Sonoma intermittently sluggish on 13" early 2015 MBP

Hi everyone,

I have a 13" early 2015 MBP that has been temperamental with OCLP. The first few minutes after startup are always egregiously slow and often I'll run into other random bouts of sluggishness. I have all root patches installed and have tried removing and reinstalling them a couple times, too. This is also my second clean install of Sonoma, and automatic updates are disabled, FWIW.

Can anyone think of factors that would lead to the random performance slowdowns? I see a few other posts with reports of general sluggishness on 2015 models, but not the up and down that I've been experiencing. The whole computer slows down; it's not app-specific and even things like trackpad responsiveness and text entry bog down in Finder bog down when things get slow. I am considering downgrading to Ventura, but would love to stick with Sonoma if possible for sake of maximum app compatibility as Apple phases out support for Ventura. I'm hesitant to try Sequoia.

FWIW, I also have a mid-2015 15" MBP with more RAM and dual graphics, and Sonoma works great on that and performance is consistent.