Late 2012 Imac 27'' constant beach ball loading and slow downs I just bought myself an iMac 27'' late 2012 model.



I am constantly getting beach balls and the computer slows to a crawl taking anywhere from 30 seconds to a minute to get back to regular speeds.

My normal programs are:

Rubymine
Parallels Desktop
Chrome
Skype

I've used a laptop with less specs than this iMac and it never had these terrible hiccups. What can I do verify what is causing the issue?

8GB is more than enough for what I'm using - is it just the Apple-tax that requires me to have even more ram?
It might help to examine how the machine's resource usage looks inside of Activity Monitor...Are the CPU cores maxed out? How about RAM usage - is there any green showing in the pie chart? Lastly - is the Disk Activity tab showing excessive write rates constantly occurring? 

Does the performance of the machine increase when you quit out of particular applications (namely Parallels?)

A defective hard drive could cause slowness, but this may be accompanied by other symptoms (crashing, audible clicking, logging of I/O errors). It may be prudent to run the Apple Hardware Test just to confirm tht the hardware is in good shape.