Troubleshooting a slow Mac - OSX 10.9.5 My 2012 MacBook Pro 15", OS X 10.9.5, 2.6 GHz i7, 16 GB RAM, 750 GB HDD, has been acting very slow recently. Starting up takes a long time, not only for the login screen to show (if starting up from being turned off), but once logged in it takes about 10-15 mins to become responsive to the point were the Finder or any of the programs are responsive enough to be used. 

Then during normal use the machine can be running fine, but flicking between finder windows, quick previewing an image in the finder using space bar, move files can cause it to hang when ill then have to wait, or force reboot the finder, using force quit. Generally though everything seems quite lethargic. 

The first thing I did was to check Activity Monitor, where as far as I can tell the Mac has got more that plenty of resources available (see below screenshots.) Although these are obviously taken at a set point in time they are pretty indicative of whats normally shown in the activity monitor.

I've checked to see if the machine's indexing, which it isn't.  I've also noticed that the when I first open the machine, Dropbox is starting up which seems to make everything quite slow, but I don't believe it's the only culprit. 

I suppose I could upgrade to an SSD, but dont particularly want to as they are quite expensive for 750GB and the machine as far as I can remember wasn't always this slow and I've always been running the same tasks on it. 

Is there anything else that I might have missed in trying to troubleshoot and resolve these issues?
The three simplest things to do to troubleshoot slowness is to write down what specifically you wish to optimize and then measure it. When you have a good baseline and preferably can reliably reproduce the conditions when it's slow.


Make a new empty user and set the Mac to not auto log in. Reboot and repeat the test with the new account.
Look in the console logs for storage errors and boot into recovery mode to run Disk Utility to check for catalog or other errors.
Install a clean OS onto a USB drive and boot from that. As long as the drive is reasonably fast, you should be a bit slower on the external drive and could even point a user home folder there back to the home folder on the internal drive to see if it's a system issue.


Unfortunately, I don't have a silver bullet, but once you narrow down things to user level slowness or system slowness or hardware errors/degradation then you can dig into Activity Monitor and see if CPU or RAM or storage is constrained when your slowness arrives. From your snapshots, you have plenty of RAM and the system should only get faster with use as files needed get cached in RAM. Your CPU doesn't look loaded at all, so I'm guessing network or storage issues from the data you have provided.