Laggy Finder after installing new HDD ???

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Prime Mover
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Laggy Finder after installing new HDD ???

Post by Prime Mover »

So, a few weeks back I cloned my drive in my MBP 2011 and migrated to a new 1TB Hitachi drive. For the most part, it works great, and it's a dream to now have all that new storage. Unfortunately, I'm also noticing some obvious lag in Finder loading. Some directories load instantly, and then others will take 5-15seconds. No rhyme or reason, either. I've repaired permissions, zapped PRAM, turned off all network sharing, disengaged Finder App Nap, even did a little terminal hacking (that I know how to reverse). I feel like things are zippier now, but the basic finder lag (intermittent 5-15sec beach balls) still exists, but maybe less frequently.

I was worried that this is because of my new HDD. But then I realized that I only upgraded to Mavericks about 6 weeks ago, and 10.9.1 came along somewhere in there too, without my knowing about it. After doing some internet searches, it seems that Mavericks is causing huge amounts of Finder slowdown, so this may not be a hardware issue at all.

What have other people experienced? Does this sound like Mavericks shenanigans?
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Re: Laggy Finder after installing new HDD ???

Post by MIDI Life Crisis »

No, it doesn't sound like Mavericks at all. Are all your drives being indexed by Spotlight? Try turning it off.
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Re: Laggy Finder after installing new HDD ???

Post by mikehalloran »

I'd suspect Spotlight, too. Once it's finished indexing, you should be ok.

Open Console. Look for mdworker and mdworker32. If they are not constantly running and failing, Spotlight is not the problem.

Here's an old trick that may work if Spotlight appears to never stop indexing: Shut down, boot in Safe mode by holding down the shift key, then shut down and reboot.
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Re: Laggy Finder after installing new HDD ???

Post by Prime Mover »

Not spotlight, that finished long ago. I opened console and I noticed quite a bit of disk I/O errors. At first I thought that this could be a bad hard drive. But when I did some research, I noticed that a lot of other people were getting these after installing Mavericks. When I checked the console again, I noticed that there were a lot of crash reports being generated by quick look and other frameworks. I have a feeling this isn't a hardware issue, so I'm not going to jump on changing out the HDD, because it likely won't make any difference.

I need to find something that will catch these errors and trash/recreate any of these files that need fixing, any ideas?
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Re: Laggy Finder after installing new HDD ???

Post by Shooshie »

Yeah, the Finder truly sucks in Mavericks. I'm not one who generally complains about the Finder or anything else about the Mac. Mavericks has changed that. I'm ready for something better, and I hope Apple can deliver that in the next OS. Meanwhile, I deal with an incredibly slow Finder, and my machine in general feels sluggish. I don't know what they did, but this is an amazing 12-core machine. To make it run sluggishly took some major foolery.

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Re: Laggy Finder after installing new HDD ???

Post by Prime Mover »

I think I fixed the problem. I ended up deleting a bunch of the Quicklooks icon cache files and rebooting. After taking a quick second to reload icons, the finder appears to be working much snappier and have yet to experience any beach balls during loading. It would occur about one out of every four directory loads; I just clicked around for about a minute straight, about 30 or so loads, with no problems, so I think I'm in the clear!
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Re: Laggy Finder after installing new HDD ???

Post by MIDI Life Crisis »

Strange. My 2008 (first generation to be able to run Mavericks) is doing fine. Snappy. One might even say spunky.

I wonder what is slowing you down, Shoosh? Is there a test we can both run to find out comparable speeds, especially in the Finder?
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Re: Laggy Finder after installing new HDD ???

Post by Shooshie »

MIDI Life Crisis wrote:Strange. My 2008 (first generation to be able to run Mavericks) is doing fine. Snappy. One might even say spunky.

I wonder what is slowing you down, Shoosh? Is there a test we can both run to find out comparable speeds, especially in the Finder?
I don't really know. It might be that we do different things, because I've noticed that some things aren't really any slower, but dealing with photos and videos seems to take longer. Copying files seems to be faster, actually. I'm sure that some of my slow-down is just dealing with hard drives spinning up. Maybe they changed the amount of time until the drives go to sleep. If they are sleeping sooner, then that might cause me to have to wait more often for them to spin up. But that's just an idea; I don't know if Apple changed that wait-time. SOMETHING, however, causes a lot of waits.

Also, if I open a folder of photos and use QuickLook to zoom through them to see what I've got, or to find a particular photo, it just doesn't work the way it used to. For example, I select all photos in a folder, then open QuickLook through Option-Spacebar, and then I start scrolling through them all using the arrow keys. I used to be able to hold down the key and it would flip through the photos in high speed, one at a time. It was a VERY fast way of looking through a lot of pictures. Now it freezes on one while it runs through the stack without displaying them. So, the picture on the monitor may change every 20 photos or so. That's not very helpful, because the one you are looking for may be in the ones that didn't display. So, I have to click the arrow key for every photo rather than just holding it down and flipping through them all. That actually started in Lion or Mountain Lion, so I can't blame it on Mavericks, but it seems to have gotten worse in Mavericks.

A few OS's ago, I really had things the way I wanted them. Everything was fast. Everything just worked. Now it's still operational, but things I used to take for granted now either do not work, do not work the same way, or they work slowly.

But if you have any ideas, MLC, please do tell. I can't think of anything right now, because I've tested things against a MacBook Pro running Mountain Lion. I just haven't found the problem yet. So... I'm kinda out of ideas. But I'm open to trying something (that doesn't involve replacing the system, yadda, yadda). It could be that in the end I DO have to replace the system, but I'll try everything else before I do that. That takes me almost a week, working at it a few hours a day.

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Re: Laggy Finder after installing new HDD ???

Post by Prime Mover »

Shoosh, that sounds sorta similar to my issue. I would go ahead and try looking up and deleting some of the icon cache files. QuickLooks is a lot more than just a viewer, it's actually a large part of the behind the scenes inner workings of the finder and controls icon appearances too, and I've seen it do weird things before, as well.
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Re: Laggy Finder after installing new HDD ???

Post by Shooshie »

Prime Mover wrote:Shoosh, that sounds sorta similar to my issue. I would go ahead and try looking up and deleting some of the icon cache files. QuickLooks is a lot more than just a viewer, it's actually a large part of the behind the scenes inner workings of the finder and controls icon appearances too, and I've seen it do weird things before, as well.
I think there is a terminal command that will delete those. I used it about 6 months ago, when I was trying to fix the custom icon problem in Mountain Lion and a few previous versions. They finally fixed that in Mavericks! Thank goodness for the positives.

I've got a clip here at my desk that I clip onto my keyboard to hold down the Option Key, so that I can watch full-screen slide shows in Quicklook. It had become an integral part of my file management, and now they've gone and crippled it. Pictures tend to look pretty small to my aging eyes on my 27" monitor, so without the full-screen capability Quicklook loses a lot of its appeal. I have no idea what they were thinking if they did this on purpose. Hopefully it was a careless error that will be corrected. If instead it's part of Jony Ive's new aesthetics, we're doomed.

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Re: Laggy Finder after installing new HDD ???

Post by BobK »

If any of you with slow Finders have a Synology NAS drive and are running the CloudStation app on your Mac, try quitting CloudStation. That resolved my slow Finder issues.

With CloudStation running, if I go to a folder with a lot of files - say, Macintosh HD -> Library -> Preferences - and scroll down the list of files (in Column View), I get a beach ball.

Turn off CloudStation and scroll again -> no more beach ball.

Before discovering CloudStation was the culprit, I ran tests and repairs via Tech Tool Pro 7, ran maintenance routines via Onyx (as recommended in this Mac Fixit article:

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-20 ... endations/),

and booted the Mac in Safe Mode. I don't know for sure if any of this helped, but the Finder seems a little quicker than before the beach ball problem. Maybe that's just my relief at not having the dang beach ball every time I tried to do anything in the Finder.
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Re: Laggy Finder after installing new HDD ???

Post by mikehalloran »

Console is your friend, here. It will show old files trying to load and failing. You never know what it will be ... unless you have old versions of Finale as they are often the culprit.

It was OS 10.8.2 that forced me to clean house: Bresink Temp Monitor, Finale 2006 and Spin Dr X were the problems for me. Finding and deleting all of the problem files took quite a bit of doing but I eventually got them all.
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Re: Laggy Finder after installing new HDD ???

Post by Prime Mover »

I had no idea that OSs commonly had so many errors and kept on going.

I noticed quite a few printer and network errors, and I realized that it was almost part of the process. You'd leave a printer network, and the computer didn't care, it just kept checking, and would error, and that's how things worked. Or your driver would be old and the computer wouldn't warn you until it actually became an issue. Kind of chilling, but also kind of nice to know that something with so much complexity doesn't have to be perfect to continue running... otherwise, using a computer would be absolutely impossible.
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Re: Laggy Finder after installing new HDD ???

Post by Phil O »

I was having Finder slowdowns, then I did some house cleaning with Onyx. Deleted a bunch of caches and the Finder is back to normal. I don't know which cache was responsible for the slowdown. I took the shotgun approach. But now, everything is snappy again. :D

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