Fixing the slowness of my 16 Macbook Pro 2019

  • Over the last couple of months, my Macbook got slower and slower. This was incremental so I didn't realize until it was quite bad.

  • I'd guess it was exacerbated by the fact that I have two browsers running most of the time - Vivaldi, which I use for my work apps, and Chrome - which I use for whichever task I'm working on, and several apps that use Electron, which is known to be quite resource-intensive.

  • What I did

  • None of this was rocket science, and is quite obvious in hindsight. But some of it may be useful in helping others to pin down the source of slowness in their own machines.

  • Chrome Optimizations

  • Chrome runs different processes for every tab, renderer, and extension you use, and because I use it so much, this was where a lot of my problems were arising.

  • Enabling hardware acceleration: (how-to link) I had disabled this at some point (ironically to solve the speed issues), but the result was that any website that used extensive animations (particularly js-based animation) ran super slowly for me.

  • Culling Extensions: I was aware I was using more chrome extensions than the average user, but didn't realize just how many I'd racked up over the years. Some of these were injecting code and adding behaviour to every site I visited, which is in itself a pretty big security risk, and many were running background pages. I couldn't believe when I went through the entire list how many there were. I uninstalled any I hadn't used in a few months, and deactivated any I wasn't using regularly, which seemed to have an immediate impact on speed.

  • Tab Suspender: (link) This was one of the simplest, but most effective things I did. I'm not a tab hoarder, but I'll still often end up half way through a task where I have opened a dozen or so in quick succession, or I'll pin a tab and forget to come back to it. Additionally, for a time I was using Codeanywhere, which initializes a full instance of VS Code inside chrome. Tab suspender monitors tabs and gracefully kills their processes when you're not using them, so they can't eat your machine's resources. I set it to deactivate tabs after just 3 minutes.

  • Other Stuff

    • Only use a single display when on zoom calls: For some reason I find that my machine has difficulty running two screens at the same time as a zoom call, and can often get completely unusable, particularly when screen sharing. Closing my laptop (and using only my external monitor) stopped this happening entirely.

    • Killing Docker for Mac I don't use Docker a lot, but I had the app auto-starting and running in the background by default, and on several ocassions when I checked the Activitiy Monitor it was eating resources.

  • None of these things are super complex, but between I managed to get my mac from feeling sluggish and bloated, to feeling brand new.

  • Website Page