[musicale]

There is a strange bug I've seen a couple of times where graphics, even simple things like scrolling a web page, get really slow even though it's supposedly using the GPU. Rebooting or logging out and in again seemed to fix the issue.

Also sometimes the virtual memory subsystem seems to get confused or overcommitted (e.g. after running a bunch of large VMs in VMware) and from that point on everything is just slow, even if you shut down every VM to relieve the memory pressure. It may be related to macOS's use of memory compression.

Then there are various background daemons (mdworker, syspolicyd, photoanalysisd, etc.) that occasionally wake up and decide to eat all of your CPU while simultaneously hammering your file system. The only effective response, short of disabling the offending service (which is much harder than it is on Windows or Linux, due to SIP) seems to be to let them run their course as they decide to scan every file they can find for the 100th time.

And when your laptop heats up, then macOS starts throttling the system via kernel_task processes that appear to be using all of your CPU.