My Mac Pro has been acting weird for months, with long pauses while doing common things, like copying and pasting, or switching between apps. Really, really annoying and gets in the way of work, big time.

And then, a few days ago, it suddenly began working at full speed again after a hard restart. All I can do is say a prayer of thanks to the gods of silicon microprocessors, because I have no idea what caused it, and I looked everywhere, including scanning through thousands of lines of system error logs and googling them.

Right before it started working again I emptied the trash on my startup disk and there were a lot of files in there (10K+), but there’s no way to know if that was related.