The beachball isn't directly related to CPU speed. It indicates the main thread of the foreground app is busy for more than a few seconds. It may be, for exampl

The beachball isn't directly related to CPU speed. It indicates the main thread of the foreground app is busy for more than a few seconds. It may be, for example, blocked waiting for something from the network -- which is one reason it's important for macOS developers to move filesystem and network access to background threads as much as possible.