Why is my Mac so slow? I was fixing the wrong thing.

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If Reddit didn’t solve your issue, this might.

If you’re reading this with 30+ Chrome tabs open, don’t worry.

I’m writing it with 125.

I work in marketing, and my Mac is a work tool.

Chrome, Google Docs, Zoom — way too many tabs, zero patience for Mac performance issues. Mind you, I’m on an M3 MacBook Pro, so the slowdowns caught me off guard.

Reddit said clean your cookies. Coworkers said close your tabs.

The unspoken misconception behind both?

Slow Mac → clean it.

It might have been true 10–15 years ago.

These days, it’s not just about “clutter”.

What is actually slowing my Mac down?

I opened Activity Monitor in the middle of a workday.

We’re looking at:

• High compression (7+ GB) and swap → shows macOS compensating behind the scenes
• Fragmented Google Chrome helper processes → every heavy tab behaves like its own mini-app
• Multiple processes running alongside Chrome → constant memory pressure

👉Even with 18 GB of RAM, my Mac was already compressing over 7 GB, which meant it was clearly under pressure. And pressure usually comes from three things:

• too many active heavy processes
• too much background work I’m not aware of
• not enough breathing room for the system to recover

So I just worked through those one by one.

1. Stop inactive Chrome tabs from competing for memory

Someone on the IT team mentioned there’s a Chrome setting that helps with memory pressure from inactive tabs.

I checked my settings. It was off.

Here’s what I did:

• Went to Chrome → Settings → Performance
• Turned on Memory Saver
• Clicked Keep these sites always active and added a bunch of sites I usually use (Google Docs, Zoom, Figma)

This stopped background tabs from eating up memory. I didn’t lose any of those tabs and didn’t have to close them.

2. Tidy up background processes

Next up, I looked at background activity.

In System Settings → Login Items & Extensions, “Open at Login” looked clean.

But under App Background Activity, there were a lot of helpers:

• Grammarly
• Google services
• Old leftovers
• Apps from unknown developers

macOS doesn’t really explain what’s essential and what’s just… there.

I ran CleanMyMac to review background apps in a bit more detail. A 5-second scan found 26 background apps.

I reviewed them and removed the ones that were clearly irrelevant.

At this point, everything felt fixed… but was it going to last?

3. Give things a bit more breathing room

From past experience, this is where little bits of junk and leftovers start piling up — not enough to cause a crash, just enough to make my Mac feel “off” again a few days later.

Mac cleanup isn’t really about deleting random files or obsessing over disk space. It’s more like preventative care — reducing background clutter before it hurts Mac performance again.

You can clean up your Mac manually, but with tools like CleanMyMac, I don’t really see the point in spending time on it anymore. This one gives me a nice overview of leftovers and maintenance in one place. I run a scan, it shows what’s on my system, and I only remove the things I’m comfortable getting rid of.

So, here’s what I did:

• removed app leftovers
• cleared system junk
• cleaned out unused binaries and old cache

It didn’t make my Mac magically fast, but it did lower the chance of random CPU & memory spikes later.

So, did this 3-step routine actually change anything?

I went back to my usual work.

A couple of Zoom calls later, I opened Activity Monitor again.

• Memory used dropped to ~13 GB
• Compressed memory fell from ~7 GB → ~2 GB

Chrome still had lots of helper processes — and that’s expected.

1. But inactive tabs stopped competing for memory.
2. Background apps looked a lot cleaner.
3. And the whole system felt noticeably smoother.

Till next time.