High Sierra, after playing with the freeze-ups and slow typing recognition for about a week I think I finally found the problem IMO. When Apple decided to re-format to the APFS file system they had a huge re-format dilemma for folks with only one SSD available to boot with. So Apple decided to go to a running format of the solid state drive included in the High Sierra package. Guess what! It doesn't work! Way too much fragmentation to the point of the computer gets confused and lost trying to find needed data or a place to store it and it want's to play beach-ball.
In the old Apple days we had to defragment drives constantly to keep from experiencing a beach-ball state of rest.
Anyway I had to do a bunch of invoicing in Quickbooks this morning. QB writes to the drive constantly to avoid any loss of financial data in a crash or outage. Ever since I installed High Sierra my typing response time slowed to a standstill. I could drink half a cup of coffee before it would finish a sentence or row of numbers.
I thought wow, this is just like the old days with my IIx. LOL And than it hit me! Ah, fragmentation! Being as I have 4 drive bays in my 5.1 Mac Pro and I had a CCC cloned copy of all my data with High Sierra on another SSD drive. I re-booted and used Disk Utility to erase and format APFS to my original boot drive. Then I transferred the cloned data back to that drive, re-booted and ran first aid on it.
I've had a smile on my face ever since! I used Quickbooks this morning for 4 hours without ONE freeze or typing slowdown. In fact, if I blinked my eye I couldn't see the page changes. It's now lightning faster than any previous OS X system I've used and I only have a 2 x 2.4 GHz Quad-Core. Not one error or stall in this message or anything I have done all day for that matter so I'm a happy High Sierra user again..
SSDs don’t suffer from access latency due to fragmentation like spinning disks do. In fact, one would probably be better off not defragmenting an SSD because all those writes will reduce the life of the disk.
Nope...OK, lets look at APFS here instead of HFS+..
Here's what I'm finding out today.. APFS understands which files will give the biggest performance boost once defragged. It works in the background when the machine is idle, so defrag won't impact system performance.
For macOS, High Sierra automatically converts the system drive to APFS as part of the installation process. The process does not move your file data. It does copy and reformat file system metadata, but does not erase the old metadata until the rewritten metadata has checked out. The metadata provides information about other data and I believe this is where the problem is. Apple will fix it, just a matter of time. For me a re-format did the job..
Why can my buddy buy a new Macbook formatted for APFS loaded from Apple with High Sierra and it runs perfect? Now take that same Macbook and install the HS update on a non APFS drive and re format to APFS and it runs like chit? Not my opinion but just what I'm seeing on other forums.. There is a serious flaw in the live update of the file system causing everyone problems..
I cured my problems completely simply by re-formatting the drive with Disk Utility APFS and re-installing the same data and using first aid.. I'm very happy with the results..
In the old Apple days we had to defragment drives constantly to keep from experiencing a beach-ball state of rest.
Anyway I had to do a bunch of invoicing in Quickbooks this morning. QB writes to the drive constantly to avoid any loss of financial data in a crash or outage. Ever since I installed High Sierra my typing response time slowed to a standstill. I could drink half a cup of coffee before it would finish a sentence or row of numbers.
I thought wow, this is just like the old days with my IIx. LOL And than it hit me! Ah, fragmentation! Being as I have 4 drive bays in my 5.1 Mac Pro and I had a CCC cloned copy of all my data with High Sierra on another SSD drive. I re-booted and used Disk Utility to erase and format APFS to my original boot drive. Then I transferred the cloned data back to that drive, re-booted and ran first aid on it.
I've had a smile on my face ever since! I used Quickbooks this morning for 4 hours without ONE freeze or typing slowdown. In fact, if I blinked my eye I couldn't see the page changes. It's now lightning faster than any previous OS X system I've used and I only have a 2 x 2.4 GHz Quad-Core. Not one error or stall in this message or anything I have done all day for that matter so I'm a happy High Sierra user again..