Etrecheck says performance is poor. Any way to find out whats wrong? My 10-year-old iMac, running High Sierra, has been beach balling a lot while using Safari and other applications. I ran Etrecheck on my computer and it said my performance was poor. When I look up what that meant it gave me the following:


  Poor: Your machine is critically sick. You should make a backup or
  otherwise save critical documents immediately. Your machine likely
  needs hardware repair.


I have run it several times and keep getting performance is poor. Is Etrecheck considered good and if so, is there any way to tell what in particular it was referring to
Etrecheck is usually pretty reliable.

Your iMac is running on one of the latest software versions on a 10 year-old machine. 

Your iMac is too old to handle the latest software and to support peak performance therefore Etrecheck is displaying that message.

If you can I recommend downgrading your OS to an older version, one that your iMac can handle better. You can see how to downgrade in this article. 

If you don’t want to downgrade I still recommend creating a backup for your files. 

An additional test you can run is an Apple Hardware Test, by holding the D key on startup which might detect any other issues.