"EtreCheck report shows poor performance. This is unusual." Ambiguous much?!

in your report, I see that you have CCleaner and also CleanMyMac installed. apps like those are, at best, useless on a Mac. they consume system resources while providing zero protection or benefit. you would do well to uninstall both of them using the developer's instructions.

there are also a few things installed that may or may not be problematic. such as it appears that Apple's own anti-virus is not active.

BrendanClay wrote:

While a little over four years old, I have found my MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2020, Four Thunderbolt 3 ports) to be showing its age—particularly in the absence of intensive usage.

That's an Intel model. There is an upper limit to the performance that it will ever reach. It's never going to be Apple Silicon. But it should be among the fastest Intel machines that Apple ever made.

The fans often run hot and fast, particularly when connected to my 27" ViewFinity S90PC 5K Monitor, with the clamshell open or closed.

It is always best to generate an EtreCheck report while the computer is behaving poorly or shortly thereafter.

The fans themselves have no meaning. They are just a symptom of some other problem. In this case, the external display is most likely a separate problem. What's important is not the 4 Thunderbolt ports. It's the lack of native HDMI. You have to use an adapter. Those adapters can sometimes trigger a low-level hardware fault that puts the system into "emergency" mode where it throttles the CPU, runs the fans at full blast, and drains the battery in a few minutes. So if you want to investigate this problem, I recommend keeping the external display disconnected while you investigate problem #1. Otherwise, it will be difficult to distinguish between them.

(For context, in my day-to-day, I generally run Brave browser, Notion, Slack, Google Calendar, etc.)

That's a lot of 3rd party apps. Google assumes that you are running Chrome - and absolutely nothing else. It would prefer to take over your entire machine. Google considers macOS to be simply a "Chrome launcher".

For what it's worth, I try to run Onyx at regular intervals and well as 'Sensei' which allows me to monitor startup/login items, etc..

You don't need to do any maintenance. The operating system does that automatically unless you've installed certain 3rd party tools that can break that functionality.

I've never heard of "Sensei" and I don't know why you would need it. Since macOS Ventura (you have Sonoma, which is even more recent), Apple has added extensive nag notifications for any kind of system modification. I can't imagine anyone wanting more of that.

Is this Apple's roundabout way of pushing me into the purchase of a Silicon-chipped upgrade?

They're really nice computers. But to get the best experience, I strongly recommend getting your current system in order first. Otherwise, these kinds of problems can be even worse on Apple Silicon.

"EtreCheck report shows poor performance. This is unusual."

(Ambiguous much?)

Seems pretty specific to me, but then I'm biased. 😄

But hey... maybe there is something here that is actionable.

Alas, not too much.

There are two basic ways that EtreCheck measures performance - hard drive speed and overall runtime.

Your hard drive speeds are pretty good. Recent Mac computers have crazy fast SSDs. Now that fusion drives are finally gone, there should be no more hard drive problems other than those that are self-imposed. While Apple always improves SSD performance every year, at this time, SSD performance is more or less the same on recent Intel and Apple Silicon computers. You're not missing much here with Intel.

However, your file system performance is suspiciously poor. 30 seconds is OK, for a mechanical hard drive. A modern SSD should be 15 seconds or less.

The other way that EtreCheck measures performance is with overall runtime. Over the years, it seems that well-running computers tend to generate an EtreCheck report in 3 minute or less. So I codified that into the app itself, and tried my best to keep the value stable. Your runtime was almost 14 minutes. I wouldn't be surprised to see that on a base model 2015 iMac with a failing Fusion Drive. But your computer should generating the report in well under 3 minutes.

A big +1 regarding no "cleaning apps—ever!"

Since 2000 the macOS has featured elegant, automated self-maintenance routines that run in the small hours of the morning when most users are not on their computers. These routines do ALL needed housekeeping, even defragging, and without any outside help. As this has been a macOS feature for almost a quarter-century, to me that makes any outside apps that claim to clean, etc, scams.

I have seen plenty of posts here where removing CleanMyMac sped up a computer. CCleaner has the ominous heritage of its early versions deleting important Mac system files, rendering some Macs unusable. Both can interfere with the elegance you paid Apple good money to build into macOS, and such conflicts can drag down performance.

Brave seems overly hungry for resources. That might improve after ridding the computer of the fearware.

Once again I've exceeded the 5000 character limit.

So what's causing that? This is where it gets tricky. I'm sure it is either one of, or some combination of, your 3rd party system modifications. Possible candidates, in decreasing order of likelihood include:

1) "security" or "privacy" apps. Always a contender. Malwarebytes has long been considered the best behaving of the bunch, but software's always changing.

2) unsigned apps. It's been many years since unsigned apps were a normal occurrence. If some developer doesn't know they should be signing their apps by now, what else have they been missing. You have 22 unsigned apps. And most of your unsigned apps are apps that actually should be signed. Are they just old versions or is something else going on?

3) Anything that has a kernel extension or system extension. This is one of the reasons for #1. You have a "Cato" app that includes a system extension. I don't recognize this app and I see a lot of apps.

4) Other 3rd party system modifications. These are represented in your EtreCheck report under the various launch daemons and launch agent categories. You have a bunch.

5) Old software. You must have migrated this setup from an older computer. You still have a startup item listed. These haven't run for years, but I keep it in the report just for situations like this.

6) Other issues. You have some "clean up" apps installed. I try to avoid naming names, but I will say that the macOS operating system doesn't nee any regular maintenance or "cleaning" in any way. You have an awful lot of audio plugins. People who have lots of audio plugins tend to report unusual and unexplainably poor performance. I don't know if this is causation or correlation because such people also ten to have all of 1-6 in place too.

My recommendation is as follows:

0) Make a backup. I don't expect you'll need it, but backups never hurt.

1) Turn on all iCloud options for everything. Wait for your computer to fully sync. You might have to pay extra for this.

2) Erase the hard drive and reinstall the operating system.

3) Sign in with iCloud and wait for all your data to return. It might take a day or so. Sometimes it's flaky.

4) Manually reinstall only the apps that you absolutely can't live without.

BrendanClay wrote:

I'll attach the current report which includes only: "Heavy CPU usage - Some processes are using an unusually high amount of CPU" primarily. Though, I do wonder if that might be a bit of a red flag given that there aren't any apps really loaded—the only non-native app would be EtreCheck.

Those apps are the system migration apps and various AI model-building apps. Those reports are generated by the operating system and then reported by EtreCheck. This is normal behaviour after any OS install or upgrade.

<< "EtreCheck report shows poor performance. This is unusual." >>

I have found that message is generated by extremely long run times to complete the runtime test in the report.

Although that is often caused by a disk that is performing badly compared with known standards for the class of Macs under test, it could also be caused by a whole raft of other causes, such as an overloaded CPU, too much virus-scanning or similar busywork, too much internet activity sync-ing files to multiple third-party sites, or too little RAM and too much paging.

...so that is the laundry list I look at when it says 'poor performance'.