Sluggish Macbook Pro performance when connected to net

[Zech]

I've been getting a whole lot of beach-ball action during ordinary use of my Mac, when it's connected to the net. Ordinary operations (word processing, email, Internet and Evernote mainly) hang constantly for 15-30 seconds. Using browsers is slowest of all (especially Safari but also Firefox).

When not connected to the net, the problems generally clear up. This is the case whatever network I'm on, and it makes no difference whether the connection is Wifi or ethernet.

I've tried all the recommendations on previous threads - clearing caches and preferences, paring down login items, repairing disk permissions, full clean-up with Onyx etc.

The only thing I haven't tried is doing a clean reinstall of Yosemite - since I had the same problems before upgrading from Mavericks, it seemed a longshot.

Macbook Pro (2013), running Yosemite.

Can anyone help?

Thanks in advance.

 

[pigoo3]

I've tried all the recommendations on previous threads - clearing caches and preferences, paring down login items, repairing disk permissions, full clean-up with Onyx etc.

Can anyone help?

How full is your storage (gigs used, gigs free)?

- Nick

 

[MacInWin]

Also, sluggishness is a symptom of a failing hard drive. But the fact that it's only sluggish when on a network seem to imply something is going on connected to that function only. Could it be your network router is flooding the net with traffic? Have you looked at Network activity on Activity Monitor to see what is going on?

 

[Zech]

Thanks for getting back.

@pigoo3

I've got about 300GB unused out of 500.

@MacInWin
The strange thing is that the same problems occur when I'm on other networks, it's not just my home one.

Activity Monitor - doing low-level activity like I am now (I have Evernote, Word, Safari and Preview running, plus some background programs like Quicksilver and BetterSnapTool) - it shows 340,00 packets going out and 320,000 coming in. Data sent 250MB, data received 200MB.

(It also doesn't show anything taking up large amounts of CPU. "WindowServer" and "launchservicesd" are usually high up the list, but still only taking around 2-3%. If I open a new Safari window, "Safari" and "Safari Web Content" will jump up to about 10%, but only for a few seconds. With Memory, "kernel task" is usually taking up by far the most, about 500MB when doing ordinary activities like posting this message. I'm not quite sure how to interpret the stuff at the bottom - "Physical Memory" is 4.00GB, "Memory Used" is 3.92GB, "Virtual Memory" currently 7.02GB and "Swap Used" 76.3MB.)

Another thing I didn't mention is the login after sleep. When I'm networked, waking up the computer takes ages and the screensaver shows abstract blurred-out colours. Even getting the cursor to appear in the field to put in my password takes ages. When I'm not networked, I see the normal desktop colour and login takes a few seconds.

 

[MacInWin]

That's a LOT of traffic on the network, I'd suggest closing things one at a time until the traffic dies off. Sitting here with Safari and Mail running I'm showing maybe 5kb in, and 5kb out, less than 10 packets.

So, kill each application until you find the culprit, including the background apps.

 

[Zech]

Just to be clear, I was talking about the "packets in" / "packets out" / "data received" / "data sent" fields - not the "per second" equivalents. Those are much closer to your figures.

Do you still think that's a smoking gun?

 

[bobtomay]

packets in/out don't tell the story - mine is currently sitting at over 6 million packets in and 4.5 million packets out along with 6 GB of data in and 1.5 GB of data out and no issue related to my internet speed - on a 30Mbps down - 5 Mbps up connection with current connections using well under 5KBps.

I'd agree with MacInWin, time to start killing processes to see what is eating bandwidth.
I would start off by temporarily removing everything from your Login Items to eliminate those from the picture. If that solves it, you can add them back one at a time and testing to see if / when the issue reoccurs. (and don't start any of those up manually while testing)

 

[Dittoman1]

With Beachball, I m fine on any website except AOL. When I open AOL mail I get beachball so often,, I uninstall AOL and re install does the same thing. Surfing other than AOL, i don't see Beachball once??? Pondering

 

[MacInWin]

Yeah, what bobtomay said. If all you are getting is single digit packets per second, it's not the network traffic that is clobbering your performance, but it's something that might be trying to communicate and failing. So do what bobtomay suggested, kill them one at a time until the problem stops to identify what is the culprit. From there we can work on possible solutions.

 

[Zech]

For what it's worth, the culprit turned out to be Mail. I've managed to 'solve' this by basically keeping Mail shut most of the time.

It's not ideal though obviously, as I have to check my phone for any urgent emails and then either reply by phone or open it briefly on the Mac.

Mail is linked to my Gmail account and iCloud account. (I already took my work Outlook account off it a while back as it was very erratic.)

Does anyone have any idea why it would slow everything down in this way and how to stop it?