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Copying/Moving files in finder all of a sudden very slow

S

shopbot999

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 14, 2011
18
0
I have a Macbook Pro 17" 2.8 with 4GB of ram running 10.7.2

For maybe the last month or so, the finder (do we still call it that?) has become very slow. If I reboot and repair permissions, it speeds up for a day or so, then becomes slow again. Simple things like opening folders, copying small text files, moving a folder to the desktop,etc. take forever..... around 5-10 seconds when they should be instant. I tried Activity Monitor and nothing is amiss. No MacDefender installed, so that's not it. Any ideas?

PS: I have 8GB of ram on order, but this was never an issue before.
 
Is it just file handling or everything else slowing down as well? I would open Activity monitor and make sure all processes is selected and see if the CPU is being worked hard, also check out the page-outs and see if they are running up. If you are paging while trying to manipulate files, it can really slow the system to a halt.
 
When I do a simple finder action, Activity Monitor is showing the finder using 100.9% of resources.

Sorry, I have no idea what page-outs are.
 
That's an outrageous amount for Finder to be using. Within the Activity monitor, select the Memory tab at the bottom and there will be a breakdown of the memory usage at the bottom of the application. Within that breakdown there will be a heading labeled Page Outs and then it will list the page-outs that have been used by the system since the last reboot (the values are cumulative, so reboots will reset the values). You would ultimately like the value to remain at 0, but the larger the value it means that you are running low on system memory and the data is being paged (written from the active RAM to free up memory for use by other programs).
 
Squeaker, that is really helpful, thank you. Here's a screenshot of my memory usage.
 

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You have a sufficiently large enough page out to be concerned that you are a good candidate for more RAM (think 8 GB, which is cheap now, to help with your situation). The page ins/outs and swap being used are large. The true measure would be to reboot to clear these values (reset them to zero) and then monitor them over a typical work day (say 8-10 hours) performing your usual duties and see go the values climb. If they climb sufficiently then it would be a good idea to upgrade your ram.

If you are trying to swap while paging, then it is relying on the bottleneck within the system which is your HDD for all activities taking place. This could account for your high CPU values for Finder. You will definitely swap if moving large amount of data, as the max you could hold would be the max of RAM available at the time, the rest would rely on the swap file.
 
Squekr, thank you for all your great info. I installed 8GB of ram, and now I have a new machine. It made all the difference in the world. I'm just wondering why the 4GB worked so well, until a few weeks ago... very odd.
 
So its been a few days now with the new 8GB installed and the machine is doing the same thing... finder actions like simple file duplications, moving, etc of very small files are taking a long time. Guess I must have another issue?
 
ScoobyMcDoo said:
Someone asked early on in the thread, but I didn't see an answer -- is performance degraded in other applications, or just Finder?
Click to expand...

Finder only. Although the initial opening of docs is very slow, too, which I think is a finder action. For example, opening a small doc in Preview.
 
shopbot999 said:
Finder only. Although the initial opening of docs is very slow, too, which I think is a finder action. For example, opening a small doc in Preview.
Click to expand...

Just now saw you replied. Anyway, have you resolved the issue? If not, you might consider backing up, the deleting ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist, then restart finder.
 
Well, its been over a year and I'm still having the same issue, so thought I'd bump this to see if anyone had any fresh ideas.

I updated to a 512GB SSD drive, which improved things slightly, but basically, if I do a lot of file copying in the finder, things start dragging to a halt after only 24 hours or so. A reboot fixes everything for another 24 hours.

I have noticed that this issue is only happening in a certain folder, which has many sub-folders, is 2.2GB in size, and has 273,000 files. Other folders with smaller amounts of content behave normally.

Are there limitations to what the system can deal with in terms of numbers of files? Possibly a variable I can increase?

TIA for any help!
 
I'm having the same issue and came across your thread. After looking at my Activity Monitor I noticed something called QTKitServer popping up and eating up all my resources when I'd have Finder open to copy files. I started going that route and came across another forum that basically said it's a corrupted video file:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2148759?start=0&tstart=0

I'm pretty sure that's my issue, although I haven't figured out which file is corrupted yet. Hope it helps!
 
I know this is an old thread, but I have a good suggestion that helps me resolve these types of issues. It's not a specific fix for this issue, but a general "fix" I use to freshen my system every year or two. Hybrid SSD drives are cheap enough now that I will buy a new hybrid SSD every year or two and install a fresh copy of OS X onto it mounted into an external enclosure. Then, I swap this new drive with the old internal drive, and I have a fresh system that runs well. Sometimes I just boot from the external and leave it there as my system drive. I do this with my 2013 "trash can" Mac Pro where the 512 GB internal M.2 SSD became too small for my needs. I run off a 2TB external hybrid SSD as my system drive.
 
toootone said:
I know this is an old thread, but I have a good suggestion that helps me resolve these types of issues. It's not a specific fix for this issue, but a general "fix" I use to freshen my system every year or two. Hybrid SSD drives are cheap enough now that I will buy a new hybrid SSD every year or two and install a fresh copy of OS X onto it mounted into an external enclosure. Then, I swap this new drive with the old internal drive, and I have a fresh system that runs well. Sometimes I just boot from the external and leave it there as my system drive. I do this with my 2013 "trash can" Mac Pro where the 512 GB internal M.2 SSD became too small for my needs. I run off a 2TB external hybrid SSD as my system drive.
Click to expand...
Just found this while fighting a late 2009 white unibody MacBook trying to pull photos off at a snails pace and found this discussion. Something I’ve encountered twice now in re: to slow copying and the like was the SATA cables. Extended the life of two 2012 Mac Minis via an off the shelf SSD and cable/toolkit from Amazon/iFixit, or other favorite Mac parts shops. Really did the job on those systems.

Good luck on tracking down the problems!

Ed
 
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