on in the background. These tasks can consume a notable
amount of CPU cycles as they complete, leading to blazing fans, slow performance,
and Mac that feels like its running hot, but once the background tasks are
finished the Mac will be speedy again. (this can also be the case with iOS 10
sluggishness, by the way). Let the Mac sit turned on overnight while its not in
use, and all indexing processes should be complete by morning with performance
returned to normal. 2: Mind Your Messages Do you use the Mac Messages app? If so,
pay attention if you are receiving tons of animated GIFs and stickers, which can
arrive in abundance from an iOS 10 iPhone user who is having fun with the new
Messages stickers, gifs, effects, and other chaos that can be sent from iOS 10
Messages app. Receiving animated GIFs in particular can cause a temporary slowdown
on the Mac and in the Messages app in particular, if those message windows are open
and actively on display and animating as intended. The good news is that the
animated gifs will stop playing and pause automatically once they are off screen in
the Messages app, so just send a few messages in response, or clear the chat log,
and Messages app will be smooth again and whatever sluggish behavior will remedy
itself. While gifs, effects, and stickers are undoubtedly fun (even though you
cant send the message effects back from a Mac for now anyway), just have a little
awareness about leaving these message windows open on the Mac. And by the way, for
the technically inclined people, you can test this out immediately by opening a new
message window and sending or receiving a few animated gifs and leaving that chat
window open in Activity Monitor you will see Messages spike in CPU activity. 3:
Use Reduce Transparency & Reduce Motion Eye candy effects like transparent windows
and overlays sure look nice, but they can also lead to performance reduction as
each new window requires more system resources to draw and maintain. Additionally,
the Mac has many motion type effects within Mission Control and elsewhere that zip
and zoom around. Fortunately macOS Sierra allows you to turn this eye candy off,
which can result in a notable performance increase, particularly for power users
who have a lot of apps or windows open concurrently. Open the Apple menu and go
to System Preferences, then choose Accessibility Go to Display settings Check
the box for Reduce motion and Reduce transparency Exit out of System
Preferences This will have an immediate effect on the appearance of Mac windows,
titlebars, sidebars, and other UI elements by using reduced transparency, and you
wont see as many animations throughout Mac OS either with Reduce Motion turned on
as well, which is a new option in Sierra. The result can be a speedier Mac. 4:
Clean Off a Cluttered Desktop Many Mac users store tons of files on their desktops,
resulting in a very cluttered desktop full of files and folders and other stuff.
Dont do this. It can slow down performance. The easiest solution to this is to
drag and drop everything from the desktop into a separate folder on the desktop,
call it Clutter or Desktop stuff or whatever you want, and then open and use
that folder when you need to access your desktop stuff. Another option is to hide
all desktop icons completely using a defaults command, but that is best for
advanced users since it involves the Terminal and disabling the Desktop feature. 5:
Check Activity Monitor for Background Tasks & Oddities If a Mac feels sluggish, the
simplest way to quickly see if something is actively consuming resources on a Mac
is with Activity Monitor. You can open Activity Monitor from
/Applications/Utilities/ then go to the CPU tab and sort by % CPU, the topmost
items will show you what, if anything, is using high amounts of CPU (shown as a
percentage of CPU resources). In this screenshot example, the mds and
mds_stores processes are running and using a notably high level of CPU these
processes, along with mdworker are part of the aforementioned Spotlight indexing
that will complete itself. Until these are finished running, the Mac may feel a bit
slower than usual. Other than normal system background tasks and apps, its
possible youll find an errant process or unusual task running and taking up a lot
of CPU. If this is the case, quit out of the application as usual, or if its a
background task, you may need to update the parent application to be compatible
with Sierra. Advanced users can force quit the app, or even uninstall and remove
the app if it wont behave at all. Absolutely do not start force quitting random
tasks and processes, the Mac has many system tasks that run in the background and
if forcibly quit it will certainly mess something up and cause bigger problems.
Consider Alternate Causes of Slowdowns If youve tried all of the above and youre
still experiencing what you consider to be unusual slowdowns or sluggish behavior
with macOS Sierra, its always possible there is something else going on. Maybe
its an incompatibility with a specific app, maybe its Time Machine stalling out
and grinding resources while it prepares for eternity, or maybe youre experiencing
a rare but truly problematic macOS Sierra experience full of kernel errors and
other headaches. You can engage in troubleshooting various Sierra difficulties, or
you can always clean install Sierra or even downgrade macOS Sierra and revert back
to the prior Mac OS X version if you declare its all too much of a hassle. Another
aspect worth noting is that some users have reported slower perceived internet
speeds with Sierra, often with a less reliable wireless connection. If that
describes your situation, you might be able to fix a macOS Sierra wi-fi issue with
these instructions. Did you notice a change in performance after updating to macOS
Sierra? Did any slow behavior resolve by waiting or trying the tips above? Is your
Mac faster or slower with Sierra? Let us know your experiences in the comments.
below: 646 548 Related articles: MacOS Sierra 10.12.2 Beta 2 Released macOS
Sierra 10.12.1 beta 2 Released How to Hide MacOS Sierra Update Banner from the Mac
App Store Second macOS Sierra GM Seed Available for Testers Posted by: Paul
Horowitz in Mac OS X, Tips & Tricks, Troubleshooting 74 Comments Comments RSS
Feed Matthew says: October 4, 2016 at 1:19 pm Spotlight, Photos, iCloud Photos, all
took about 6 hours to complete on my Mac after Sierra installed. Then it was good
to go after that. I installed in the evening and opened Photos and noticed it was
scanning stuff so I let it sit until it finished. Sierra performance wise runs
about the same as El Capitan. Overall I find Sierra to be more buggy and I get
weird errors and have to reboot more often which is annoying, hope an update fixes
that part. Otherwise I like Sierra. Reply Miguel says: November 20, 2016 at 11:46
pm What Mac are you using? I upgraded to Sierra on my 2011 Macbook Pro 13 inch and
it was very slow even as I tried reducing all the effects and letting everything
Reply analog5 says: June 20, 2017 at 4:55 am I own a 2016 MacBook Pro ntb and
safari loads basic sites and the homepage really slowly. Some sites it loads fast.
But Firefox is a lot faster. Its problem however is that it crashes and also
freezes up the entire system at times. Reply OJ says: October 4, 2016 at 1:42 pm I
found Safari running really slow with Mac Sierra, so I removed all extensions and
cleared the cache and it was fine after that. Also Mac OS Sierra version 10 of
Safari cant handle as many tabs, so dont open too
many tabs. Reply CFM says: November 27, 2016 at 1:55 pm I find the same thing with
Sierra. Safari is quite slow. Ive cleaned the caches, but can you help me clean
the extensions? I dont know how to do that. Reply Sven says: October 4, 2016 at
2:08 pm I really like your site and appreciate your advices. But honestly, saying
Do not use your desktop as a desktop is something i cant agree with. Putting
stuff on the desktop is intuitive and shouldnt bother our expensive machines, else
something is wrong. Reply Paul says: October 4, 2016 at 2:48 pm Sven, using the
desktop as a desktop is fine, and having a reasonable number of files on the
desktop wont matter, but if you have hundreds of files kept cluttered on the
desktop it can become noticeable and impact performance. This is because each
desktop file and icon is drawn as an element with a live preview on the screen,
taking up resources to display. The advice is really for people who have tons and
tons of stuff on their desktops. Reply tuqqer says: October 4, 2016 at 4:08 pm Its
relative. You can use your desktop as a desktop with a dozen files and 6 folders
and you wont see a slow down. If using your desktop means 140 files and 32
folders, youll see a slowdown. I screenshare with colleagues Macs, and quite a
few use the 140 file desktop method. They all experience slowdowns at weird times.
file management. Reply JA says: October 4, 2016 at 3:22 pm Increase contrast looks
so MacOS 6! Reply Steve Dietrich says: October 4, 2016 at 4:49 pm If I understand
what the article is saying is that Apple is running facial recognition on my photos
is there a way to kill this.. Reply Alan says: October 4, 2016 at 5:33 pm
by not using Photos app. Reply Michael Vallance says: October 4, 2016 at 4:58 pm
awaiting a M$oft update before I revert to Yosemite. Reply RAN says: December 1,
2016 at 1:07 pm Sierra was running very slow on my 13 MacBook Pro (mid-2012) and
Ive noticed issues with Microsoft Office as well, in particular with Word. Turning
off Siri seems to have helped with computer speed. If you figure out what the issue
is with Office though let me know! Reply Greg Csullog says: January 9, 2017 at 2:20
pm Since installing Sierra 10.2.2, my 2012 Mac Mini is essentially unusable. After
for an app to respond. Right now I am on my 2008 iMac with El Capitan 10.11.6. I
reinstalled Sierra twice same problem with delays and the colour wheel. My next
If the problem persists after that then I have NO idea what to do next. As an FYI,
both my drives are encrypted and my firmware is password protected. Reply J Carr
says: October 4, 2016 at 5:21 pm Ive notice a general increase in speed. Things
are generally snappier. No problems so far. And, Im running it on an
unsupported MacPro. (Shame on Apple for arbitrarily cutting out so many capable
machines. Im going to but a new iMac anyway if they EVER get around to updating
the hardware) The only slowdown I notice is when the online backup program is
running but this is no different from elCap. I just pause it if it is annoying.
Reply John Lang says: October 4, 2016 at 8:21 pm Did you use the Sierra patch tool
or go with the firmware patch? I went the firmware route and its working very
well. Reply Wharf Xanadu says: October 4, 2016 at 5:41 pm Safari has some kind of
issue and it is slow. Reply Anne says: October 4, 2016 at 5:51 pm If I never use
Siri or Spotlight it sounds like not upgrading my 2012 Mac Mini is a good idea. Im
still debating about my iPad. Reply Jason says: October 5, 2016 at 8:00 am Im
running it on a 2011 MacBook Pro without issue. Just let it bake overnight and life
will be fine. Disable sleep after X minutes will help keep it awake over night
while all the indexing apps finish their work. Reply J-L says: October 4, 2016 at
10:17 pm On the whole Sierra performs well after a problem free installation. Disk
free space went from 75 to 125 Gb. I had an issue where fans were blazing while
using Safari. After troubleshooting this turned out to be Trusteer Rapport.
Switched it off and all good. https://discussions.apple.com/search.jspa?
q=trusteer+rapport&after=month Reply J R Rockwell says: October 5, 2016 at 9:46 am
party app makers need to work on their part too. Reply Tarquin Shrapnel-Carruthers
says: October 4, 2016 at 10:58 pm Both late-2013 iMac and 2012 MBA feel sluggish.
Photos facial recognition is a disaster: the iMac, where my library is stored, is
stuck on 26,013 of 48 thousand. Reply jolehp says: October 4, 2016 at 11:12 pm I
just found out that now we have reduce motion like on iOS.. Im suprised :D Reply
Bernard says: October 5, 2016 at 12:41 am Yet another nail in the coffin of It
just works. Reply ab65 says: October 5, 2016 at 12:52 am Since Ive disabled
Spotlight completely from system. (use find any file instead) Old MBP 8.2 (16GB
memory/ SSD) does his job to my contentedness. No more mds worker nagging cpu. Not
to mention Spotlight doesnt find anything in the first place. Reply maccy
mcmacface says: October 5, 2016 at 2:17 am Since I installed Sierra, my GPU failed.
Mid 2011 iMac. Waiting to hear if Apple think that European trade law applies.
Coincidence? Probably but who knows? One thing Im sure of is Ill never buy
another mac cramming all those heat generating parts into a tiny space so that
they are bound to get too hot and then making it so difficult that only an expert
can fix them is not how I think good design works. If Apple wont fix it, then its
a Windows PC in a nice big open box for me! Reply Warren O says: October 5, 2016 at
5:45 am After the upgrade, my 2013 rMBP wasnt running slow, but the fans were
running full tilt all the time. iStat showed low temps for the CPU/GPU, so it
seemed like it was running the fans unnecessarily. I did an SMC reset, and the fans
went back to normal. Other than this minor hiccup, Sierra has been a painless and
enjoyable upgrade. Reply RM says: October 5, 2016 at 6:43 am Havent upgraded yet,
curious if mdworker is still a ravenous whore. Reply Aviral Bansal says: October 5,
2016 at 10:07 am After update to Sierra, started having strange problem. In mission
control view I am able to move spaces around but not apps running in full screen
mode. They just drop down and disappear from the spaces tray and and then turn up
at the beginning of the end of the test. Called Apple support and they made me
reset the PROM. Has been working fine since. Reply Gonuchi says: October 5, 2016 at
10:21 am Was it slow? That sounds like a troubleshooting issue. There is a
ridiculously long post and comment section on Sierra troubleshooting here
http://osxdaily.com/2016/09/24/troubleshooting-macos-sierra-problems/ Did Apple
take your call despite not having warranty? Do they support Sierra on the phone?
Reply Charles says: October 5, 2016 at 10:19 am I believe the facial recognition
agent running in Sierra is called photoanalysisid because when the Mac is running
hot and fans are loud as can be that is often what you find taking up 100% of CPU
or more, slowing down the entire Mac. The bigger the photo library the longer
photoanalysisid runs and the more it slows down the Mac until it is finished. I
suspect if you really wanted to you could locate the photoanalysisid binary and
but it could break Photos app. I have not tested it yet. Anyway, if your Mac is
hot, slow and fans loud check for photoanalysisid it needs to run for like 10 hours
to finish. Crazy. Reply Rachel says: October 6, 2016 at 10:32 am Im just noticing
a few bugs on Apple Mail. It takes forever to send a messages, and it deleted all
of my signatures. Reply Rogier says: October 7, 2016 at 11:59 am 1. VLC player
stopped working 2. iTunesthe disaster keeps getting worse and worse. REALLY, COME
ON APPLE, WTF (every os update makes this program turn worse; I remember the last
one when it started creating many duplicates in the artists section) I have my
library on an external Toshiba Disc, which suddenly went from read & write to
read only. Also, iTunes suddenly cannot locate 1000s of files. Then: it keeps
switching to the standard iTunes Library on the Mac HD itself. iTunes also
crashes/doesnt respond. When will you start debugging this program? Yes, Im
frustrated with this. The last few updates really didnt make anything better and
causes a lot of work to fix stuff again. Reply Steve says: December 13, 2016 at
10:18 pm Rogier, I had the same problem with my Toshiba drive. I had to install
Tuxera Software to be able to read and write on the NTFS format drive. Hope this
helps. Reply ben says: October 7, 2016 at 1:27 pm I had most of these issues and
more, constantly maxing out of fan, processor, apps running slow etc etc until i
found this https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/49163
and unplugged my external screen! now it runs beautifully! insane but there we
are Reply Ken says: October 7, 2016 at 2:44 pm It says photoanalysisd 102.9% CPU.
It takes several to open any folder. It has been doing that process for 6:20:00
Reply Paul says: October 7, 2016 at 4:39 pm You probably have a lot of photos
stored in the Photos app, it can take many hours to finish analyzing photos for
facial and feature recognition. Let it run overnight, it should be done by morning
unless you have an enormous photo library. Reply pinkhousegirl says: October 17,
2016 at 7:02 am I have upgraded to Sierra and it took about an hour to restore
photo library. But I still cant upload any photos which is very annoying as I need
to do this for work. Does anyone have any suggestions. Photo library has about 50k
photos. Should I just clock on upload and leave it (I just get a spinning wheel).
grateful for any help, thanks Reply Ken says: October 7, 2016 at 2:45 pm several
seconds Reply Gerald says: October 8, 2016 at 3:00 am Hi This upgrade is
catastrophic for me.It took a whole day to get back running as before on an old
MacBook, but it is even worse on a more recent iMac. Nothing wrong shows in the
activity monitor but every single application takes for ever: uploading 3 pictures
to my website dashboard has taken 1h and 13 minutes !!! Firefox crashes 2 to 3
times an hour and even Safari freezes for extended periods. What a mess this system
makes. Reply Myla says: October 11, 2016 at 7:11 pm #3 worked like a charm, thanks!
Reply Meri says: October 12, 2016 at 12:00 pm Drag and drop is SO slow. I cant
move files aroundtakes minutes per file. Windowserver was taking up most of my
CPUdown to 16% today so maybe the index is finishing. Is my OS Sierra conflicting
with MS office 2011is that why everything is SO slow? Ready to downgrade OS
systems unless this changes by tomorrow. Reply Iain says: October 12, 2016 at 11:29
pm My fans run constantly when I open Safari, Activity Monitor show no other
recognition), just safari. Any ideas why? Reply Carl Fontbath says: October 13,
2016 at 10:05 am Show all tasks for all users in Activity Monitor to get an
accurate representation of activity, kernel_task and WindowServer are often doing
something busy, swapping or drawing transparency, etc. For Safari: Its probably
Safari media, maybe a video. Dont use Flash or Java with Safari, both will make it
run poorly. Beyond that it could be an extension or plug-in, all of which perform
poorly in my experience. Remove any extensions from Safari, clear cache, dont
leave tabs open if they wont be used, etc. Using Chrome can be a good test too.
Reply Daniella says: October 13, 2016 at 2:57 pm Hi there, I just updated my
MacBook Pro to Sierra and I cant work anymore with my computer !! It ist extremely
slow it takes about 5 min just to open a window what should I do Im pretty
scared that it the mac will stay this way Reply Scott Porter says: October 17, 2016
at 1:30 am Best idea is not to use Safari, to be honest. Chrome is a much more
capable browser, and will not stress the CPU/batteries as much. If youre stuck in
the Apple bubble, you may not be aware of other software, but its out there if you
look! Reply Rob says: October 17, 2016 at 9:25 am Ive been running Sierra for a
couple weeks now. It runs pretty much like El Capitan. Except. Photos Faces (or
People now) is very very slow. Im not sure if it is running the new algorithm each
time I open a face or if its experiencing a problem, or if its just buggy.
Anyway, thats my take on it and thats my experience at this time. Reply Chloe
says: October 21, 2016 at 9:38 am I found this tip about the secd helped:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7684723?start=0&tstart=0 Reply kathy says:
October 25, 2016 at 10:39 am Microsoft Outlook 2017 for Mac is ridiculously slow.
Almost 5 minutes to open, and often closes itselfand cant hit on button in dock
to reopen window, even thought its open. Reply lassi says: October 27, 2016 at
12:57 am This could be pretty much a copy-paste from any other osx update and I
strongly suspect so. Actualy fixes would be appreciated to situations where disk
reads are slow as f- but disk bench gets 90mbyte/s easily yet copying files takes
minutes when it should take mere seconds. and apps take forever to load and they
are not hogging the cpu either, just waiting the os to switch some flag or another.
Reply Robin says: November 2, 2016 at 6:43 am Maybe you could solve this not
easier, but easier ;-) Create a new user account and copy all the very needed
(app) files such as preferences to the new user. I experienced a very fast
setting. Reply Roxanne says: November 6, 2016 at 12:30 pm UGH. I installed Sierra
yesterday, and it destroyed an entire day of productivity while it installed. I
left it overnight to process, came back today expecting better performance.
Instead, its slower. Powerpoint wont run and constantly freezes when I do get it
running. Even opening Finder takes forever. HATE IT. Have disabled Siri (didnt
want it in the first place) but that doesnt seem to help. This seems like the
worst upgrade ever, especially for people with deadlines to complete. Reply Rade
Naumoski says: December 14, 2016 at 1:45 am Had same issues. Need to run following
commands in Terminal. sudo mdutil -E / This will delete & reindex Spotlight. Allow
to run overnight it takes forever. Reply MC says: November 7, 2016 at 10:24 am
Hi, Microsoft Office wont work properly with upgrading to Sierra on MacBook air.
Many thanks in advance. Reply MacA says: November 14, 2016 at 5:51 am Not sure
everyone has the same problem. After updated to Sierra, each time i turn on my Mac,
my ipad and android tablets that connected to wifi unable to to connect to or very
slow loading pages. Once I was thinking probably the server but thennope.is my
mac.each time i put my mac to sleep or turn off wifi, both ipad and tablet
working as normal but then i open my mac and start browsing, my ipad and tablets
again.very slow and sometimes lost connection too.need help here Reply mark sins
says: November 14, 2016 at 3:33 pm had the same issue. tried all sorts of
suggestions from here and other places. Only thing that has worked is de-installing
kaspersky internet security as I noticed kav was constantly running. I currently
have no protection so will retry installing but speed back to normal without
kaspersky. Reply mark sins says: November 17, 2016 at 9:29 am Right ignore what I
said about uninstalling kaspersky, the problem re-occurred. I think i have now
sussed it. My mac is now running erfectly after doing a NVRAM reset ( alt/cmd/p/r
at reboot ). I also did an smc reset but pretty sure it was the nvram reset which
cured it. Reply Kaitensatsuma says: November 18, 2016 at 6:48 am This probably
isnt the place to raise the issue, but is it just me or it infinitely odd that it
is up to users to work around the issues that Apple has introduced as a part of the
new operating system? Not even solve or disable, which are usually available, but
literally have towork around or Put up with Reply Carlos says: November 21, 2016
at 5:40 pm Is there any advice on the reason why macOS Sierra seems to run slower
on less than 3GB RAM macs than in those with more? It seems obvious but even after
clearing lots of clutter and extensions, etc it should be performing fine but it
doesnt. Just updated my Mac Mini late 2012 and although there is plenty of
storage, it comes down to maybe not enough RAM. Or, isnt it? Reply Sheryl says:
December 4, 2016 at 10:28 am My MacBook Pro is a mid 2012 model. I implemented few
of the fixes I found here and on another site and my Sierra is running well so far
on the day after installation. Last night I did notice a few issues with freezing
(not being able to click on hyperlinks, additional tabs, other apps, etc.) that I
havent seen yet today. Before I installed Sierra I was having issues with random
restarts that began a few days after I installed Sophos antivirus. I uninstalled
Sophos but waited until my Sierra upgrade to implement a fix that seemed to work
for some. I hope it works for me too because the restarts are more than annoying.
Reply Ron says: December 6, 2016 at 12:00 pm My wife loved her iMac for a few
years, after the OSX update I find her crying at her desk. So far Ive spent a few
hours following all the recovery advise online here. Apple was my last hope for a
usable desktop for a non tech artist, forcing features on your user community put
Apple in the same useless crap hole as Microsoft. Now until I can get her using
Linux Ill be stuck in the hell created by business people who have no creative
vision. Man I miss Steve Jobs. Reply Phan Steven says: December 6, 2016 at 12:11 pm
worthwhile to downgrade rather than be annoyed or upset. I have downgraded one of
my macs from sierra to El Cap and it runs OK again. Then another one of my Macs
runs fine with Sierra. The irony is the machines are exactly the same, they have
cloned data and user preferences through Migration Assistant. Why one works and the
other doesnt, who knows, Sierra is buggy. Reply Bruce Bathols says: December 8,
2016 at 10:33 pm My late 2013 21.5 iMac has always been a slow starter to boot up.
Upgraded to Sierra, and it runs even slower. Not impressed ! It now takes 3 minutes
from the boing at switch on for the Apple icon to appear, then a further 2
minutes for it to for
the boot sequence to complete. Am considering upgrading the HDD to SSD. Memory is
8GB. I was running Parallels as I have MYOB business accounting system in Windows.
I have now totally deleted Parallels and have re-instated an old Windows laptop for
my accounting. Deleting Parallels made no difference. Anyone got clues on this ?
Anyone got any clues on this ? Reply Martin says: December 10, 2016 at 4:47 am My
MacBook Pro is very slow after the update. It takes hours to do tasks that only is
marked with a few minutes. The system CPU usage is about 2%. The user CPU usage is
about 2%. And the idle CPU is about 96%. And there is no heavy programs running.
But still it is unbelievably slow. And it started shortly after the update. I am
searching for advise on how to solve it rather quickly, because Im in the midst of
writing an very big and important exam paper. Thanks for replying in advance. Reply
Xrisomalis says: December 10, 2016 at 9:24 am I have finally figured out why, after
upgrading to macOS Sierra on my Mini Mac 2010, it runs slow. It is nothing more
than MEMORY. This machine had 2GB of physical memory and 300GB of storage. Sierra
needs more PHYSICAL MEMORY to make everything move fast. I purchased two (2) 4GB
from Crucial which lifted my PHYSICAL MEMORY up to 8GB. FINALLY, my MacMini is
running like a champ just the way it is supposed to be. I had read all the other
threads and searched the internet for the answer. NO ONE had every posted anything
about memory. They stated it would take time for the applications to catalogue
sync blah blah blah. Now, the memory is priced reasonably and TOTALLY simple to
install. Check out a video on YouTube to learn how to remove the old PHYSICAL
MEMORY and install the new. It took me ten minutes and couldnt wait to share this
info with everyone. Reply cherriez88 says: December 27, 2016 at 9:46 pm One thing
to update in this article is Keyboard Slow Response when typing & instructions to
fix this issue: Choose Apple menu > System Preferences, then click Accessibility.
Click Keyboard, then select Enable Slow Keys. Click Options, then drag the
Acceptance Delay slider to set how long you want your Mac to wait before it
responds after the key is pressed. Source: https://support.apple.com/kb/PH18416?
locale=en_US Reply Greg says: January 3, 2017 at 1:11 pm I use a macbook pro Mid
2012 15 inch. It is running exremely slow. sometimes it takes 5 to 10 seconds to
see what I type on the keyboard appearing on my screen. I noticed my mac was
running slower and slower with every update. What i hear from apple resellers is
that apple made the new OS for the new macs, it expects the use of a SSD drive
(witch is probably related with features such as the new indexation of Photo and
Siri thats not optimised for our old and slow hard drives ). Reply Andre Felix
says: January 11, 2017 at 2:52 pm I like to tell a story about the use of your
desktop for files and folders. 1. It is using power to redraw the icons and files.
2. It looks like crap and you give the impression that you are not organized. 3. If
you have a crash of your hard drive the files on the desktop are the first to go
and you will not get them back. I had this happen (3) to me and I had to reshoot a
clients images all over again as I had put the folder with all the images on the
desktop and was going to make a backup later. Wrong move! Reply Roger says: May 21,
2017 at 9:34 pm You can use your desktop as a desktop by using aliases. Put your
files and folder in Documents and create an alias for those you have to have on the
desktop. https://support.apple.com/kb/PH19065?locale=en_US Reply Attila KB says:
January 17, 2017 at 9:38 am I tried everything you listed. I appreciate the you
putting this list together, but it did not help. I have Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015,
2.2 GHz Intel Core i7, 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3, Intel Iris Pro 1536 MB, and SSD I just
upgraded to Sierra it takes about 2 to 3 seconds for an image to preview
first 10 seconds. I had El Captain before everything was lightning fast. Reply
Baffour Ankomah says: February 18, 2017 at 8:27 am After installing macOS Sierra
10.12.3, I cant any longer manually control the icons on the desktop of my macbook
pro retina 13. What can I do to go back to manually arrange the icons as I want,
not as the auto-arrange wants? Reply Mitch says: May 1, 2017 at 8:11 am Nothing of
all suggested solutions solved the sluggishness of my MacBook Pro (13-inch, mid-
2012) after I upgraded to OS X Sierra from OS X El Capitan. What I did eventually
after doing all the suggested solutions (from here and other sources and from
different people) was to install a fresh OS X Sierra, wiping out all the previous
OS and files entirely from the hard drive. Voila! Fast as it was when I first used
this laptop 5 years ago. The drawback is that you will have to backup everything. I
think the sluggishness is something to do with the apps installed when the OS was
El Capitan, creating some incompatibility problems with Sierra. (Although I never
considered this solution because my old apps works fast after clean-install.)
Reply s says: May 27, 2017 at 7:03 am Perceived slowdown ?? I just got a
spinning colored pinwheel as I tried to type the first word of this sentence. You
make it sound like we are just idiots that cant use a computer. The suggestions
you make are useless, and to suggest that a machine with 2GB of RAM cant handle a
messy desktop is absurd ! Do you remember the days of computers that had 128 MB of
RAM, and 300 Mhz speeds ? Even then, the slowdown from having a cluttered desktop
was minimal. Stop trying to glorify Apples failure, and put the blame on the user.
Reply DANIELRP says: July 29, 2017 at 1:40 pm I have a MacBook Pro late 2011.
Everything was fine while I was running with LION until the moment that I decided
to upgrade to SIERRA on July 2017. My Mac became slow, very slow! For your
reference, it took around 8 minutes to open the browser Safari. You can imagine?!
I then phoned Apple Support and followed all their instructions. Nothing worked!! I
thought that the problem was caused by memory RAM, as I had 4GB (2 slots with 2GB
each). I then talked with several authorized Apple offices and all them suggested
me to install an SSD. I followed their suggestion and.. it worked!! Now my MacBook
is very very fast. It opens several apps at same time in an impressive speed. I am
very satisfied now. Note that I did not have to change my memory RAM. I still have
4GB RAM. Another point of interest: my original HD has 500GB. However, I bought a
SSD of only 120GB. So, I decided to remove my DVD and installed my original HD
500GB in its place. Now my MacBook does not read DVD, but I have 720GB HD and a
very fast notebook. This is my experience. Reply Leave a Reply Name (required) Mail
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Tips & Tricks Jailbreak News iOS macOS Sierra Slow? Heres Why & How to Speed
Sierra Up Oct 4, 2016 - 74 Comments Some Mac users who have updated to macOS
Sierra have felt their computer is running slower than it should be. If you have
noticed a performance hit after upgrading to macOS Sierra, there is likely a good
reason for it, and its even more likely to have a simple solution. Read on to
learn why macOS Sierra may be running slow (some MacBook users notice their Mac is
hot and fans are blasting away too), and what you can do about it. 5 Ways to Speed
Up MacOS Sierra OK so lets assume your Mac with macOS Sierra is running slow. Why?
How? And more importantly, what can you do it about it to speed up your computer
again? Lets review five main reasons and what to do so speed things up in Sierra
again, and also discuss some other reasons a Mac might be slow. 1: Slow Mac After
Sierra Update? Fans Blazing? WAIT! Immediately after updating to macOS Sierra, the
Mac must re-index the drive for use with Spotlight and Siri, the built-in search
functions in Mac OS. This can take quite a while to complete, particularly if you
have a large hard drive with a ton of files. It is important to just let this
process complete itself, interrupting Spotlight indexing will cause Spotlight to
not work properly, and it will just attempt to re-index again anyway. Another
possible cause of a perceived slowdown after updating to macOS Sierra is the new
Photos app, which indexes and scans all photos for identifiable features and faces.
This can take quite a while as well, particularly if you have a very large Photos
app library. This is another process that you need to let complete in order for
Photos to work properly. The solution? Wait it out. I know, waiting isnt always
satisfying, but its easy and it works! For the vast majority of users, the reason
their Mac feels slow after updating to macOS Sierra is because of the reindexing
features that are going on in the background. These tasks can consume a notable
amount of CPU cycles as they complete, leading to blazing fans, slow performance,
and Mac that feels like its running hot, but once the background tasks are
finished the Mac will be speedy again. (this can also be the case with iOS 10
sluggishness, by the way). Let the Mac sit turned on overnight while its not in
use, and all indexing processes should be complete by morning
with performance returned to normal. 2: Mind Your Messages Do you use the Mac
Messages app? If so, pay attention if you are receiving tons of animated GIFs and
stickers, which can arrive in abundance from an iOS 10 iPhone user who is having
fun with the new Messages stickers, gifs, effects, and other chaos that can be sent
from iOS 10 Messages app. Receiving animated GIFs in particular can cause a
temporary slowdown on the Mac and in the Messages app in particular, if those
message windows are open and actively on display and animating as intended. The
good news is that the animated gifs will stop playing and pause automatically once
they are off screen in the Messages app, so just send a few messages in response,
or clear the chat log, and Messages app will be smooth again and whatever sluggish
behavior will remedy itself. While gifs, effects, and stickers are undoubtedly fun
(even though you cant send the message effects back from a Mac for now anyway),
just have a little awareness about leaving these message windows open on the Mac.
spike in CPU activity. 3: Use Reduce Transparency & Reduce Motion Eye candy effects
like transparent windows and overlays sure look nice, but they can also lead to
performance reduction as each new window requires more system resources to draw and
maintain. Additionally, the Mac has many motion type effects within Mission Control
and elsewhere that zip and zoom around. Fortunately macOS Sierra allows you to turn
this eye candy off, which can result in a notable performance increase,
particularly for power users who have a lot of apps or windows open concurrently.
Open the Apple menu and go to System Preferences, then choose Accessibility Go
to Display settings Check the box for Reduce motion and Reduce transparency
Exit out of System Preferences This will have an immediate effect on the appearance
of Mac windows, titlebars, sidebars, and other UI elements by using reduced
transparency, and you wont see as many animations throughout Mac OS either with
Reduce Motion turned on as well, which is a new option in Sierra. The result can be
a speedier Mac. 4: Clean Off a Cluttered Desktop Many Mac users store tons of files
on their desktops, resulting in a very cluttered desktop full of files and folders
and other stuff. Dont do this. It can slow down performance. The easiest solution
to this is to drag and drop everything from the desktop into a separate folder on
the desktop, call it Clutter or Desktop stuff or whatever you want, and then
open and use that folder when you need to access your desktop stuff. Another option
is to hide all desktop icons completely using a defaults command, but that is best
for advanced users since it involves the Terminal and disabling the Desktop
feature. 5: Check Activity Monitor for Background Tasks & Oddities If a Mac feels
sluggish, the simplest way to quickly see if something is actively consuming
resources on a Mac is with Activity Monitor. You can open Activity Monitor from
/Applications/Utilities/ then go to the CPU tab and sort by % CPU, the topmost
items will show you what, if anything, is using high amounts of CPU (shown as a
percentage of CPU resources). In this screenshot example, the mds and
mds_stores processes are running and using a notably high level of CPU these
processes, along with mdworker are part of the aforementioned Spotlight indexing
that will complete itself. Until these are finished running, the Mac may feel a bit
slower than usual. Other than normal system background tasks and apps, its
possible youll find an errant process or unusual task running and taking up a lot
of CPU. If this is the case, quit out of the application as usual, or if its a
background task, you may need to update the parent application to be compatible
with Sierra. Advanced users can force quit the app, or even uninstall and remove
the app if it wont behave at all. Absolutely do not start force quitting random
tasks and processes, the Mac has many system tasks that run in the background and
if forcibly quit it will certainly mess something up and cause bigger problems.
Consider Alternate Causes of Slowdowns If youve tried all of the above and youre
still experiencing what you consider to be unusual slowdowns or sluggish behavior
with macOS Sierra, its always possible there is something else going on. Maybe
its an incompatibility with a specific app, maybe its Time Machine stalling out
and grinding resources while it prepares for eternity, or maybe youre experiencing
a rare but truly problematic macOS Sierra experience full of kernel errors and
other headaches. You can engage in troubleshooting various Sierra difficulties, or
you can always clean install Sierra or even downgrade macOS Sierra and revert back
to the prior Mac OS X version if you declare its all too much of a hassle. Another
aspect worth noting is that some users have reported slower perceived internet
speeds with Sierra, often with a less reliable wireless connection. If that
describes your situation, you might be able to fix a macOS Sierra wi-fi issue with
these instructions. Did you notice a change in performance after updating to macOS
Sierra? Did any slow behavior resolve by waiting or trying the tips above? Is your
Mac faster or slower with Sierra? Let us know your experiences in the comments.
below: 646 548 Related articles: MacOS Sierra 10.12.2 Beta 2 Released macOS
Sierra 10.12.1 beta 2 Released How to Hide MacOS Sierra Update Banner from the Mac
App Store Second macOS Sierra GM Seed Available for Testers Posted by: Paul
Horowitz in Mac OS X, Tips & Tricks, Troubleshooting 74 Comments Comments RSS
Feed Matthew says: October 4, 2016 at 1:19 pm Spotlight, Photos, iCloud Photos, all
took about 6 hours to complete on my Mac after Sierra installed. Then it was good
to go after that. I installed in the evening and opened Photos and noticed it was
scanning stuff so I let it sit until it finished. Sierra performance wise runs
about the same as El Capitan. Overall I find Sierra to be more buggy and I get
weird errors and have to reboot more often which is annoying, hope an update fixes
that part. Otherwise I like Sierra. Reply Miguel says: November 20, 2016 at 11:46
pm What Mac are you using? I upgraded to Sierra on my 2011 Macbook Pro 13 inch and
it was very slow even as I tried reducing all the effects and letting everything
Reply analog5 says: June 20, 2017 at 4:55 am I own a 2016 MacBook Pro ntb and
safari loads basic sites and the homepage really slowly. Some sites it loads fast.
But Firefox is a lot faster. Its problem however is that it crashes and also
freezes up the entire system at times. Reply OJ says: October 4, 2016 at 1:42 pm I
found Safari running really slow with Mac Sierra, so I removed all extensions and
cleared the cache and it was fine after that. Also Mac OS Sierra version 10 of
Safari cant handle as many tabs, so dont open too many tabs. Reply CFM says:
November 27, 2016 at 1:55 pm I find the same thing with Sierra. Safari is quite
slow. Ive cleaned the caches, but can you help me clean the extensions? I dont
know how to do that. Reply Sven says: October 4, 2016 at 2:08 pm I really like your
site and appreciate your advices. But honestly, saying Do not use your desktop as
a desktop is something i cant agree with. Putting stuff on the desktop is
intuitive and shouldnt bother our expensive machines, else something is wrong.
Reply Paul says: October 4, 2016 at 2:48 pm Sven, using the desktop as a desktop is
fine, and having a reasonable number of files on the desktop wont matter, but if
you have hundreds of files kept cluttered on the desktop it can become noticeable
and impact performance. This is because each desktop file and icon is drawn as an
element with a live preview on the screen, taking up resources to display. The
advice is really for people who have tons and tons of stuff on their desktops.
Reply tuqqer says: October 4, 2016 at 4:08 pm Its relative. You can use your
desktop as a desktop with a dozen files and 6 folders and you wont see a slow
down. If using your desktop means 140 files and 32 folders, youll see a slowdown.
method. They all experience slowdowns at weird times. But at that point, I contend
that thats not using a Desktop as a Desktop. Its bad file management. Reply JA
says: October 4, 2016 at 3:22 pm Increase contrast looks so MacOS 6! Reply Steve
Dietrich says: October 4, 2016 at 4:49 pm If I understand what the article is
saying is that Apple is running facial recognition on my photos is there a way to
kill this.. Reply Alan says: October 4, 2016 at 5:33 pm Facial recognition
happens in software on the computer locally, Apple is not running it remotely. It
is done securely on the local machine. You can not currently disable facial
recognition in Photos app, the only way to prevent that is by not using Photos app.
Reply Michael Vallance says: October 4, 2016 at 4:58 pm Sierra very slow on my 2012
iMac 27; even after 5 days. Quite disappointed really. However, it may be due to
Microsoft Office as that crashes all the time so am awaiting a M$oft update before
I revert to Yosemite. Reply RAN says: December 1, 2016 at 1:07 pm Sierra was
running very slow on my 13 MacBook Pro (mid-2012) and Ive noticed issues with
Microsoft Office
as well, in particular with Word. Turning off Siri seems to have helped with
computer speed. If you figure out what the issue is with Office though let me know!
Reply Greg Csullog says: January 9, 2017 at 2:20 pm Since installing Sierra 10.2.2,
my 2012 Mac Mini is essentially unusable. After only a few minutes use after
booting up, I see the colour wheel after just about every character typed or mouse
click. Sometimes it takes 4-5 minutes between clicks for an app to respond. Right
now I am on my 2008 iMac with El Capitan 10.11.6. I reinstalled Sierra twice same
problem with delays and the colour wheel. My next move is to blow away my main
drive (I have dual 1 TB drives) and reinstall Sierra. If the problem persists after
that then I have NO idea what to do next. As an FYI, both my drives are encrypted
and my firmware is password protected. Reply J Carr says: October 4, 2016 at 5:21
pm Ive notice a general increase in speed. Things are generally snappier. No
anyway if they EVER get around to updating the hardware) The only slowdown I
notice is when the online backup program is running but this is no different from
elCap. I just pause it if it is annoying. Reply John Lang says: October 4, 2016 at
8:21 pm Did you use the Sierra patch tool or go with the firmware patch? I went the
firmware route and its working very well. Reply Wharf Xanadu says: October 4, 2016
at 5:41 pm Safari has some kind of issue and it is slow. Reply Anne says: October
4, 2016 at 5:51 pm If I never use Siri or Spotlight it sounds like not upgrading my
2012 Mac Mini is a good idea. Im still debating about my iPad. Reply Jason says:
October 5, 2016 at 8:00 am Im running it on a 2011 MacBook Pro without issue. Just
let it bake overnight and life will be fine. Disable sleep after X minutes will
help keep it awake over night while all the indexing apps finish their work. Reply
J-L says: October 4, 2016 at 10:17 pm On the whole Sierra performs well after a
problem free installation. Disk free space went from 75 to 125 Gb. I had an issue
where fans were blazing while using Safari. After troubleshooting this turned out
to be Trusteer Rapport. Switched it off and all good.
https://discussions.apple.com/search.jspa?q=trusteer+rapport&after=month Reply J R
Rockwell says: October 5, 2016 at 9:46 am There are many app and accessory
incompatibilities with Sierra, especially for such a minor OS update. At this point
unless you somehow desperately need Siri on the Mac I would not recommend anyone
update until the issues have been sorted out and apps have been updated to work
together. 10.12.1 is going to be out soon but third party app makers need to work
on their part too. Reply Tarquin Shrapnel-Carruthers says: October 4, 2016 at 10:58
pm Both late-2013 iMac and 2012 MBA feel sluggish. Photos facial recognition is a
Reply jolehp says: October 4, 2016 at 11:12 pm I just found out that now we have
reduce motion like on iOS.. Im suprised :D Reply Bernard says: October 5, 2016 at
12:41 am Yet another nail in the coffin of It just works. Reply ab65 says:
October 5, 2016 at 12:52 am Since Ive disabled Spotlight completely from system.
(use find any file instead) Old MBP 8.2 (16GB memory/ SSD) does his job to my
contentedness. No more mds worker nagging cpu. Not to mention Spotlight doesnt
find anything in the first place. Reply maccy mcmacface says: October 5, 2016 at
2:17 am Since I installed Sierra, my GPU failed. Mid 2011 iMac. Waiting to hear if
Apple think that European trade law applies. Coincidence? Probably but who knows?
for me! Reply Warren O says: October 5, 2016 at 5:45 am After the upgrade, my 2013
rMBP wasnt running slow, but the fans were running full tilt all the time. iStat
showed low temps for the CPU/GPU, so it seemed like it was running the fans
unnecessarily. I did an SMC reset, and the fans went back to normal. Other than
this minor hiccup, Sierra has been a painless and enjoyable upgrade. Reply RM says:
October 5, 2016 at 6:43 am Havent upgraded yet, curious if mdworker is still a
ravenous whore. Reply Aviral Bansal says: October 5, 2016 at 10:07 am After update
to Sierra, started having strange problem. In mission control view I am able to
move spaces around but not apps running in full screen mode. They just drop down
and disappear from the spaces tray and and then turn up at the beginning of the end
of the test. Called Apple support and they made me reset the PROM. Has been working
fine since. Reply Gonuchi says: October 5, 2016 at 10:21 am Was it slow? That
sounds like a troubleshooting issue. There is a ridiculously long post and comment
section on Sierra troubleshooting here
http://osxdaily.com/2016/09/24/troubleshooting-macos-sierra-problems/ Did Apple
take your call despite not having warranty? Do they support Sierra on the phone?
Reply Charles says: October 5, 2016 at 10:19 am I believe the facial recognition
agent running in Sierra is called photoanalysisid because when the Mac is running
hot and fans are loud as can be that is often what you find taking up 100% of CPU
or more, slowing down the entire Mac. The bigger the photo library the longer
photoanalysisid runs and the more it slows down the Mac until it is finished. I
suspect if you really wanted to you could locate the photoanalysisid binary and
but it could break Photos app. I have not tested it yet. Anyway, if your Mac is
hot, slow and fans loud check for photoanalysisid it needs to run for like 10 hours
to finish. Crazy. Reply Rachel says: October 6, 2016 at 10:32 am Im just noticing
a few bugs on Apple Mail. It takes forever to send a messages, and it deleted all
of my signatures. Reply Rogier says: October 7, 2016 at 11:59 am 1. VLC player
stopped working 2. iTunesthe disaster keeps getting worse and worse. REALLY, COME
ON APPLE, WTF (every os update makes this program turn worse; I remember the last
one when it started creating many duplicates in the artists section) I have my
library on an external Toshiba Disc, which suddenly went from read & write to
read only. Also, iTunes suddenly cannot locate 1000s of files. Then: it keeps
switching to the standard iTunes Library on the Mac HD itself. iTunes also
crashes/doesnt respond. When will you start debugging this program? Yes, Im
frustrated with this. The last few updates really didnt make anything better and
causes a lot of work to fix stuff again. Reply Steve says: December 13, 2016 at
10:18 pm Rogier, I had the same problem with my Toshiba drive. I had to install
Tuxera Software to be able to read and write on the NTFS format drive. Hope this
helps. Reply ben says: October 7, 2016 at 1:27 pm I had most of these issues and
more, constantly maxing out of fan, processor, apps running slow etc etc until i
found this https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/49163 and unplugged my
external screen! now it runs beautifully! insane but there we are Reply Ken says:
October 7, 2016 at 2:44 pm It says photoanalysisd 102.9% CPU. It takes several to
open any folder. It has been doing that process for 6:20:00 Reply Paul says:
October 7, 2016 at 4:39 pm You probably have a lot of photos stored in the Photos
app, it can take many hours to finish analyzing photos for facial and feature
recognition. Let it run overnight, it should be done by morning unless you have an
enormous photo library. Reply pinkhousegirl says: October 17, 2016 at 7:02 am I
have upgraded to Sierra and it took about an hour to restore photo library. But I
clock on upload and leave it (I just get a spinning wheel). grateful for any help,
thanks Reply Ken says: October 7, 2016 at 2:45 pm several seconds Reply Gerald
says: October 8, 2016 at 3:00 am Hi This upgrade is catastrophic for me.It took a
whole day to get back running as before on an old MacBook, but it is even worse on
a more recent iMac. Nothing wrong shows in the activity monitor but every single
application takes for ever: uploading 3 pictures to my website dashboard has taken
1h and 13 minutes !!! Firefox crashes 2 to 3 times an hour and even Safari freezes
for extended periods. What a mess this system makes. Reply Myla says: October 11,
2016 at 7:11 pm #3 worked like a charm, thanks! Reply Meri says: October 12, 2016
at 12:00 pm Drag and drop is SO slow. I cant move files aroundtakes minutes per
file. Windowserver was taking up most of my CPUdown to 16% today so maybe the
index is finishing. Is my OS Sierra conflicting with MS office 2011is that why
everything is SO slow? Ready to downgrade OS systems unless this changes by
tomorrow. Reply Iain says: October 12, 2016 at 11:29 pm My fans run constantly when
I open Safari, Activity Monitor show no other applications are hogging CPU % (e.g.
uploading to iCloud, reindexing, photo facial recognition), just safari. Any ideas
why? Reply Carl Fontbath says: October 13, 2016 at 10:05 am Show all tasks for all
users in Activity Monitor to get an accurate representation of activity,
kernel_task and WindowServer are often doing something busy, swapping or drawing
transparency, etc. For Safari: Its probably Safari
media, maybe a video. Dont use Flash or Java with Safari, both will make it run
poorly. Beyond that it could be an extension or plug-in, all of which perform
poorly in my experience. Remove any extensions from Safari, clear cache, dont
leave tabs open if they wont be used, etc. Using Chrome can be a good test too.
Reply Daniella says: October 13, 2016 at 2:57 pm Hi there, I just updated my
MacBook Pro to Sierra and I cant work anymore with my computer !! It ist extremely
slow it takes about 5 min just to open a window what should I do Im pretty
scared that it the mac will stay this way Reply Scott Porter says: October 17, 2016
at 1:30 am Best idea is not to use Safari, to be honest. Chrome is a much more
capable browser, and will not stress the CPU/batteries as much. If youre stuck in
the Apple bubble, you may not be aware of other software, but its out there if you
look! Reply Rob says: October 17, 2016 at 9:25 am Ive been running Sierra for a
couple weeks now. It runs pretty much like El Capitan. Except. Photos Faces (or
People now) is very very slow. Im not sure if it is running the new algorithm each
time I open a face or if its experiencing a problem, or if its just buggy.
Anyway, thats my take on it and thats my experience at this time. Reply Chloe
says: October 21, 2016 at 9:38 am I found this tip about the secd helped:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7684723?start=0&tstart=0 Reply kathy says:
October 25, 2016 at 10:39 am Microsoft Outlook 2017 for Mac is ridiculously slow.
Almost 5 minutes to open, and often closes itselfand cant hit on button in dock
to reopen window, even thought its open. Reply lassi says: October 27, 2016 at
12:57 am This could be pretty much a copy-paste from any other osx update and I
strongly suspect so. Actualy fixes would be appreciated to situations where disk
reads are slow as f- but disk bench gets 90mbyte/s easily yet copying files takes
minutes when it should take mere seconds. and apps take forever to load and they
are not hogging the cpu either, just waiting the os to switch some flag or another.
Reply Robin says: November 2, 2016 at 6:43 am Maybe you could solve this not
easier, but easier ;-) Create a new user account and copy all the very needed
(app) files such as preferences to the new user. I experienced a very fast
setting. Reply Roxanne says: November 6, 2016 at 12:30 pm UGH. I installed Sierra
yesterday, and it destroyed an entire day of productivity while it installed. I
left it overnight to process, came back today expecting better performance.
Instead, its slower. Powerpoint wont run and constantly freezes when I do get it
running. Even opening Finder takes forever. HATE IT. Have disabled Siri (didnt
want it in the first place) but that doesnt seem to help. This seems like the
worst upgrade ever, especially for people with deadlines to complete. Reply Rade
Naumoski says: December 14, 2016 at 1:45 am Had same issues. Need to run following
commands in Terminal. sudo mdutil -E / This will delete & reindex Spotlight. Allow
to run overnight it takes forever. Reply MC says: November 7, 2016 at 10:24 am
Hi, Microsoft Office wont work properly with upgrading to Sierra on MacBook air.
Many thanks in advance. Reply MacA says: November 14, 2016 at 5:51 am Not sure
everyone has the same problem. After updated to Sierra, each time i turn on my Mac,
my ipad and android tablets that connected to wifi unable to to connect to or very
slow loading pages. Once I was thinking probably the server but thennope.is my
mac.each time i put my mac to sleep or turn off wifi, both ipad and tablet
working as normal but then i open my mac and start browsing, my ipad and tablets
again.very slow and sometimes lost connection too.need help here Reply mark sins
says: November 14, 2016 at 3:33 pm had the same issue. tried all sorts of
suggestions from here and other places. Only thing that has worked is de-installing
kaspersky internet security as I noticed kav was constantly running. I currently
have no protection so will retry installing but speed back to normal without
kaspersky. Reply mark sins says: November 17, 2016 at 9:29 am Right ignore what I
said about uninstalling kaspersky, the problem re-occurred. I think i have now
sussed it. My mac is now running erfectly after doing a NVRAM reset ( alt/cmd/p/r
at reboot ). I also did an smc reset but pretty sure it was the nvram reset which
cured it. Reply Kaitensatsuma says: November 18, 2016 at 6:48 am This probably
isnt the place to raise the issue, but is it just me or it infinitely odd that it
is up to users to work around the issues that Apple has introduced as a part of the
new operating system? Not even solve or disable, which are usually available, but
literally have towork around or Put up with Reply Carlos says: November 21, 2016
at 5:40 pm Is there any advice on the reason why macOS Sierra seems to run slower
on less than 3GB RAM macs than in those with more? It seems obvious but even after
clearing lots of clutter and extensions, etc it should be performing fine but it
doesnt. Just updated my Mac Mini late 2012 and although there is plenty of
storage, it comes down to maybe not enough RAM. Or, isnt it? Reply Sheryl says:
December 4, 2016 at 10:28 am My MacBook Pro is a mid 2012 model. I implemented few
of the fixes I found here and on another site and my Sierra is running well so far
on the day after installation. Last night I did notice a few issues with freezing
(not being able to click on hyperlinks, additional tabs, other apps, etc.) that I
havent seen yet today. Before I installed Sierra I was having issues with random
restarts that began a few days after I installed Sophos antivirus. I uninstalled
Sophos but waited until my Sierra upgrade to implement a fix that seemed to work
for some. I hope it works for me too because the restarts are more than annoying.
Reply Ron says: December 6, 2016 at 12:00 pm My wife loved her iMac for a few
years, after the OSX update I find her crying at her desk. So far Ive spent a few
hours following all the recovery advise online here. Apple was my last hope for a
usable desktop for a non tech artist, forcing features on your user community put
Apple in the same useless crap hole as Microsoft. Now until I can get her using
Linux Ill be stuck in the hell created by business people who have no creative
vision. Man I miss Steve Jobs. Reply Phan Steven says: December 6, 2016 at 12:11 pm
worthwhile to downgrade rather than be annoyed or upset. I have downgraded one of
my macs from sierra to El Cap and it runs OK again. Then another one of my Macs
runs fine with Sierra. The irony is the machines are exactly the same, they have
cloned data and user preferences through Migration Assistant. Why one works and the
other doesnt, who knows, Sierra is buggy. Reply Bruce Bathols says: December 8,
2016 at 10:33 pm My late 2013 21.5 iMac has always been a slow starter to boot up.
Upgraded to Sierra, and it runs even slower. Not impressed ! It now takes 3 minutes
from the boing at switch on for the Apple icon to appear, then a further 2
minutes for it to for the boot sequence to complete. Am considering upgrading the
HDD to SSD. Memory is 8GB. I was running Parallels as I have MYOB business
accounting system in Windows. I have now totally deleted Parallels and have re-
instated an old Windows laptop for my accounting. Deleting Parallels made no
difference. Anyone got clues on this ? Anyone got any clues on this ? Reply Martin
says: December 10, 2016 at 4:47 am My MacBook Pro is very slow after the update. It
takes hours to do tasks that only is marked with a few minutes. The system CPU
usage is about 2%. The user CPU usage is about 2%. And the idle CPU is about 96%.
started shortly after the update. I am searching for advise on how to solve it
rather quickly, because Im in the midst of writing an very big and important exam
paper. Thanks for replying in advance. Reply Xrisomalis says: December 10, 2016 at
9:24 am I have finally figured out why, after upgrading to macOS Sierra on my Mini
Mac 2010, it runs slow. It is nothing more than MEMORY. This machine had 2GB of
minutes and couldnt wait to share this info with everyone. Reply cherriez88 says:
December 27, 2016 at 9:46 pm One thing to update in this article is Keyboard Slow
Response when typing & instructions to fix this issue: Choose Apple menu > System
Preferences, then click Accessibility. Click Keyboard, then select Enable Slow
Keys. Click Options, then drag the Acceptance Delay slider to set how long you want
your Mac to wait before it responds after the key is pressed. Source:
https://support.apple.com/kb/PH18416?locale=en_US Reply Greg says: January 3, 2017
at 1:11 pm I use a macbook pro Mid 2012 15 inch. It is running exremely slow.
sometimes it takes 5 to
10 seconds to see what I type on the keyboard appearing on my screen. I noticed my
mac was running slower and slower with every update. What i hear from apple
resellers is that apple made the new OS for the new macs, it expects the use of a
SSD drive (witch is probably related with features such as the new indexation of
Photo and Siri thats not optimised for our old and slow hard drives ). Reply Andre
Felix says: January 11, 2017 at 2:52 pm I like to tell a story about the use of
your desktop for files and folders. 1. It is using power to redraw the icons and
files. 2. It looks like crap and you give the impression that you are not
organized. 3. If you have a crash of your hard drive the files on the desktop are
the first to go and you will not get them back. I had this happen (3) to me and I
had to reshoot a clients images all over again as I had put the folder with all the
images on the desktop and was going to make a backup later. Wrong move! Reply Roger
says: May 21, 2017 at 9:34 pm You can use your desktop as a desktop by using
aliases. Put your files and folder in Documents and create an alias for those you
have to have on the desktop. https://support.apple.com/kb/PH19065?locale=en_US
Reply Attila KB says: January 17, 2017 at 9:38 am I tried everything you listed. I
appreciate the you putting this list together, but it did not help. I have Retina,
15-inch, Mid 2015, 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7, 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3, Intel Iris Pro 1536
MB, and SSD I just upgraded to Sierra it takes about 2 to 3 seconds for an image
to preview Everything is getting stuck. Whatever app I use CPU usage jumps to 99%
for the first 10 seconds. I had El Captain before everything was lightning fast.
Reply Baffour Ankomah says: February 18, 2017 at 8:27 am After installing macOS
Sierra 10.12.3, I cant any longer manually control the icons on the desktop of my
macbook pro retina 13. What can I do to go back to manually arrange the icons as I
want, not as the auto-arrange wants? Reply Mitch says: May 1, 2017 at 8:11 am
clean-install.) Reply s says: May 27, 2017 at 7:03 am Perceived slowdown ?? I
just got a spinning colored pinwheel as I tried to type the first word of this
sentence. You make it sound like we are just idiots that cant use a computer. The
suggestions you make are useless, and to suggest that a machine with 2GB of RAM
cluttered desktop was minimal. Stop trying to glorify Apples failure, and put the
blame on the user. Reply DANIELRP says: July 29, 2017 at 1:40 pm I have a MacBook
Pro late 2011. Everything was fine while I was running with LION until the moment
that I decided to upgrade to SIERRA on July 2017. My Mac became slow, very slow!
For your reference, it took around 8 minutes to open the browser Safari. You can
imagine?! I then phoned Apple Support and followed all their instructions. Nothing
worked!! I thought that the problem was caused by memory RAM, as I had 4GB (2 slots
with 2GB each). I then talked with several authorized Apple offices and all them
suggested me to install an SSD. I followed their suggestion and.. it worked!! Now
my MacBook is very very fast. It opens several apps at same time in an impressive
speed. I am very satisfied now. Note that I did not have to change my memory RAM. I
still have 4GB RAM. Another point of interest: my original HD has 500GB. However,
I bought a SSD of only 120GB. So, I decided to remove my DVD and installed my
original HD 500GB in its place. Now my MacBook does not read DVD, but I have 720GB
HD and a very fast notebook. This is my experience. Reply Leave a Reply Name
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OS X Daily

Speed up slow macOS Sierra

5 Ways to Speed Up MacOS Sierra

1: Slow Mac After Sierra Update? Fans Blazing? WAIT!

Spotlight running in background of Sierra needs to complete

Another possible cause of a perceived slowdown after updating to macOS Sierra is

2: Mind Your Messages

Messages gifs can slow down Messages app on Mac

Mac Messages slows down with animated gifs displayed

3: Use Reduce Transparency & Reduce Motion

4: Clean Off a Cluttered Desktop

Dont do this. It can slow down performance.

Dont have a cluttered desktop

Spotlight running in background of Sierra needs to complete

Consider Alternate Causes of Slowdowns

As an FYI, both my drives are encrypted and my firmware is password protected.

Im still debating about my iPad.

grateful for any help, thanks

Many thanks in advance.

Anyone got any clues on this ?

Choose Apple menu > System Preferences, then click Accessibility.

Click Keyboard, then select Enable Slow Keys.

1. It is using power to redraw the icons and files.

I just upgraded to Sierra it takes about 2 to 3 seconds for an image to preview

I had El Captain before everything was lightning fast.

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Shop for Apple & Mac Deals on Amazon.com

Speed up slow macOS Sierra

5 Ways to Speed Up MacOS Sierra

Spotlight running in background of Sierra needs to complete

Another possible cause of a perceived slowdown after updating to macOS Sierra is

2: Mind Your Messages

Messages gifs can slow down Messages app on Mac

Mac Messages slows down with animated gifs displayed

3: Use Reduce Transparency & Reduce Motion

4: Clean Off a Cluttered Desktop

Dont do this. It can slow down performance.

Dont have a cluttered desktop

5: Check Activity Monitor for Background Tasks & Oddities

Spotlight running in background of Sierra needs to complete

As an FYI, both my drives are encrypted and my firmware is password protected.

Im still debating about my iPad.

grateful for any help, thanks

Many thanks in advance.

Anyone got any clues on this ?

Choose Apple menu > System Preferences, then click Accessibility.

Click Keyboard, then select Enable Slow Keys.

1. It is using power to redraw the icons and files.

I just upgraded to Sierra it takes about 2 to 3 seconds for an image to preview

I had El Captain before everything was lightning fast.

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Shop for Apple & Mac Deals on Amazon.com

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