I have no background in Mac but I'd look for a utility that monitors cpu usage and may gpu also. Something sounds like it's grinding your rig to a halt.
In Linux I'd run a simple (top) command in a terminal to see what was eating things up? Maybe some Mac guru can assist.
I'd be very curious as to what process is running so hard, might point you in the right direction.
Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor
I have integrated graphics so idk if it monitors a video card. It'll do your CPU, RAM, system drive, external drives and network activity though.
But I don't know if it'll help you. I just know that this is the included utility that sal hypothesized.
Thanks,
-m
The a program in Linux is called "atop". Maybe available for Mac X?
"AT Computing System and Process Monitor
The program atop is an interactive monitor to view the load on
a Linux-system. It shows the occupation of the most critical
hardware-resources (from a performance point of view) on system-level,
i.e. cpu, memory, disk and network. It also shows which processes are
responsible for the indicated load (again cpu-, memory-, disk- and
network-load on process-level).
The program atop can also be used to log system- and process-level
information in raw format for long-term analysis.
The program atopsar can be used to view system-level statistics as
reports, similar to the program sar."
Here's a snapshot of the process running on my system. It's a dynamic process
refreshing it's report every couple of seconds. Invaluable for determining
what process is responsible for slowing down a system.
top - 11:25:08 up 1 day, 10 min, 3 users, load average: 0.05, 0.16, 0.17
Tasks: 248 total, 1 running, 247 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 2.5%us, 2.5%sy, 0.3%ni, 94.0%id, 0.7%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 3982020k total, 3534388k used, 447632k free, 184444k buffers
Swap: 2289224k total, 0k used, 2289224k free, 1269544k cached
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
1302 root 20 0 262m 110m 66m S 2 2.8 8:22.27 Xorg
21301 sal 20 0 608m 60m 37m S 2 1.6 0:01.27 konsole
17305 sal 20 0 586m 61m 29m S 1 1.6 0:34.22 chrome
4159 sal 20 0 373m 50m 34m S 1 1.3 4:06.04 gkrellm
4398 sal 20 0 971m 57m 33m S 1 1.5 1:17.83 SpotifyHelper
17285 sal 25 5 961m 175m 95m S 1 4.5 0:31.94 chrome
4355 sal 20 0 850m 177m 108m S 1 4.6 2:25.64 spotify
16368 sal 25 5 1071m 226m 75m S 0 5.8 0:11.63 chrome
21344 sal 20 0 13464 2344 1920 R 0 0.1 0:00.19 top
1 root 20 0 4276 1432 1336 S 0 0.0 0:02.65 init
2 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.01 kthreadd
3 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.85 ksoftirqd/0
5 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 kworker/0:0H
7 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:25.19 rcu_sched
8 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 rcu_bh
9 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.19 migration/0
10 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 lru-add-drain
11 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 cpuhp/0
12 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 cpuhp/1
13 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.30 migration/1
14 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.88 ksoftirqd/1
16 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 kworker/1:0H
17 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 kdevtmpfs
18 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 netns
19 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 oom_reaper
20 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 writeback
21 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 kcompactd0
22 root 25 5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 ksmd
23 root 39 19 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 khugepaged
24 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 crypto
25 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 kintegrityd
26 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 bioset
27 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 kblockd
28 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 ata_sff
29 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 md
30 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 devfreq_wq
31 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 watchdogd
34 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 kswapd0
