iMac slowing down

For the past several weeks I've noticed my iMac is "slowing down" and the dreaded "spinning wheel" is showing up more and more. The past few days the wheel has caused me to just shut the master power strip off and reboot the machine.

I don't really think it's anything physical, but rather something with software clutter (if that's the correct term). Feel like I'm back with a cluttered Windows machine.

Is there a thread or suggestions available to do some trouble shooting? I looked, probably not all that hard, but wasn't able to find anything.

From pigoo3, hope this helps
http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/ap...lot-beach-balls-recently-why.html#post1320497

You might start with repairing the permissions (open disk utilities). One of my staff frequently has your issue and a permissions repair usually resolves it (for a month or two anyway). Won't hurt anything even if it doesn't help.

Jim

How much free space does the hard drive enjoy?

Minimum of 15% required and some experts say up to 25%.

Those percentages are just theories, not actual proven rules. I'm a very strong advocate of keeping lots of free space available, but it's just ridiculous to say that the moment you install a 3TB hard drive in your Mac you now *need* to keep *at least* 450GB free for the machine to operate properly. That's just silly.

The TRUTH of the matter is that the amount varies by what you do with the machine, but as a rule of thumb a good idea would be to keep 20GB or more available at all times, and more available if you're moving big files around a lot. There is no precise "percentage," and no universal amount. Just a reasonable suggestion that varies depending on usage.

+1 for chas_m's comment. I think the free space required is more related to the kinds of applications you use. Most applications, as well as OSX itself, use disk space as "scratch" memory and put temporary files on it as you are doing work. That's how you can Cancel almost any edit, the application just goes back to the last version stored in that scratch memory. So if all you do is email, surf, chat, and you have a lot of internal RAM then you don't need a ton of free space on the hard drive, but if you routinely edit huge Photoshop files and keep lots of history layers, edit movies or huge audio files, etc, and routinely push the memory limits of your system, forcing OSX to swap out tons of data, then you need a LOT of disk space free.

Personally, I start to get nervous when I have less than 100 GB free on my boot drive and look to remove stuff that isn't critical to other locations. At 50 GB I force myself to take that action before I do any Photoshop work at all.