Finder very slow to load

dhjdhjdhjdhj · 01-28-2013, 02:27 PM

I have a new refurbished Macbook Pro with two 512G SSDs. It's intended as a backup in case my main machines dies while I'm on tour (I use the laptop for a live keyboard rig in a band)

I'm having tremendous trouble getting it to be responsive. When I boot it up and the main window appears, there will be about a 10 second delay before the hard drive icons are displayed.

Double-clicking on a folder window will sometimes (not always) take several (5-6 seconds) before the folder window opens.

At first I thought there was a problem with one of the SSDs and I took it to an authorized Apple dealer familar with these things and they completely nuked the contents of the drives and reinstalled Lion (10.7.5) on one and left the other one empty. The behavior was totally fine and they have confirmed that the SSDs are in perfect working order.

I then used the Migration Assistent to copy as much as possible from primary laptop to secondary laptop. After that was done and after I dealt with various reactivation issues for some software, I then copied the contents of the second SSD from original machine to new machine. This was done using rsync.

I'm suspecting there's some kind of contention somewhere that is "holding up" Finder and file operations but I've no idea how to go about dealing with this.

Anyone have any ideas here?

Thanks in advance,
D

dhjdhjdhjdhj · 01-28-2013, 02:33 PM

As a followup, one symtom I see a lot when I open a new folder window is a spinning icon on the bottom right of the folder for an extremely long time. Eventually, the files show up, but delays range from 5 seconds to several minutes.

DeltaMac · 01-28-2013, 03:11 PM

You should be able to quickly determine at least some part of the slowdowns by opening your Activity Monitor. Set the display to show All Processes - not just My Processes.
Click on the header to sort by % CPU, so you get the most CPU use at the top of the list.
Open one of your finder windows, and watch that Activity Monitor window while that window loads.
Are there typical windows that are much slower - or are all windows much the same slow speed?

If you can't tell much with Activity Monitor - is this an issue of sheer file numbers in a finder window?
What do you use for default View in any window? Have you tried changing the View Options for a less CPU-intensive choice (especially if you have a large number of files in a folder. Large, in my opinion, would be more than 2,000 files in a list ) trying showing in List View, and make sure to turn OFF showing "Calculate all sizes" and also "Show Icon Preview"
Are you using software OTHER than OS X to show all your files, such as Pathfinder, etc?

What major apps do you have open all the time?
You have two 512 GB SSDs. How much free space do you have on both drives?

dhjdhjdhjdhj · 01-28-2013, 04:19 PM

First --- thank you so much for the quick response, I appreciate it.
I don't believe this is really a Finder issue. It seems more like underlying file operation access

I observe that when I start up other programs there can be minutes of delay before the program actually runs...the activity monitor doesn't actually give anything useful --- I'll often see the app I started showing 100% (or more) utilization for a few seconds and it will then drop down to a small number (5-10%) and then there's just minutes of waiting.

I don't have any apps open when I see this behavior in Finder, or I will see the behavior when I open just one app (like MaxMSP) and then try to load patchers (Max equivalent of loading documents into other applications)

Each SSD is about 1/2 full. This is for legacy reasons, I used to use 7200rpm hard drives and I put my sample wavefiles on a separate hard drive to speed up access. When I switched from hard drives to SSDs, it was easier to just clone the existing hard drives.

Note that I am not having this problem on my "master" laptop (which has the same SSDs in it) and actually less RAM (8Gb rather than 16Gb)

DeltaMac · 01-28-2013, 04:48 PM

So, when you say that you have NO apps open, yet it happens in the Finder - what shows up in the window if you bring up your Force-Quit? If you have no other apps running, then you should only see Finder in the Force-Quit window.

Boot to your Recovery system, and run Disk Utility/Repair Disk on both SSDs.

Are both of your laptops running the same OS X version (10.7.5)

If both laptops have essentially identical software, then I could suggest that you try an OS X reinstall - very simple to do from your Recovery partition. That will often clean up your system, and could result in a return to the performance that you expect.
Run Software Update to make sure that your system is fully up-to-date after that OS X reload.
Don't do ANYTHING else to the rest of your own software, just reinstall OS X.
I'm not sure what would happen to your MaxMSP installation after an OS X reload, because the purpose of the OS X reinstall is to do that in-place. Some pro-level software may need to be reinstalled, but try it out after the OS X reload, to see if all works as you expect. Just to repeat, I'm asking you to do the OS X reinstall, without erasing. Sounds like you do keep good backups, and this would be one of the times that you want to be sure about that. In fact, if you have your full Lion install on a flash drive, you'll find that the reinstall of Lion goes very quickly to your SSD. Otherwise, doing the reinstall from your Recovery system means waiting for the internet download of the Lion files.
I like to restart a couple of times after a major reinstall, to rebuild the various system caches. Trying folders and apps directly after the first reboot is not usually a good test. Restart a couple of times, THEN check for your issues. Don't forget to allow for the time to rebuild the Spotlight database. It WILL rebuild after the OS X reload, and may give you a huge hit on performance as it rebuilds.

dhjdhjdhjdhj · 01-28-2013, 06:16 PM

I did an OS reinstall and that solved the problem completely! I wish I understood what was the problem though but at this point I'm just happy to have the issue resolved.

Thank you
D

DeltaMac · 01-28-2013, 10:05 PM

Might be a result of the big migration that you needed to do, onto the new, clean system. Perhaps some of the cache files became corrupted during that migration process. The OS X reload can often clean out the caches, and set everything right. I will often do a reload as a sort-of last step after moving files because of a replaced hard drive, or (like in your case) building up a system from a backup set created on a different Mac. Most of your backup was created on another computer, right? and now you want to incorporate THOSE files into a system on a completely different Mac. So - last part of that is a reload, as a final "alignment" of the system itself.
Or - maybe it's just my OCD taking over (IDK?)
The important part is a good result, eh?

agentx · 01-29-2013, 08:58 AM

Always test a machine with a new User first before a re-intsall.
You then know if problem is in your Users folder or higher level.

It could have been 1 plist or cache file causing issues...or spotlight etc.

dhjdhjdhjdhj · 01-29-2013, 09:01 AM

Yes, the first thing I did was create a new user --- that made no difference. That's when I started to get worried :-)

agentx · 01-29-2013, 09:22 AM

OK. So issues would point then to /Library
Anyway a reinstall is nice to do now and again. Gets rid of all the cruft ;-)

dhjdhjdhjdhj · 01-29-2013, 09:35 AM

Well, yeah --- but I would have liked to have known precisely what was wrong. Something was really screwing up file access.

agentx · 01-29-2013, 09:54 AM

Well could have been Directory issues. ( A job for Diskwarrior)
what SSDs do you have ?

dhjdhjdhjdhj · 01-29-2013, 10:06 AM

They are Crucial M4 (512Gb each)

agentx · 01-29-2013, 10:09 AM

What firmware ?

dhjdhjdhjdhj · 01-29-2013, 10:17 AM

Latest --- they're brand new....I'm aware of the issue with that old version of the firmware but as I mentioned at the beginning, I knew the drives were ok as we had done separate testing.

agentx · 01-29-2013, 10:33 AM

Also just for note Apple's built in RSYNC is very out of date and they will not be updating it. It was modified but does not always handle things perfectly on OS X.

I compile and use my own versions of Rsync 3.

agentx$ rsync --version
rsync version 3.0.9 protocol version 30
Copyright (C) 1996-2011 by Andrew Tridgell, Wayne Davison, and others.
Web site: http://rsync.samba.org/
Capabilities:
64-bit files, 64-bit inums, 64-bit timestamps, 64-bit long ints,
socketpairs, hardlinks, symlinks, IPv6, batchfiles, inplace,
append, ACLs, xattrs, iconv, symtimes, file-flags

do the same for built in versions and will be missing some of the goodness ;-)

01-28-2013, 02:27 PM	#1
dhjdhjdhjdhj Triple-A Player Join Date: Apr 2007 Posts: 96	Finder very slow to load I have a new refurbished Macbook Pro with two 512G SSDs. It's intended as a backup in case my main machines dies while I'm on tour (I use the laptop for a live keyboard rig in a band) I'm having tremendous trouble getting it to be responsive. When I boot it up and the main window appears, there will be about a 10 second delay before the hard drive icons are displayed. Double-clicking on a folder window will sometimes (not always) take several (5-6 seconds) before the folder window opens. At first I thought there was a problem with one of the SSDs and I took it to an authorized Apple dealer familar with these things and they completely nuked the contents of the drives and reinstalled Lion (10.7.5) on one and left the other one empty. The behavior was totally fine and they have confirmed that the SSDs are in perfect working order. I then used the Migration Assistent to copy as much as possible from primary laptop to secondary laptop. After that was done and after I dealt with various reactivation issues for some software, I then copied the contents of the second SSD from original machine to new machine. This was done using rsync. I'm suspecting there's some kind of contention somewhere that is "holding up" Finder and file operations but I've no idea how to go about dealing with this. Anyone have any ideas here? Thanks in advance, D

01-28-2013, 03:11 PM	#3
DeltaMac League Commissioner Join Date: Jan 2002 Posts: 7,960	You should be able to quickly determine at least some part of the slowdowns by opening your Activity Monitor. Set the display to show All Processes - not just My Processes. Click on the header to sort by % CPU, so you get the most CPU use at the top of the list. Open one of your finder windows, and watch that Activity Monitor window while that window loads. Are there typical windows that are much slower - or are all windows much the same slow speed? If you can't tell much with Activity Monitor - is this an issue of sheer file numbers in a finder window? What do you use for default View in any window? Have you tried changing the View Options for a less CPU-intensive choice (especially if you have a large number of files in a folder. Large, in my opinion, would be more than 2,000 files in a list ) trying showing in List View, and make sure to turn OFF showing "Calculate all sizes" and also "Show Icon Preview" Are you using software OTHER than OS X to show all your files, such as Pathfinder, etc? What major apps do you have open all the time? You have two 512 GB SSDs. How much free space do you have on both drives? Last edited by DeltaMac; 01-28-2013 at 03:17 PM.

01-29-2013, 10:33 AM	#16
agentx Hall of Famer Join Date: Feb 2003 Location: Brighton, UK Posts: 3,811	Also just for note Apple's built in RSYNC is very out of date and they will not be updating it. It was modified but does not always handle things perfectly on OS X. I compile and use my own versions of Rsync 3. agentx$ rsync --version rsync version 3.0.9 protocol version 30 Copyright (C) 1996-2011 by Andrew Tridgell, Wayne Davison, and others. Web site: http://rsync.samba.org/ Capabilities: 64-bit files, 64-bit inums, 64-bit timestamps, 64-bit long ints, socketpairs, hardlinks, symlinks, IPv6, batchfiles, inplace, append, ACLs, xattrs, iconv, symtimes, file-flags do the same for built in versions and will be missing some of the goodness ;-) Last edited by agentx; 01-29-2013 at 10:36 AM.

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01-28-2013, 02:33 PM	#2
dhjdhjdhjdhj Triple-A Player Join Date: Apr 2007 Posts: 96	As a followup, one symtom I see a lot when I open a new folder window is a spinning icon on the bottom right of the folder for an extremely long time. Eventually, the files show up, but delays range from 5 seconds to several minutes.

01-28-2013, 04:19 PM	#4
dhjdhjdhjdhj Triple-A Player Join Date: Apr 2007 Posts: 96	First --- thank you so much for the quick response, I appreciate it. I don't believe this is really a Finder issue. It seems more like underlying file operation access I observe that when I start up other programs there can be minutes of delay before the program actually runs...the activity monitor doesn't actually give anything useful --- I'll often see the app I started showing 100% (or more) utilization for a few seconds and it will then drop down to a small number (5-10%) and then there's just minutes of waiting. I don't have any apps open when I see this behavior in Finder, or I will see the behavior when I open just one app (like MaxMSP) and then try to load patchers (Max equivalent of loading documents into other applications) Each SSD is about 1/2 full. This is for legacy reasons, I used to use 7200rpm hard drives and I put my sample wavefiles on a separate hard drive to speed up access. When I switched from hard drives to SSDs, it was easier to just clone the existing hard drives. Note that I am not having this problem on my "master" laptop (which has the same SSDs in it) and actually less RAM (8Gb rather than 16Gb)

01-28-2013, 04:48 PM	#5
DeltaMac League Commissioner Join Date: Jan 2002 Posts: 7,960	So, when you say that you have NO apps open, yet it happens in the Finder - what shows up in the window if you bring up your Force-Quit? If you have no other apps running, then you should only see Finder in the Force-Quit window. Boot to your Recovery system, and run Disk Utility/Repair Disk on both SSDs. Are both of your laptops running the same OS X version (10.7.5) If both laptops have essentially identical software, then I could suggest that you try an OS X reinstall - very simple to do from your Recovery partition. That will often clean up your system, and could result in a return to the performance that you expect. Run Software Update to make sure that your system is fully up-to-date after that OS X reload. Don't do ANYTHING else to the rest of your own software, just reinstall OS X. I'm not sure what would happen to your MaxMSP installation after an OS X reload, because the purpose of the OS X reinstall is to do that in-place. Some pro-level software may need to be reinstalled, but try it out after the OS X reload, to see if all works as you expect. Just to repeat, I'm asking you to do the OS X reinstall, without erasing. Sounds like you do keep good backups, and this would be one of the times that you want to be sure about that. In fact, if you have your full Lion install on a flash drive, you'll find that the reinstall of Lion goes very quickly to your SSD. Otherwise, doing the reinstall from your Recovery system means waiting for the internet download of the Lion files. I like to restart a couple of times after a major reinstall, to rebuild the various system caches. Trying folders and apps directly after the first reboot is not usually a good test. Restart a couple of times, THEN check for your issues. Don't forget to allow for the time to rebuild the Spotlight database. It WILL rebuild after the OS X reload, and may give you a huge hit on performance as it rebuilds.

01-28-2013, 06:16 PM	#6
dhjdhjdhjdhj Triple-A Player Join Date: Apr 2007 Posts: 96	I did an OS reinstall and that solved the problem completely! I wish I understood what was the problem though but at this point I'm just happy to have the issue resolved. Thank you D

01-28-2013, 10:05 PM	#7
DeltaMac League Commissioner Join Date: Jan 2002 Posts: 7,960	Might be a result of the big migration that you needed to do, onto the new, clean system. Perhaps some of the cache files became corrupted during that migration process. The OS X reload can often clean out the caches, and set everything right. I will often do a reload as a sort-of last step after moving files because of a replaced hard drive, or (like in your case) building up a system from a backup set created on a different Mac. Most of your backup was created on another computer, right? and now you want to incorporate THOSE files into a system on a completely different Mac. So - last part of that is a reload, as a final "alignment" of the system itself. Or - maybe it's just my OCD taking over (IDK?) The important part is a good result, eh?

01-29-2013, 08:58 AM	#8
agentx Hall of Famer Join Date: Feb 2003 Location: Brighton, UK Posts: 3,811	Always test a machine with a new User first before a re-intsall. You then know if problem is in your Users folder or higher level. It could have been 1 plist or cache file causing issues...or spotlight etc.

01-29-2013, 09:01 AM	#9
dhjdhjdhjdhj Triple-A Player Join Date: Apr 2007 Posts: 96	Yes, the first thing I did was create a new user --- that made no difference. That's when I started to get worried :-)

01-29-2013, 09:22 AM	#10
agentx Hall of Famer Join Date: Feb 2003 Location: Brighton, UK Posts: 3,811	OK. So issues would point then to /Library Anyway a reinstall is nice to do now and again. Gets rid of all the cruft ;-)

01-29-2013, 09:35 AM	#11
dhjdhjdhjdhj Triple-A Player Join Date: Apr 2007 Posts: 96	Well, yeah --- but I would have liked to have known precisely what was wrong. Something was really screwing up file access.

01-29-2013, 09:54 AM	#12
agentx Hall of Famer Join Date: Feb 2003 Location: Brighton, UK Posts: 3,811	Well could have been Directory issues. ( A job for Diskwarrior) what SSDs do you have ?

01-29-2013, 10:06 AM	#13
dhjdhjdhjdhj Triple-A Player Join Date: Apr 2007 Posts: 96	They are Crucial M4 (512Gb each)

01-29-2013, 10:09 AM	#14
agentx Hall of Famer Join Date: Feb 2003 Location: Brighton, UK Posts: 3,811	What firmware ?

01-29-2013, 10:17 AM	#15
dhjdhjdhjdhj Triple-A Player Join Date: Apr 2007 Posts: 96	Latest --- they're brand new....I'm aware of the issue with that old version of the firmware but as I mentioned at the beginning, I knew the drives were ok as we had done separate testing.