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ferencav

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 31, 2019
40
20
Today I restarted my iMac 2019 and suddenly it was very slow. Starting Chrome or Photoshop took more than a minute while normally this takes a few seconds. Also unhiding the dock or starting a new finder window took for ages. It felt like my old iMac when the HDD began to fail. I also got an error message from Creative Cloud: "Adobe Creative Cloud, needed to resolve this problem, is missing or damaged".

The only thing I could think of that had changed, was the internet connection went offline due to a malfunction with my provider.

I ran Etrecheck and after a long time it said "A process is using a large percentage of your CPU." The process was mentioned in the report as "Other processes 116.57 % (?) Activity monitor showed a very high CPU time for meta data server related processes. But there weren't any processes using a high amount of CPU at the time of checking.

Screenshot 2019-11-25 at 20.59.53.png



Then I used Disk Utility in Recovery Modus but the drive was ok. Back in MacOS everything was still going very slow. Than suddenly the internet connection came back and all the problems were gone! This was great, but my iMac should function normally when there is no internet. So I unplugged the router, restarted, but everything was still working great. Then I did a Apple Diagnostic test and all Hardware was functioning ok.

Does anyone know what this could have been?
 

Honza1

macrumors 6502a
Nov 30, 2013
933
433
US
I wonder, when you lost connection, was it between router and cable modem (or other device from provider)? If you unplug ethernet cable from the computer or disconnect from wifi, system knows it does not have internet connection. If you loose connection from router out, system can connect to router and may think that there should be connection to internet. And some process (iCloud update?) may hang.
Try disconnecting router from modem and see, if that causes the issue. But in any case, if this was some background update, it may not happen again anyway.
I do not remember seeing anything like this when I loose network connection.
Poking through system log - if you know the day/time and still have it, may tell you which process was spewing errors...
 

ferencav

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 31, 2019
40
20
I'm using an ADSL router which indicated there was no signal. When I wanted to simulate the same situation I just turned off the router. So indeed you're right, this isn't exactly the same.

I'm not very familiar with all the system log messages, but I notice a lot of "This service is defined to be constantly running and is inherently inefficient" messages for a variety of processes that day. Also a lot of "Class {classname} is implemented in both {url} and {url}. One of the two will be used. Which one is undefined." Don't know if these are common messages but I don't see them popping up in the system.log of today or yesterday.

I can imagine a process like iCloud update could hang when losing connection. But what I don't get is why the whole system became so slow and unresponsive, even after restarting.
 

geo88

macrumors member
Nov 19, 2019
53
26
Nashville, USA
I have experienced this kind of problem with Mojave when there is no internet. Adobe CC seems to choke quite a lot. Quitting CC helps system performance immediately. I've also noticed iCloud, Dropbox, and the Google Chrome software update daemon going nuts when they can't phone home.
 

ferencav

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 31, 2019
40
20
Glad to hear someone else had this before. I'm running all the software you mention so it could be one of those in deed. If this happens again I will try to quit every process one by one to see if this has any effect.
 
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