2023 24-inch iMac running slow

Thank you for the new report, that was suggested by my good colleague @ den.thed 👍

Below some are the findings

Your iMac hardware is fine. The real issues are:

1 - Carbonite is overwhelming your Mac

CarboniteDaemon is using 117% CPU

CarboniteStatus is using ~10% CPU

Both together are using almost ¾ of your available RAM.

2 - Your Mac only has 8 GB RAM, and Carbonite is using most of it.

This alone will cause constant beachballing, freezing, and slow apps.

Your Mac is out of RAM and using almost 7 GB of swap

Swap Used: 6.90 GB

This indicates RAM exhaustion, which forces macOS to use the SSD as temporary memory — causing slowness and spinning beachballs.

When your Mac runs out of available RAM, it moves some inactive data from RAM to the swap file on disk.

This frees up RAM for active apps and helps prevent slowdowns or crashes

3 - Your internal drive is low on space

You’re at 41 GB free, but macOS with 8 GB RAM performs much better with 70–100 GB free.

4 - Many background processes (Adobe, Carbonite, HP, Malwarebytes, Coupons utility, etc.)

Your Mac has hundreds of background agents.

Most are harmless, but combined they strain an 8 GB system.

What to do:

If you prefer to use Time Machine only (which you already have working), uninstalling Carbonite will immediately free resources.

5 - Reduce background apps / login items

These add up and drain RAM.

Recommended to disable from System Settings → Login Items:

Adobe Creative Cloud

Canon Extended Survey

HP Product Research

Coupons launcher

Menu World Time (if unused)

Skype ShareAgent (or remove it completely) Microsoft and discontinued Skype 

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/skype/skype-is-retiring-in-may-2025-what-you-need-to-know-2a7d2501-427f-485e-8be0-2068a9f90472

6 - Free more disk space

You currently have:

41 GB free

macOS reports 77 GB “Available” (this includes purgeable space)

Purgeable Space is controlled by the Operating System and not the user 

Get detailed information about a disk in Disk Utility on Mac

To stop beachballing you want at least 70 GB actually free, not purgeable.