Almost ten-year-old Mac acting up

This afternoon, suddenly the laptop grinds to a halt for no apparent reason. Resource monitor shows available CPU at less than 10%. Usually, I need >40% for it to be smooth running.

I couldn't pinpoint the cause. Restarting the laptop once didn't help at all.

Suddenly, two apps I rely on for daily note-taking, Obsidian and Logseq, are crawling too.

It isn't the first time this happened. The cause remains a mystery and perhaps will be forever.

Things can be fragile, as life is. 🥲

Possible cause

It seems the cause was Obsidian. Suddenly several plugins were reporting issues. I uninstalled or disabled them, even went into "no community plugin" mode, restarted laptop, monitoring system while loading Obsidian and turned on community plugins. It is normal again.