Is fan not working
I can't hear my fan running and when I'm in apps that need updated flash player it's really slow and freezes up alot. How do I tell if it's the fan or something else wrong
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The system is designed to only turn on the fan when the board/processor temperature requires it. However, if the processor is getting too hot too fast, it might freeze/lockup/shut off and the fan won't lower the temperature like its supposed to.
If the system is over 5-6 years old, the processor temperature may be too high due to old thermal grease and you might need to put new thermal grease on the processor.
There are guides on this site available.
As far as only happening while running certain applications, I haven't heard of that, but who knows.
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What Nate said is pretty much correct, your fans are designed to always spin but a properly spinning fan won't be audible until the system calls on it to spin up faster to address a rise in temperature. IE, your CPU fan will probably not be audible until you start watching a movie, rendering a video, etc. Once the processor & components in that area start to heat up the fan will spin up/faster accordingly to stabilize the temperature, at this point you may notice an audible fan noise. The aluminum iMacs have never called for thermal grease, at least from an Apple tech (ACMT) standpoint and from referring to their service manuals. It could theoretically help but it is by no means recommended.
You can check fan speeds using a free Dashboard widget called iStat. It will show the various fan speeds. The normal range for fan speeds varies from generation to generation and even Apple is hard pressed to give an actual "acceptable" range. The only sure way to check for failure is through Apple Service Diagnostics (Apple Authorized Service Providers can run this for you) or if iStat shows 0 rpms. You can download iStat @ http://islayer.com/apps/istatpro/
As far as checking to see what is causing the lag in performance I would start with Activity Monitor, which can be found in your Applications -> Utilities folder. With Activity Monitor open you can see the available system memory as well as the CPU load & memory used by each process.
With your mention of Flash you may have answered your own question. Flash is a resource heavy process so it's not uncommon for it to cause a dip in performance. You might try upgrading Flash player and ensuring other applications are closed (bring up the application switcher, cmd+tab, to see open applications) to free up as much memory as possible for Flash to use.
Good luck!
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