Mavericks: Slow finder / spinning beach ball

KimHansenDK · Oct 28, 2013

I recently installed Mavericks on my 2012 13" MacBook Air (2.0/8GB) and have experienced a few issues.

The finder is kinda slow - especially when accessing folders for the first time after being logged out / waking up. It's shows the folder, but the content will only be shown after 20-30 sec. If I access it again it shows the content immediately...

Also I see the spinning beach ball a lot more than before. But only for like half a second. Sometimes it shows up when right clicking somewhere, changing text in Photoshop or doing something else. It does not affect my work, but I would really like it to stop...

I also experience safari being slow to load websites once in a while.

Everything just seems slower - before my MacBook Air was just blazing fast!

Has anyone else noticed the issues with the slow finder and spinning beach ball? And is there a way to fix it? Maybe it is just some bugs that will be corrected in an update...

KimHansenDK · Oct 28, 2013

Can anyone test this:

Log out or restart your machine - open safari and try to download (save as) an image to the hard drive.

Does the finder take long to show the content of the folders you choose to save the image to?

This is just an example. Also in ex. Photoshop when I open or save a file (for the first time or after a while) it takes soooo long to show the content of the folders in the finder.

Any advice? I have clean-installed Mavericks.

Machine: 13" MacBook Air 2012 (2.0GHz i7/8GB ram/265GB SSD)

Really frustrating when working!!

definitive · Oct 28, 2013

i've experienced the beach ball issue on several macs, though it didn't have any negative affect on the system performance.

KimHansenDK · Oct 28, 2013

definitive said:
i've experienced the beach ball issue on several macs, though it didn't have any negative affect on the system performance.

It doesn't affect the performance here as well.

What about the content/files of folders not showing immediately when accessing the folder from safari/apps ??

definitive · Oct 28, 2013

KimHansenDK said:
It doesn't affect the performance here as well.

What about the content/files of folders not showing immediately when accessing the folder from safari/apps ??

i've not experienced any issues with finder. have you tried to repair permissions and verify disk in the disk utility, or maybe even resetting pram?

dangerly · Oct 28, 2013

Two days ago I upgraded two iMacs to Mavericks. One is a 24" 3.06 C2D 8Gb (2009) the other is a 27" i7 3.4 GHz 24Gb (late 2012).

Well, the 24" iMac has become a snail in just about every task.
As far as the 27" iMac i experience similar slowdowns and beachballs showing up as you do with your MBAir.
I did a clean install of Mavericks on both my iMacs.

Don't know why and hope somebody has an explanation for this.

KimHansenDK · Oct 28, 2013

definitive said:
i've not experienced any issues with finder. have you tried to repair permissions and verify disk in the disk utility, or maybe even resetting pram?

I have tried both.

In the finder it shows a loading/searching icon in the bottom of the finder window until the files are showing.

katmeef · Oct 28, 2013

KimHansenDK said:
It doesn't affect the performance here as well.

What about the content/files of folders not showing immediately when accessing the folder from safari/apps ??

I see the ultra brief beach balls as well, normally when I'm in parallels and ram utilization is high (8gb early 2013 13" rmbp). Wondering if it might be memory compression at work but not sure.

KimHansenDK · Oct 28, 2013

katmeef said:
I see the ultra brief beach balls as well, normally when I'm in parallels and ram utilization is high (8gb early 2013 13" rmbp). Wondering if it might be memory compression at work but not sure.

I can live with the beach balls but the finder issue is getting on my nerves.

Diesel79 · Oct 29, 2013

I'm also getting the beachball issue, it's not causing any problems other than the facts it's really! irritating.

DocMultimedia · Oct 29, 2013

Also seeing the beachball on the 3 different computers I've installed Mavericks on. 27in iMac, Mac Pro, and 13in Air.

I've noticed on QuickLook that it takes a noticeable amount of time to display an image, or most any other type of file.

Hopefully will be fixed in 10.9.1.

audiomixer · Oct 30, 2013

I also am seeing a slow finder. Most irritating with you have to attach a file or do a save file as. It just takes too long to load the folder.

tigres · Oct 31, 2013

This is driving me insane

OP.

I have this very issue, and no matter what I have tried I cannot solve the issue.

Finder is slow......... spinning wheel while loading, but most of all saving any attachment is a 30 second wait to load folders on any level in finder.

So far I have:
Repaired permissions.
Reset PRAM
Reset SMC
RE-indexed spotlight

2013 MBA maxed out.

Can anyone please advise on how we might fix this? Saving a mail attachment to any folder (even the desktop) results in a ridiculous holding pattern for the mac to (index?) the entire mac-> (or so it appears that's what's happening).

Thanks for any guidance/tips.

xgman · Oct 31, 2013

tigres said:
OP.

I have this very issue, and no matter what I have tried I cannot solve the issue.

Finder is slow......... spinning wheel while loading, but most of all saving any attachment is a 30 second wait to load folders on any level in finder.

So far I have:
Repaired permissions.
Reset PRAM
Reset SMC
RE-indexed spotlight

2013 MBA maxed out.

Can anyone please advise on how we might fix this? Saving a mail attachment to any folder (even the desktop) results in a ridiculous holding pattern for the mac to (index?) the entire mac-> (or so it appears that's what's happening).

Thanks for any guidance/tips.

Not sure, but after permissions repair in disk utility, try this below. Can't hurt to try.

Clear the kext caches:

sudo chown root:admin (enter password)

sudo kextcache -system-prelinked-kernel
sudo kextcache -system-caches

Do in terminal and reboot. make sure your start up disk is still selected correctly in preferences.

tigres · Oct 31, 2013

xgman said:
Not sure, but after permissions repair in disk utility, try this below. Can't hurt to try.

Clear the kext caches:

sudo chown root:admin (enter password)

sudo kextcache -system-prelinked-kernel
sudo kextcache -system-caches

Do in terminal and reboot. make sure your start up disk is still selected correctly in preferences.

Not sure if I should be attempting this, can you advise on what exactly this is doing to my machine?

thanks for the tip, appreciate it.

Siderz · Oct 31, 2013

I was gonna ask about the beach ball.

I get it quite often when I'm not doing anything strenuous, like if I just move the cursor over to a tab in Chrome, it'll appear for about half a second.

darngooddesign · Oct 31, 2013

Its not just Mavericks. I just upgraded iTunes on Lion and I'm now getting more beach balls.

PixarPost · Oct 31, 2013

audiomixer said:
I also am seeing a slow finder. Most irritating with you have to attach a file or do a save file as. It just takes too long to load the folder.

This is my exact scenario as well - I am experiencing this on a Mid 2010 Mac Pro as well as a Late 2009 MacBook.

Prof. · Oct 31, 2013

I get the half-second beach ball thing, too. Also, my MacBook Pro no longer responds after the first click. Sometimes I have to click an app/link two or three times before it opens. Other times I click it once and there is a delay in opening the link/app. Finally, things take forever to load.

IMO, Mavericks is the buggiest OS release.

Doc69 · Nov 1, 2013

I upgraded my oldest Mac (2007 17" SR MacBook Pro, 4GB RAM, SSD) to try out Mavericks before I upgrade on my main Macs. The result is a very slow computer. The worst thing is how the virtual machines in Fusion 5 or 6 behaves. They take maybe 5-10 times as long to boot and software are running extremely slow.

Is this normal because the Mac is old? Mountain Lion ran perfectly.

Prof. · Nov 1, 2013

And this is why Mavericks sucks.

With ML that never went below 1GB free

BuffMaltese · Nov 1, 2013

mid 2012 MBAir i7 8gb ram

blazing speed under mountain lion.

upgrade to mavericks....problems
clean install....same problems

Problems:

1) Frequently spinning beach ball (rainbow pinwheel)
2) pdf scrolling freezes in preview (unresponsive for a few seconds)
3) choppy full-screen video in Mplayer X, started using VLC player, same problem (intermittent, seems worse the first part of the video for some reason)

All pdf's and videos are saved to my hard drive

gmanist1000 · Nov 1, 2013

KimHansenDK said:
I recently installed Mavericks on my 2012 13" MacBook Air (2.0/8GB) and have experienced a few issues.

The finder is kinda slow - especially when accessing folders for the first time after being logged out / waking up. It's shows the folder, but the content will only be shown after 20-30 sec. If I access it again it shows the content immediately...

Also I see the spinning beach ball a lot more than before. But only for like half a second. Sometimes it shows up when right clicking somewhere, changing text in Photoshop or doing something else. It does not affect my work, but I would really like it to stop...

I also experience safari being slow to load websites once in a while.

Everything just seems slower - before my MacBook Air was just blazing fast!

Has anyone else noticed the issues with the slow finder and spinning beach ball? And is there a way to fix it? Maybe it is just some bugs that will be corrected in an update...

Finder is a lot slower. Whenever I need to attach files in Safari it takes ages to load the files.

scarduner · Nov 2, 2013

Of course they have a solution: buy a new Mac

Apple doesn't care about people who don't buy new Macs regularly. Apparently theyjust don't care about us cheapskate laggards.

My perfectly good older Macbook Pro is now unbearably slow. I can't work like this and I can't go out and buy a new computer to keep up with their OS...

I would have appreciated a nice big warning on install: "You are running an older Mac... You only have 4GB memory... Mavericks does not run well on older systems like yours..."

Too late now. Anyone got a few thousand they can lend me?

This is truly unacceptable.

oldtime · Nov 2, 2013

scarduner said:
Apple doesn't care about people who don't buy new Macs regularly. Apparently theyjust don't care about us cheapskate laggards.

My perfectly good older Macbook Pro is now unbearably slow. I can't work like this and I can't go out and buy a new computer to keep up with their OS...

I would have appreciated a nice big warning on install: "You are running an older Mac... You only have 4GB memory... Mavericks does not run well on older systems like yours..."

Too late now. Anyone got a few thousand they can lend me?

This is truly unacceptable.

Well you can always go back to ML. I actually think I might. Not digging Mavs for the problems outlined here.

Mavericks: Slow finder / spinning beach ball

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