Diagnosing "Finder Not Responding" under 10.9

[DanielCoffey]

I am having serious trouble with slow performance after a reboot on my 5,1 with Mavericks and Finder taking a good few minutes to appear on the desktop and I would like to look at my options while I still have a couple of months of AppleCare left.

The very first thing I did was to strip out the Rocket 640L and plug both SSDs back onto the SATA II ODD drive cables. I have reset PRAM and the SMC. I have repaired permissions in Safe Mode.

At the moment the 5,1 has the following configuration...

6x3.33
12Gb ECC 1333 (3x4Gb)
EFI flashed 7950 3Gb (R17 modded)
Samsung 840 PRO 256Gb (Mavericks Boot in ODD)
Samsung 840 PRO 256Gb (Win7 in ODD)
OCZ Vertex2 240Gb (Time Machine in drive slot 2)

USB devices are a Wacom Intuos4, wired mouse and keyboard and a Roland QuadCapture for audio.

I have captured the lines for the most recent Boot from the Console into a Log. It is too large to include in this message so I am linking to the RTF file (46Kb).

http://www.dcoffey.co.uk/images/misc/ConsoleLog.rtf

The last line at 17:35:56.383 appeared just as the Finder finally initialised, almost three minutes after boot.

Other symptoms are that the Tablet driver is not initialising until Finder is finished loading which forces me to use the mouse until it does.

Once the machine is up and running, I can sleep and wake reliably. The only items in the Startup list are iTunesHelper and BootChamp. iStatMenus is in there somewhere too. Mavericks was an Upgrade install from Mountain Lion.

I have tried the Terminal command to kill the Finder plist and process which only works for that boot. Next reboot the issue returns.

I have covered everything I can think of at the moment so would appreciate some help looking into this.

 

[DanielCoffey]

I am really hoping I don't have to go through a Clean Install of Mavericks to resolve this. Since no-one else seems to be having this issue, it is looking like I will have to do so however.

I would assume that temporarily removing all other boot drives from the machine and just leaving a blank drive with a 10.9 Recovery Partition on it would make for a smoother re-install process, yes?

 

[DanielCoffey]

In the end I did have to reinstall Mavericks but it wasn't as bad as I had thought.

I had a spare SSD that I did the clean 10.9 install to and when booting to that drive the MP responded as quickly as I would expect.

I then used Migration Assistant to bring over the Applications, the User folders but NOT the System settings and fortunately that was enough to leave behind whatever was causing the issue.

If I booted from the original drive, I got poor boot times and Spotlight tasks bogging down the performance for several minutes. If I booted from the clean 10.9 plus Apps and User data it was perfectly quick.

I used CCC to shift the clean install plus migrated data to my main SSD, updated my clone backup and turned Time Machine back on and I now have a MP that behaves as I would expect.