Moved 270k files and Dock hangs up

[mrz0diak]

Hi everyone

I faced interesting problem. I needed to move 270k files (around 30KB each) from one directory to another. Because of "argument list too long" problem I wasn't able to use simple "mv", so I used workaround with find: find . -type f -name '*' -exec mv {} my_target_dir/ \;
Not fasted solution ever, but.... anyway

After moving files Mac totally hangs up. A little later it become sloooooowly responsive. I assumed that Spotlight indexing files at new location, so I managed to open Spotlight preferences and add my_target_dir into exceptions. Then it come better. But Dock still totally not responsive. Reboot didn't help. I see that Dock consumes memory just more, more, more untill I'm out of free space on my HDD and warning appears. Looks like it also doing some indexing. Any ideas what it can be and how to fix it?

Environment: Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, Macbook Pro 2009

[justperry]

Try to move (move not delete) the com.apple.dock.plist to the desktop and restart the dock.

[Bear]

Are these files all in one directory? Or are they in subdirectories? If they aren't in subdirectories, I would recommend you make that happen.

A single directory with 270K files directly in it is going to eat a lot of overhead whenever you access it.