I have a 2018 mac mini that I upgraded to Ventura. That was likely a mistake as everything, especially FCP, is super slow. I get lots of beach balls. Most of my data is on an external usb-c Samsung 4TB SSD. But the main drive and my user directory are on the internal 1 TB drive. I have 32 GB memory. I don’t use the computer much anymore as I now work for the county, but man, when I went to use FCP for a simple 10 minute video, it sat there for hours grinding away to export. The MBP M1 next to it did the video in about 2 minutes. Is anyone else out there getting the same problem with everything slower (search in finder) since upgrading to Ventura? I’m wondering if the code is now optimized for M chips so all the intel chip machines are suffering. I don’t want to upgrade (although the 14” MBP M3 looks good), but if this thing doesn’t work, I’ll be forced to do so.
I don’t know about FCP, since I’ve never run it, but I didn’t notice any performance hit when I upgraded my 2018 mini from Big Sur to Ventura (a few weeks ago). This is with a 2TB internal SSD (about 60% full) and 16GB RAM.
But I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t run high-powered software. Firefox, Microsoft Office, FileMaker and a podcast player.
That sounds like a general ailment, it’s definitely not the hardware and software. My 2018 Mini is running smoothly with Sonoma (just upgraded from Ventura).
Start with the ever-mysterious (and yet somehow ever-reliable) NVRAM reset: hold down Command-Option-P-R as you power up the machine, until it chimes a second time. See if it helps.
Ventura runs fine over here, on a 2018 i7 32GB Mini. I’ve actually been considering upgrading to Sonoma, which is what drew me to your question. I don’t use FCP, but my machine is loaded with special homebrew installs, commercial software, my own custom apps, automator scripts, etc, plus it serves up several moderately used web apps. Besides resetting NVRAM, how’s your available disk space? It might be superstition, but I sometimes run Disk Utility’s First Aid a few times in a row. (Also, do remember that once you’ve computed with an M-series machine, you have a difference sense of speed…)
2 things to try. Crank up Activity Monitor and see what resources are being used. Pay particular attention to memory pressure, disk activity, and processor usage. 2nd, what is the status of the system drive - free space, general health?
OK, I did the NVRAM thing (first time) and it absolutely helped. It now processes the videos in minutes. I have more than 1/2 of the 1 TB ssd available, and 1/4 of the external SSD available. It runs super hot at about 190-200 when processing, even when it is done. About 90% of the CPU was in use by FCP when processing a video for export. I’m running first aid.
I, too, used to own a 2018 Mac mini with Ventura installed. Although I never used Final Cut Pro (I didn’t know what FCP was. I had to look it up), I did not find the machine to be too slow. The only thing I noticed was that it would get very hot and the fan speed would increase. But that was nothing new. Running App Tamer helped to decrease the %CPU being taken up by some apps.
Some random thoughts.
Seems that you’d want 90%+ CPU time when running FCP. Otherwise your disk would be the bottleneck.
It’s not surprising that your mini is cranking up the fans and running hot during heavy CPU utilization - it is an Intel CPU after all and even SSDs generate heat when hitting them hard. And that mini is very likely less powerful, quiet, or cool (temperature and aesthetics) as your MBP M1.
Are you still getting beach balls or has that subsided? You say it’s still running hot after the video export - is anything else going on with the system at that point?
Other than being the “when all else fails, guess I’ll run first aid” placebo, why are you doing this? What is giving you any indication that there’s anything wrong with your file systems?
What file system is in use on that external drive?
I ran first aid because it was a suggestion and it was easy/cheap. The external SSD is running APFS. It seems the beach balls have gone away after the NVRAM reset.
I upgraded my 2018 MacMini to Ventura several weeks back, and have not noticed any slowdown, but I also don’t have anything with high processing loads other than Firefox with too many tabs open. The only weirdness I have seen is multiple “disk not ejected properly” errors when the Mac wakes up on my external Crucial X6 SSD, which I use to store music and large data files. I’ve been working this with Crucial and discussing it in the Apple Support forum, but what’s going on remains mysterious. It may be related to timing, and may go away if you keep the Mac from sleeping external disks.
Surprisingly, I don’t have external SSD problems. I did when upgrading to either Monterey or Ventura at which point I had to change out the external drive case/power supply and the problems went away. Went from a OWC Mercury Elite Pro mini USB-C to a OWC Mercury Elite Pro External Storage Enclosure with USB 3.2.
This may not apply to you but FYI.
OSXDaily: Messages Using High CPU on Mac, Slowing Performance
The “Disk Not Ejected Properly” errors appear to arise from sleep settings under the Energy Saving option in System Settings. They stopped after I turned off Enabling Power Nap, Put hard disks to sleep when possible, Wake for Network Access, and start up automatically after a power failure. I don’t know if you have to turn all of them off, but that’s what worked for me. It looks like the problem was that the Ventura update created a problem for that only occurred for certain settings, and perhaps only for certain systems with those settings. I am no plans to update to Sonoma in the near term.
Is it possible, then, that an operation like this would have been slow even before upgrading to Ventura and you just hadn’t tried it recently?