Holy crap! I have not had that experience at all! I spent more time being lost, more than anything….
I have a couple of ideas of how we can track this down, because locally I use Lando and Docker significantly for WP and other dev and unfortunately one of those has a reputation of using large amounts of CPU for no good reason. I am talking 120% and more. My only fix so far on that I’ll share at the end of this response.
For machine reference – I’m using a late 2012 MBP – 2.3 GHz Intel Core i7, 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3. This is the “newest” model of mac I’ll prob ever use because it’s the last model that didn’t hard solder the ram to the motherboard. I have an 500GB SSD for my main drive.
Thoughts:
1) In terms of machine specs – 8G of ram should be more than enough for you. I could be wrong. However, it is scary to think if we would need more just to use a CMS.
2) Have you opened up the console and checked to see if there’s a js script hanging? Normally, php will just silent fail or error out and keep trudging. JS though, can seriously stall entire processes. I am curious if there’s an issue lurking somewhere in your plugins that may unfortunately be hanging up.
3) Have you used Activity Monitor? It’s in your Utilities folder inside Applications .. just click anywhere on the desktop to put yourself in Finder and then use keyboard shortcut “command + shift + g” to pull up “Go to Folder” modal. in that, type “/Applications/Utilities” and you should see Activity Monitor up top. Open it, and click the CPU% heading so the list of applications running is sorted from most CPU used to least, and see if anything other than Safari is killing your CPU.
4) If in 3) above it is NOT Safari, you can use this little helper app that has saved me a ton of headache. It is NOT a long term fix. It is a bandage. But it keeps you going with less angst. It is called CPU Throttle.
Just download from here: https://www.willnolan.com/cputhrottle/cputhrottle.html – under Source (not the Binary). Put it in top level of your drive – as a sibling of Applications. And then, in terminal, you can use the command he shows to clamp an application down. Again, this is just a bandage, not a solution.
5) If in 2) above, you see any warnings or especially, any errors that are js related, then I would imagine that is the issue. Then, it would be a matter of discovering just which plugin is at fault.
Hope that helps.
