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I have an old Mac mini that is now on MacOS Catalina. It is quite slow and tends to slow down over time. Years ago, I upped the RAM to 16 Gb, and that helped a lot to boost performance, but that effect seems to have faded. I know I can get an SSD also but I'm wondering if there may be any other issues.

I thought it may be good to see why sometimes it takes 10-20 seconds from when I type a git command in Terminal, to when the response comes. Perhaps there is a bottleneck somewhere. I googled and found this link that points to this blog post on Dtrace, so I tried to use Dtrace related tools. sudo iosnoop, however, gives the following message:

dtrace: system integrity protection is on, some features will not be available

I found also this q&a with some suggested command line tools like vm_stat 900 and iostat 900, but they don't seem to provide as much useful info as what Dtrace does?

So, the immediate question is, how to get the Dtrace tools working on MacOS Catalina?

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auspicious99
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  • You are totally correct - getting actual signpost / millisecond type timing will let you measure if the CPU is full speed and therefore conclude storage is the cause, but even though CPU throttling or degradation is an unlikely cause, what if it is and you don’t want to buy storage and should get a logic board repair or just buy the new Mac Mini which screams performance wise... – bmike Jun 13 '20 at 13:35
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    Yes, maybe something in the CPU, maybe something in the OS related to caching or who knows what, maybe something faulty in the logic board or some other piece of hardware .. was hoping to be able to explore and try to figure it out. – auspicious99 Jun 13 '20 at 13:43
  • Possibly relevant: https://sigpipe.macromates.com/2020/macos-catalina-slow-by-design/ – lhf Jun 13 '20 at 13:45
  • I don’t have a mac I care to disable SIP to test dtrace, but disabling SIP and running this should work to ensure it has total control on Catalina. https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/51713 – bmike Jun 13 '20 at 13:57
  • @auspicious99 if you happen to have Xcode, instruments.app can help too – anki Jun 13 '20 at 14:29

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