I have a 2018 MacBook Pro as my main computer. I’m on it all day most days. Months ago, I found it runs better if I reboot every morning. Otherwise, there’s a good chance it will slow to a crawl during the day.
Is this common? Is this something I should be concerned about? Is there a workaround? Some part of my brain thinks I should only reboot a Mac when required by system or app updates.
I guess I’m just curious about this. It’s not like the reboot is a big deal; I do it first thing in the morning while filling the dog’s water dishes.
IMHO not uncommon, although my sample size is small. Usually it means you have an app with a memory leak, or that there’s a background process running that’s sapping resources and temporarily shuts down / deactivates when you reboot.
I had a Mac Mini once where Keyboard Maestro kept gobbling memory until it was consuming gigabytes at a time.
Every day seems a bit much, but it wouldn’t bother me that much.
No, this should not be necessary, but it’ll be tricky to isolate. You might start with Activity Monitor, or perhaps running top in a terminal window, looking for processes that are continuously growing in memory and/or swap usage. Or you might try semi-randomly quitting apps or startup items until something happens.
Also check that the total amount of RAM is displaying correctly in About This Macintosh. Bad RAM is not likely with recent Macs (because of Apple QA), but bad RAM can cause this kind of behavior.
This is true but bad RAM usually results in random crashes as well. Still, easy to check as you’ve described. There is also a free version of memtest, which I’ve used successfully in the past.
I have a 2019 MBP which does well with current macOS and end user software with just an occasional reboot. But that’s nothing I schedule, and nothing I do more than a couple times a month.
The Mac does not slow down every day if I don’t reboot. It seems to go about 2-4 days with no problems. But rebooting every morning is easy to remember to do; rebooting every second, third, or fourth day is less easy to remember.
There are other things going on here–and this can definitely be construed as burying the most important part.
For several days this week I found that Internet access was running slow at lunchtime. Which is particularly annoying because you know what I like to do at lunch? Read on the Internet. You know what I don’t like to do? Troubleshoot networking problems.
Also, a couple of days ago, the Mac spontaneously rebooted when I was out of the room. Which is a big red flag.
However, no problems today.
And now here’s something potentially relevant: During the time I was having problems, I had Microsoft Edge open to Teams, because I’ve been having trouble with the Teams app on the Mac. Today, I have not been running Edge at all. Maybe not a coincidence; I know that fancy web pages (like Teams) can eat up memory.
I’ll keep an eye on things and make sure double-sure my backups are current.
It’s amazing that a five-year-old laptop is still good. I can remember when PCs became rubbish after three years, no longer able to run the latest software at decent performance.
I’m undecided about posting this comment because I’m not advocating that you do this, I am merely tossing an idea out there…
I wiped my hard-drive and did a fresh install of OS Ventura on my 2019 Intel MacBook Pro, and it’s been quite the revelation. I had like a decade of accumulated nonsense on mine as I migrated instead of doing a fresh install when I’d bought new devices. This was my motive for taking such brutal action; I could see files relating to software that had never even been on this specific device, which made me wonder what else was lurking on my device that I wasn’t even seeing (and by extension, what it was all up to).
I’ve not noticed a speed difference, but that’s because I hadn’t had an issue I’d observed with slowness. However, my battery now lasts a third longer than before, so I know that I’ve removed something (or some things) that were using power and processing without my knowledge.
Now, I had a somewhat crappy time with my wipe owing to not doing it correctly, but on the assumption that 99.9% of people do this correctly and have no issues, it’s not too bad. It’s stressful (erasing your hard-drive and imagining a future without all your files is a good way to raise your blood pressure), and it takes hours, but on balance I’m still glad I did it.
(I haven’t re-downloaded all the apps I need, I’ve mostly been doing it as it crops up in order to save my sanity. One huge caveat I’d add is do not do this unless you have a solid filing system for all your app purchases - mine are nicely filed in DT and it would’ve been brutal if I couldn’t easily find all my product license keys.)
Re rebooting regularly, I do my MBP on a Monday morning and that’s it for the week unless an app wants the device restarted.
I came here to say that I ran into the problem of the Internet slowing to a crawl again this morning. More precisely, the browser slows to a crawl when this happens, and it does not seem to matter what browser I use.
I wanted to take a break from work this morning and so I decided to run First Aid on the Mac while I sat with my iPad. I ran First Aid and it found corruption. Yay! It’s always good when you have a problem and the diagnostic finds a problem.
So I ran First Aid and … uh-oh. It failed. Several times.
I need to double-check this, but I think when I googled, the advice is to save backups, reformat the disk, and reinstall the operating system. I’ve checked my backups, and I’ll think about reformatting and reinstalling when I’m off deadline.
I’m concerned because I’ve already done this relatively recently, in early August.
Current plan: Finish work before my deadlines Monday, double-check whether reformat and reinstall is necessary, if it is then do so, and if the problem doesn’t go away I’m off to the Apple Store. Because this MBP is five years old, I’m thinking there may be an upgrade in my near future. I’m not happy about that—I was hoping to save the money. But if it comes to that I may be able to buy a MBP from CostCo, taking advantage of their generous returns/exchange policy, and then return it when the MBP comes back from the shop.
Update on this problem, primarily for the benefit of anybody Googling this in the future:
The problem got worse, as the Mac spontaneously rebooted, sometimes more than once in one day. Because technology is perverse, this happened when I was out of the room. But one day it happened when I was in the room and I saw the dreaded kernel panic warning before the machine restarted.
I Googled for a solution and found this
I did all the steps in those instructions but the final step, reinstalling the operating system. Googling for further help, I saw that I did not have to wipe and reformat the disk to reinstall the OS. I could do so leaving my applications and data intact. (I actually knew that already, but I had forgotten.)
So I checked to be sure my redundant backups were up-to-date (in case something went wrong), reinstalled the operating system, and now the Mac is running great for more than 12 days, with no reboots in all that time.
I was thinking actually that I’m a fraud as an MPU because my nearest Apple Store is in a pretty big mall and I don’t know the best place to park to get in and out of the Apple Store quickly, without having to hike much of the length of the mall to get from my car to the store.