New imacs that are terrible.

Unfortunately the problems you are having are due to what you have done to the computer. Mac OS does NOT benefit in any way by adding any of the following types of third party apps:

• Antivirus
• Cleaning
• Security
• VPN
• Maintenenace

Your computer has Total AV installed. My recommendation would be to wipe your computer clean by following the steps in What to do before you sell, give away, trade in, or recycle your Mac - Apple Support and then start over and manually re-add your data and any third party apps. All Mac OS needs in order to remain safe, fast and stable is simply keep it up-to-date and restart the computer about 1x per week. That's it, very very simple.

Poisoning Internet performance:

By far the easiest way to cause poor performance, instability, overheating and crashing is to install ANY third-party speeder-uppers, Cleaners, Optimizers, Third-party Virus scanners, Bit Torrent, or a VPN that you installed yourself. They are relentless in scanning your files, non-stop, looking for virus-like patterns in Everything, or looking for files that have changed. When completed, they do it all again.

The idea that a third party, with no special knowledge of the inner workings of MacOS, can somehow find a simple way to protect or speed up your computer — that is not already being done by MacOS itself — suggests that the MacOS developers are somehow "holding out on you". That is absurd.

 You should remove any and all (other than Apple built-in) virus scanners, speeder uppers, optimizers, cleaners, App deleters or VPN packages you installed yourself, or anything of that ilk.

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Why Apple built-in Security software is all you need:

• The key feature is that MacOS does not allow just 'any old junk' from anywhere to become Executable.

• The second feature that makes the first one bulletproof is that malware can not attach itself to parts of the System.

MacOS shares a lot of the lock-down mechanisms developed for the iPhone. Applications are all sand-boxed with a list of the resources they require, and they cannot access anything outside their sandbox without crashing. Signed Applications are checked that they are from legitimate Developers, and Notarized Applications are delivered with the assurance that they have NOT been modified since their release by the Developer.

Introduced just before MacOS 12 Monterey, the system is now on a Separate, cryptographically—signed ‘sealed System Volume’. The Mac runs off read-only snapshots of this volume, which is not writeable using ordinary means. Any unauthorized changes to the crypto-signed volume are very quickly detected and you are alerted.

So you could store just about every malware known to mankind on your Mac, and your Mac would not get infected spontaneously. Scanning for virus-like patterns might make you feel a little better now, but non-stop scanning is outdated nonsense, and a tremendous waste of resources.

Nothing can become Executable Unless/Until you supply your Admin password to "make it so".

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Some users may prefer to create a new Admin User with a unique password (be sure to write that password down somewhere). Then log in as the new Admin and demote their daily-use account to an "ordinary" non-Admin account. In that case, nothing can be installed "by accident" because you will need to provide both the Admin Username AND Password to install anything. This gives you an additional step to pause and think about whether you really want to do this.

You don;t get it, TotalAV is worthless and is causing your problem so doing what I originally suggested will solve your performance issue. If you want to ignore the advice that is but don't complain about poor performance or having issues with the iMac. The problem was cause by installing TotalAV which does nothing but make Mac OS slow, appear buggy and cause unwanted behaviors. In short, it has ZERO redeeming value other than putting money into the developer's pockets.

There are no viruses for Mac OS, if you disagree please tell us the name of 1 virus for Mac OS!

I see you've ditched Chrome, but pieces of it are still lingering.

User Launch Agents:

[Loaded] com.google.GoogleUpdater.wake.plist (Google LLC - installed 2026-07-21)

Command: ~/Library/Application

[Not Loaded] com.google.keystone.agent.plist (Not signed - installed 2026-07-21)

<Empty>

[Not Loaded] com.google.keystone.xpcservice.plist (Not signed - installed 2026-07-21)

<Empty>

The three bolded items should be removed. The first in particular as it's an active process. The other two are technically dead since the processes they would launch within the Chrome app are missing.

Chrome puts junk all over the drive after the first use. Including Google Chrome Helper, which is still eating up a lot of resources, even though it no longer has a purpose:

Top Processes Snapshot by CPU:

Google Chrome Helper (Renderer) (6) 3.58 % (Google LLC)

Top Processes Snapshot by Memory:

Google Chrome Helper (Renderer) (6) 1.38 GB (Google LLC)

Top Processes Snapshot by Energy Use:

Google Chrome Helper (Renderer) (6) 2 (Google LLC)

The keystone ones are easy to find. They should be in your user Library folder at:

/Users/your_account/Library/LaunchAgents

If not there, then in the root Library folder at:

/Library/LaunchAgents

The others may be easier to find using the free EasyFind app. This is the developer's direct download site. Be sure to give the app Full Disk Access in the System Settings so it can look everywhere. When I installed Chrome for testing a year or so ago, I couldn't believe how many items it installed all over creation. Doing a search with EasyFind for Chrome and then Google uncovered most, but probably not all if neither of these words weren't part of a file name Chrome installed.

You definitely want to locate and remove Google Chrome Helper.

While I use Safari for most purposes, I switch to Helium for sites that simply work better with a Chromium based browser. The really nice thing about this app or Vivaldi (and likely Chrome or any other Chromium based browser) is web sites have no idea you have an ad blocker running as it's built directly into the browser. There is no plug-in for them to detect, and then block you from visiting the site unless you turn the ad blocker off.

in addition to what has already been suggested, your Mac appears to be "on the Phone" syncing files all over the place, using services like OneDrive and Synology cloud drive to do so.

Third-party file Sync-ers such as DropBox, BackBlaze, OneDrive, Carbonite, or GoogleDrive can ruin performance, but are not inherently dangerous.

They were Quickly ported from that other Operating System, and were never re-written to take advantage of the MacOS ‘File System Event Store’. The typical brute-force search they use takes all afternoon for one pass. That relentless searching is a completely un-necessary waste of resources.

Native Synch and Backup programs like iCloud Drive and Time Machine that DO use the MacOS File System Event Store can find changes really quickly and be done with their work and suspend themselves. Time machine can run backups Hourly, while all those others are still beating on the file system for the first pass, four hours later. By the time those others have finished one pass, they need to start again.

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To determine whether added software is the problem, run in Safe Mode, where no third-party items are loaded. Because graphics acceleration is not loaded, screen updates will be wonky and slow, but ultimately correct.

"Works in Safe Mode, Fails in regular mode" implies, "it's something you added."

Start up your Mac in safe mode - Apple Support

Remove the add-on anti-malware, using the built-in, and test again.

Also remove or disable the ad blocker as part of this testing.

I’d also temporarily disable OneDrive, as that and other file sync services can sometimes get busy.

If you’re running a public-facing web server, that too can involve substantial system and network loads.

Looks like you may be overloading RAM. You have 32 GB of RAM, which is the maximum that you can get on an iMac with a plain M4 chip, and which is a lot compared to what many applications need. But your Swap Used is huge – 21.69 GB. That means that your Mac was using 21.69 GB of space on the SSD as a slow way to simulate 21.69 GB of real RAM that it didn't have.

Virtual Memory Information:

Physical RAM: 32 GB

Free RAM: 84 MB

Used RAM: 27.98 GB

Cached files: 3.94 GB

Available RAM: 4.02 GB

Swap Used: 21.69 GB

A certain amount of swapping is tolerable, and SSDs these days are faster than they used to be, but even with a fast SSD, if you push the virtual memory system too hard, performance will eventually fall over a cliff.

On my system, which is usually running a much lighter load, memory usage currently looks like this:

Same amount of physical RAM, but the load is light enough that nothing is being swapped out to the SSD, and a whole lot more "free" RAM is being put to work holding Cached Files (to boost performance if the Mac needs the cached data before it needs the RAM).

Already mentioned, but Chrome is one or worst pieces of software you can put on any computer. Windows or Mac.

Chrome is a known, massive resource hog. On top of that, from the moment you turn your Mac on to the time you turn it off, it is constantly sending anonymized data of your computer and web usage to Google's servers. Chrome doesn't even have to be running. The keystone agents…

/Library/LaunchDaemons/google.keystone.agent.plist

/Library/LaunchDaemons/google.keystone.xpcservice.plist

…do that by launching apps buried within the Chrome app, which load at startup. One of them is just for checking for updates to Chrome. The other is for all-the-time data harvesting.

And then there's this.

We don't allow any software written by Google on our Macs. Not Chrome, Google Earth, or anything else. Google's real business is collecting marketing data. You are their unwilling and unpaid source for it when you use any of their junk. If Safari isn't a browser you care much for, try Firefox, Helium or Vivaldi. If you have a Google/Gmail account, you do not need Chrome to access it online. You can do that from any browser.

Helium or Vivaldi in particular are excellent replacements for Chrome. They’re built on the same open-source Chromium web code, but without any of Google Chrome’s intrusive data harvesting. One thing that makes Helium or Vivaldi better alternatives are dumb web sites (like some banks) which insist you use Chrome for access. In almost all cases, Helium or Vivaldi will also work. And to really cut off Google’s data harvesting, change the default search engine in your browsers to DuckDuckGo.

And yet another reason to never allow any app written by Google on your computer.

Google told users that when using incognito/private mode, Chrome would not track your usage, or collect data. They lied. It did anyway. Google has now agreed to settle the 2020 lawsuit with a five billion dollar fine.

But even so, according to another article on the lawsuit, that 5 billion is still a drop in the bucket to what Google has made on the collected data.

Remove Chrome and its daemons. Never install it again.

For reference: Activity Monitor User Guide for Mac - Apple Support

You may want to run Activity Monitor, with the Memory tab open, while you are carrying out typical (or heavy) workloads.

The things that matter here:

• Memory Pressure: Green is good. Yellow, not so much. Red means that the system thinks that there is not enough RAM for what you are doing (whether that's doing useful work, or "leaking" memory), and that this is hurting performance.
• Swap Used: Zero is ideal. Low is fine too, I do not know exactly where to draw the line, but my gut says that 21.69 GB of swap used on a system with 32 GB of real RAM is way, way too much.

Things not to worry about:

• Cached Files: Idle RAM is RAM that isn't doing anything for you. So whenever the Mac has "free" RAM, it will often put that RAM to work holding "cached files" – copies of stuff on disk. If the Mac needs the cached data before it needs the RAM, you get a performance boost. If it needs the RAM first, it dumps some cached data. The more RAM you have, the more RAM you're not using at the moment, the more "Cached Files" the Mac will find to fill that RAM up. So a large "Cached Files" number is not an indication that you need to "clean RAM" or get more RAM – it's just a normal side effect of the performance optimization.

I recommend that you download the free Blackmagic Disk Speed Test from the App Store and run it each of your external drives and your boot drive. Post the results in your reply.

Also unless the Synergy disk is a format that needs it's software to read and write uninstall the Synergy software and all supporting documents according to the developer's instructions. The use the shareware app Find Any File to search for any files with a particular file name.  For the Synergy and TotalAV software you'd do the following search(es): 

1 - Name contains synergy

2 - Name contains totalav

Any files that are found can be Option dragged from the search results window to the Desktop to get a copy of the file.

FAF can search areas that Spotlight can't like invisible folders, system folders and packages.  

Also what are the make and model of your external drives and how are they connected to the iMac and with what type of cables

As to what's eating up your RAM, the report shows:

Top Processes Snapshot by Memory:

Process (count) RAM usage (Source - Location)

Google Chrome Helper (Renderer) (73) 7.43 GB (Google LLC)

EtreCheckPro 1.07 GB (Etresoft, Inc.)

Google Chrome 520 MB (Google LLC)

Adobe Illustrator 438 MB (Adobe Inc.)

Google Chrome Helper (5) 376 MB (Google LLC)

Google Chrome and its helper processes seem to be taking a lot of memory. I don't know if you have a lot of tabs open, or if it is just that Google Chrome is RAM-hungry.

There is also the distinct possibility that some of the applications that you are using are "leaking" memory. That is, they're asking macOS for memory, then failing to free that memory up when they're done with it. If you continue to run a program that leaks memory for a long time, the leaks will keep adding up and adding up, because macOS has no good way of knowing whether it is safe to reclaim the memory.

I would suggest quitting and restarting applications – especially Chrome and Illustrator - every once in a while. You may want to run Applications > Activity Monitor, and keep an eye on how the summary section of the Memory tab changes when you do this. If the high memory consumption continues (suggesting possible leaks in a background helper that runs all the time), you may want to try restarting the Mac periodically to see if that helps.

If Google Chrome turns out to be the culprit, you may want to consider an alternate browser like Firefox or Safari …

treis32 wrote:

Thank you for you reply. This is a brand new mac. I am not sure by what you are saying 'what I have done to it'

Everything was installed fresh. There was nothing transferred from an old mac. There is no VPN, cleaning security or maintenance on either of these mac.

We use total AV just a precaution for viruses.

Use the built-in anti-malware.

Too often, the add-on anti-malware is itself intrusive, privacy-compromising, security-weakening, and performance-compromising morass, and all to solve a problem the built-in anti-malware either already solves.

One of the better known anti-malware packages was itself all to close to being malware, but with an end-user license agreement. Selling personally-identified web-browsing activities and web purchasing activities is something I’d consider inappropriate and malware-like behavior, as a specific example. And yes, that has happened.

A strategy that arose for Windows from, say, 1995 to 2015 or so… just doesn’t work so well for macOS in 2026.

And even if you still do want add anti-malware, remove all of those here for testing. With that all removed, you’ll know if the app is the source of the performance degradation, and you can then re-add it knowing how it affects your performance.

In addition to what the others have pointed out.

This iMac has not been restarted in 39 days.

Which leads to high Swap Used and slowness.



Most third-party app un-installers just guess. They do no better than you can do yourself, and some have a reputation for trying to throw out active parts of macOS itself. I prefer to use these :

Install and Un-Install

the fundamental principles:

• anything installed with drag-and-drop to the /Applications folder can be un-installed by Drag-and-drop to the Trash. After a restart, the Trash can be emptied.

• anything installed with a complex installer program requires the manufacturer's un-installer program. sometimes this is included as an "option" in the Installer package, but the software-maker's web site should specify how to un-install (if they don't, they get swamped with users clamoring for Un-install Instructions).

DO NOT use any other web site’s instructions, unless you have complete trust in that specific site to tell you the truth.

Third-party un-installers could be malicious. The Classic case is malicious updaters for Flash Player that installed malware instead..

• anything claiming to be an 'uninstaller helper' is just JUNK. (worse than web site click-bait).

These programs have been known to do so much damage that a re-install was required.

DO NOT be tempted to remove ANYTHING using an App like CleanMyMac. They just guess, and you can (and should) do better.

Remember that you can not immediately DELETE anything that is part of the running MacOS, because if it were referenced after being deleted, your Mac would crash. What you can often do is Move to Trash, and after a Restart, the item will no longer be part of the running MacOS and the Trash can be emptied..

Please download and run EtreCheck (the free version, don’t need the paid version here), and use the Share to share the results to the Mac clipboard. Then open a new reply here, and press the Additional Text button (the button that looks like a printed page), and paste and post the hardware and software configuration report here. From that, we can get a little more detail about what is installed and what is running here.

With my personal experience, I will tell you, trash apps to the dustbin do not work; you might need apps like https://freemacsoft.net/appcleaner/ is app cleaner which finds the app selected and finds all the trash and throws it in the dustbin.

I would also test with all external drives disconnected.

I would guess that the Mac was running a lot faster at the time you generated this report.

Virtual Memory Information:

Physical RAM: 32 GB

Free RAM: 9.14 GB – had been 84 MB

Used RAM: 13.76 GB – had been 27.98 GB

Cached files: 9.11 GB – had been 3.94 GB

Available RAM: 18.24 GB – had been 4.02 GB

Swap Used: 0 B – had been 21.69 GB

This is probably just a result of restarting the Mac. ("Time since boot" was 39 days for the previous report – and, for this report, was "less than an hour". Even if you are running an application that is leaking memory like a sieve, that application hasn't had enough time to leak enough memory to bring the system to its knees again.)

If TotalAV was in the habit of forcing your Mac to do a lot of background scanning (I don't know whether it was or not), getting rid of that might also have contributed to improved performance.

Grant Bennet-Alder wrote:

DO NOT use any other web site’s instructions, unless you have complete trust in that specific site to tell you the truth.

That goes double for anything that involves

• Running a third-party application recommended on such a site, or
• Running any Terminal command

There are threads on these forums where someone blindly typed in a long Terminal command they found on some third-party Web site, a command that, when decoded, translated to "Download a script that contains who knows what commands, from some malware site, and run it with full Administrator (sudo) privileges".

Thanks. I am not sure what to do in some of these

Remove the add-on anti-malware, using the built-in, and test again.

Are you referring to Total AV? What is the built in you are referring to?

Also remove or disable the ad blocker as part of this testing.

How do i do this?

I’d also temporarily disable OneDrive,

How do i do this?

Thank you for you reply. This is a brand new mac. I am not sure by what you are saying 'what I have done to it'

Everything was installed fresh. There was nothing transferred from an old mac. There is no VPN, cleaning security or maintenance on either of these mac.

We use total AV just a precaution for viruses.

There is no way I am going to wipe this computer when it has just been SET up.

Thanks anyway

Thank you so much for your information.

Would you know what I can do to help this situation?

It is just crazy, writing the list of items in a folder takes time when it never used to. Simple tasks , redrawing in applications etc is painful.

Any suggestions on what I can try to do would be welcome

treis32 wrote:

We use total AV just a precaution for viruses.

1. Many parts of macOS live on a "signed sealed system volume". These are parts that Apple believes don't need to be modified during normal operation. When the Mac starts up, it checks the cryptographic signature on this volume. If the seal has been broken (e.g. by user tampering or malware attack), the system refuses to start up from the compromised volume. If it is intact, the system runs off a read-only APFS snapshot. This makes it so viruses would have pretty much no hope of successfully infecting things in the "signed sealed system volume".
2. There are also several other layers of protection against malware (Protecting against malware in macOS - Apple Support)

In recent years, even Windows has gained more built-in protection against malware, to the point that purchasing add-on security programs does not always make sense. (Especially since on Windows, when you install a third-party program, that turns off the built-in protection that you otherwise would have gotten for free from Windows Defender.)

There is no VPN, cleaning security or maintenance on either of these mac.

... but

We use total AV just a precaution for viruses.

Cognitive dissonance?

Effective defenses against malware and other threats - Apple Community

Rule 1 of Macs is don't install junk.

+1 on Grant Bennet-Alder's statement. App cleaners should be avoided. They cannot possibly know where an app has placed things on the drive. Only the developer would know that information.

As stated, they guess by looking for items with a matching name, but that can also include items that have nothing at all to do with the app you're trying to remove. There may be other things they do, like looking at the text in .plist files.

I tested an app just yesterday that had a somewhat common name. When I used EasyFind to locate where it put things so I could remove it, many items in the Library folder and my user account matched the name of the app. Only the ones with the same day's creation date would be logical to remove, but a cleaner would just try to remove anything with a matching name. And there were a lot of them. No telling how many unrelated apps removing those would have screwed up.

Deleting a drag-and-drop app isn't always as easy as simply removing the app. As I stated above, Chrome puts well over a couple dozen items in way out of the way folders after it's first launched. Items from the App Store aren't allowed to do that (or aren't supposed to). Usually, all they create are a few small preference files, and maybe a few items in the user's Application Support folder. In general, small files that are completely benign once the app is deleted.

Also as Grant noted, never, ever, trust sites that claim to be able to clean up an app for you. You can type in a search for something like, "uninstall xxx on mac". It will return numerous sites that are intentionally set up to match such a search, and almost always include huge buttons to download the uninstaller. Often multiple times on the same page to goad you into using it. These are often malware themselves.

And I wouldn't doubt if some crook is responsible for creating the majority of these as they often have the same design. The other common thing these sites do is list a very complicated and long series of steps to manually remove an app. This is deliberate. The main reason is to, again, goad you into downloading the uninstaller by making the manual steps look like too much work. And it's been proven that much of the time, the manual method lists items that don't exist. They just throw them in to make a manual remove appear harder to do.

Grant Bennet-Alder wrote:

Most third-party app un-installers just guess. They do no better than you can do yourself, and some have a reputation for trying to throw out active parts of macOS itself. I prefer to use these :

Install and Un-Install

the fundamental principles:

• anything installed with drag-and-drop to the /Applications folder can be un-installed by Drag-and-drop to the Trash. After a restart, the Trash can be emptied.

• anything installed with a complex installer program requires the manufacturer's un-installer program. sometimes this is included as an "option" in the Installer package, but the software-maker's web site should specify how to un-install (if they don't, they get swamped with users clamoring for Un-install Instructions).

DO NOT use any other web site’s instructions, unless you have complete trust in that specific site to tell you the truth.

Third-party un-installers could be malicious. The Classic case is malicious updaters for Flash Player that installed malware instead..

• anything claiming to be an 'uninstaller helper' is just JUNK. (worse than web site click-bait).

These programs have been known to do so much damage that a re-install was required.

DO NOT be tempted to remove ANYTHING using an App like CleanMyMac. They just guess, and you can (and should) do better.

Remember that you can not immediately DELETE anything that is part of the running MacOS, because if it were referenced after being deleted, your Mac would crash. What you can often do is Move to Trash, and after a Restart, the item will no longer be part of the running MacOS and the Trash can be emptied..

I use it, and it does not delete by itself, and it shows where the trash is left, for exampleit is not mallacious, and yes there are sometime leftovers.

Thanks for having a look at this

Thank you for your advice.

Thank you for your help. I will look at taking the Total AV off aswell as implementing some of the other advice that I have been given today and see how they perform.

I have uninstalled Total AV now and ran the report again. Does this look any better.