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monokakata

macrumors 68020
May 8, 2008
2,057
602
Ithaca, NY
Well...that lasted for a while, but a couple of days ago the external connection went back to awful. And I'd rebooted recently.

Just now I ran Onyx and Finder's behaving itself. I guess I'll just get in the habit of running Onyx every week.
 

BKDad

macrumors regular
May 16, 2011
208
178
Well...that lasted for a while, but a couple of days ago the external connection went back to awful. And I'd rebooted recently.

Just now I ran Onyx and Finder's behaving itself. I guess I'll just get in the habit of running Onyx every week.

I guess that's better than nuthin. It'd be nice to know just which action Onyx is doing to fix this. That'd speed the process up.

It's amazing to me that Apple seemingly will spend a lot of resources deciding to not fix something they broke, that affects a lot of people, rather than just doing it.

It's ironic, in a way. One of the selling points about macOS and OS X before was that you could go months without rebooting with no bad effects. HA!

Thanks for the update! Is there anything at all better about Sonoma?
 

monokakata

macrumors 68020
May 8, 2008
2,057
602
Ithaca, NY
I guess that's better than nuthin. It'd be nice to know just which action Onyx is doing to fix this. That'd speed the process up.

It's amazing to me that Apple seemingly will spend a lot of resources deciding to not fix something they broke, that affects a lot of people, rather than just doing it.

It's ironic, in a way. One of the selling points about macOS and OS X before was that you could go months without rebooting with no bad effects. HA!

Thanks for the update! Is there anything at all better about Sonoma?
Nothing better that I can see. But I had better say that I use my Mac in some very specific ways, all the time, and so I'm hardly even aware of Sonoma's bells and whistles. That's not meant as a criticism.
 

BKDad

macrumors regular
May 16, 2011
208
178
Nothing better that I can see. But I had better say that I use my Mac in some very specific ways, all the time, and so I'm hardly even aware of Sonoma's bells and whistles. That's not meant as a criticism.

I guess that after a point, there's limited value in adding more ways to do the same old things. Sure, some people really like some of the newer approaches, and that's great, but more isn't always better.

As for Onyx, you might try a more selective approach. Just this one function seems to work for me. Of course, I'm not really sure if it's just some restart activity that clears up whatever is bothering macOS or this specifically, but it might be worth a try.

EDIT: Titanium software also offers another software application named Maintenance that is essentially a subset of Onyx. It doesn't do as much as Onyx, but it does do the part I show below. It seems to do the job equally well. For me, anyway. YMMV, etc.

Maintenance

1702648078169.png
 
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HDFan

Contributor
Original poster
Jun 30, 2007
7,216
3,266
Just checked with Apple support again. Development again stated that they are aware of the problem and to wait for a fix at a time to be determined.

If you want this to get fixed file a feedback report.
 
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HDFan

Contributor
Original poster
Jun 30, 2007
7,216
3,266
Yes, it will and there is nothing we can do about it. Apple can respond if there are enough complaints. We can influence its decisions.
 

monokakata

macrumors 68020
May 8, 2008
2,057
602
Ithaca, NY
Yes, it will and there is nothing we can do about it. Apple can respond if there are enough complaints. We can influence its decisions.
I filed a report a few weeks ago.

Of course Apple prioritizes its response to issues. But I'm having a hard time believing that the folks with large external disks aren't a significant part of the ecosystem. Maybe I'm wrong, and those of us who need this bug fixed are too small a group for the managers to worry about.

The other day I opened up my 8 tb TB external with Finder (thoughtlessly) and waited more than 30 seconds for action. Slapped my forehead, went to Forklift, got what I wanted instantly.
 
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BKDad

macrumors regular
May 16, 2011
208
178
Yes, it will and there is nothing we can do about it. Apple can respond if there are enough complaints. We can influence its decisions.
Can and will are two different things.

Side story...

When I updated from Ventura to Sonoma on this pretty new Mac Studio, one of my USB peripherals stopped working properly. (I'll leave out the particulars.) As it happens, I'm friends with the guy who designed this particular peripheral device, so I asked him what was going on. He told me that he'd had another customer tell him about this.

So, he emailed the engineers at Apple he'd worked with on this and some other products. Probably an unauthorized backdoor approach, which is why I left out the particulars. They got back to him within a day to tell him that they had never heard about the issue, were personally concerned, and that they would try to sneak in a fix ASAP. These are engineers my friend had a good relationship with, and he doubted that they'd mislead him. They certainly hadn't in the past.

Now, what's that say? It says to me that the Apple corporate system is focused on new whatever, and that fixing stuff that broke along the way is a lower priority. In fact, as you found out, they have a kind of emergency room triage system that determines what the engineers even hear about. Lots of corporate resources are put into prioritizing what gets worked on.

My guess is that this won't be fixed soon because it isn't a high priority for what drives the management. The engineers might be all for getting it right, but they may not have even heard about the issue. If it hasn't been fixed by now, it may never be fixed.

Also, this may be considered a feature, not a bug!

Check this out: Sonoma Memory Leak

Although not exactly the same thing, the behavior is pretty much the same. If you use Finder to look at a list of files in a folder, it often takes quite a while for the list to be populated if the folder has a lot of files in it. At least that's what I've found. But, if you go back to that same folder and look again two minutes later, the listing pops up almost instantly. Go back a few days later to do the same thing and it takes half of forever again. It could be that the same kind of action takes place as described in the Eclectic Light article linked to above. A system restart empties that cache in memory, so Finder has to scan the folder again rather than looking for a cache listing. That doesn't seem to take nearly as long as a cache scan. (Note - this is just supposition on my part, but the two issues seem really closely related. They emerged at the same time, too.)

Maybe a daily restart isn't the worst thing you can do. It cleans up some Mail app problems, too.
 
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HDFan

Contributor
Original poster
Jun 30, 2007
7,216
3,266
Can and will are two different things.

Have you worked in a software development environment? As you said the timing of fixes is depending upon a lot of things - severity, resources available, number of complaints, code lifetime (is that code going go be completely replaced in a year) among other things. Bug fixes have to be prioritized and if your bug is at the bottom of the list you will have to wait. Maybe forever. My fingers are crossed.

There is a lot of pressure on software developers, particularly as a new release approaches. "Sneaking in" a fix could get them fired.
 
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Davidson Powell

macrumors newbie
Feb 22, 2011
4
2
Thankful to find this thread!

Same issue here, the very slow population of files or folders in a Finder window with column view- particularly for data on a TB-attached external RAID0 SSD.

My setup is a Mac Studio M1 Max, running Ventura 13.6.5.

I tried some of the mentioned solutions, but what has so far made the most difference is running cache-cleaning routines (except for the internet caches) with Cocktail.app, with an auto-restart when complete.

For now, this has mostly eliminated the slowness.. ..we'll see if this lasts, or if the slowness gradually returns.
 
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Davidson Powell

macrumors newbie
Feb 22, 2011
4
2
Thankful to find this thread!

Same issue here, the very slow population of files or folders in a Finder window with column view- particularly for data on a TB-attached external RAID0 SSD.

My setup is a Mac Studio M1 Max, running Ventura 13.6.5.

I tried some of the mentioned solutions, but what has so far made the most difference is running cache-cleaning routines (except for the internet caches) with Cocktail.app, with an auto-restart when complete.

For now, this has mostly eliminated the slowness.. ..we'll see if this lasts, or if the slowness gradually returns.
Sure enuf, slowness gradually returned.. (sigh) I'll just have to run the cache cleaning routines more frequently..

And just re-checking, this seems to affect only those directories on outboard attached disks- whether SS or spinning.
 
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HDFan

Contributor
Original poster
Jun 30, 2007
7,216
3,266
slowness gradually returned.. (sigh) I'll just have to run the cache cleaning routines more frequently..

or just use a different file browser such as forklift.


I have file system slowness on my main drive when doing things as opening a newly created file. File open dialogue has different results than finder window. Sometimes takes minutes for a file to appear. Not sure if it is due to iCloud files.
 
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Davidson Powell

macrumors newbie
Feb 22, 2011
4
2
or just use a different file browser such as forklift.



I have file system slowness on my main drive when doing things as opening a newly created file. File open dialogue has different results than finder window. Sometimes takes minutes for a file to appear. Not sure if it is due to iCloud files.
Yeah, I may try forklift- thanks for the info on that :)

I did go through and un-check the iCloud stuff; didn't seem to make any noticeable difference. It's the same for me too HDFan- condition is most obvious with 'Open' file dialogue, especially with photoshop, but is also generally prevalent throughout in varying degrees of slowness..

When convenient, I'll open from a list-viewed folder from the Dock where there's no delay.
 

jollino

macrumors 6502
Nov 15, 2006
366
10
Chieti, Italy
Out of sheer curiosity, what filesystem do you all have on the slow disks? I only have this on a mechanical USB 3.0 hard drive, which is HFS+. The same disk exhibits the same issues on a new M2 Pro Mac Mini with Sonoma as it did on a 2017 Intel iMac with Ventura.

It IS definitely Finder related because listing files in a terminal window is absolutely instant. I assume that ForkLift (which I haven't tried) also gets the file list more directly. Still, moving the same slow folders to an APFS SSD — be it the internal one or an USB one — is instant. I wonder if Apple caused a regression in Ventura's finder as far as HFS+ is concerned, and it's just gone unnoticed since all new machines tend to use APFS anyway.

During the slow listings with the Finder, I see a process called diskarbitrationd taking up about 85% CPU, while launchd takes another 35%. The crazy part is that sometimes it takes so long that the physical disk spins down again before it's done.
 
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CapitalQ

macrumors member
Jun 30, 2007
57
11
Bummer to see there are 5 pages of people suffering from this, but no fix from Apple yet. I'll add one to the pile.

My friend bought and set up a new M2 Mac Mini this week to upgrade from a dying 2010s iMac. I know the performance increase when I upgraded to Apple Silicon was immeasurable, so I was excited to hear some good news.

Unfortunately he's been completely caught off-guard by Finder suddenly taking up to 30 seconds to load folders from external drives (which he uses daily for work) that previously rendered instantaneously on the Intel iMac running Catalina.

After multiple calls to Apple and a visit to the Genius Bar, all of whom were unfamiliar with this issue and told him perhaps he needed more RAM than 16GB (to use Finder??), we ran some home tests. He was able to capture video showing how the iMac on Catalina loads these folders with no delay, but on his new M2 Mac Mini or my M1 MacBook Air, both running Sonoma, folders with a few hundred images consistently struggle to load in a reasonable time, especially in 'Open File' dialogs in various applications like Preview.

The real kicker is as a final test last night, he upgraded the Intel iMac from Catalina (2019) to Sonoma to see if the Finder issues would come to the older model, so we could rule out Apple Silicon hardware being the problem. Lo and behold, a computer that had never exhibited these issues with external drives before suddenly now takes 30 seconds to load those folders on Sonoma. Feels like a very clear macOS bug that I hope Apple will prioritize.
 

jollino

macrumors 6502
Nov 15, 2006
366
10
Chieti, Italy
The real kicker is as a final test last night, he upgraded the Intel iMac from Catalina (2019) to Sonoma to see if the Finder issues would come to the older model, so we could rule out Apple Silicon hardware being the problem. Lo and behold, a computer that had never exhibited these issues with external drives before suddenly now takes 30 seconds to load those folders on Sonoma. Feels like a very clear macOS bug that I hope Apple will prioritize.
That seems to confirm that the issue happened around Ventura and keeps going with Sonoma.

Can your friend check whether he also has `diskarbitrationd` using a lot of CPU time while Finder says "loading"? And, just to try to narrow it down further, what file system is on these external drives?

Also, now that I think of it, I wonder if the File Provider API that was introduced in Monterey, and then made effectively mandatory as kernel extensions were deprecated, has something to do with it? I do have OneDrive and Creative Cloud installed on my machines (the latter doesn't sync files though).
 

CapitalQ

macrumors member
Jun 30, 2007
57
11
Can your friend check whether he also has `diskarbitrationd` using a lot of CPU time while Finder says "loading"? And, just to try to narrow it down further, what file system is on these external drives?
HFS+ drives. He's saying diskarbitrationd is not showing in Activity Monitor, but Finder shoots up to around 44% CPU usage while trying to load the contents of a folder on an external.
 
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BKDad

macrumors regular
May 16, 2011
208
178
It could be my imagination, but I just upgraded to Sonoma 14.5 and things seem, well, different.
 

BKDad

macrumors regular
May 16, 2011
208
178
I wish it were better for me, but 14.5 is as dog slow as it's always been.
Hey! I never said it was better. Just, different.

It seems a bit faster, but only once the cache of items to display has been filled. Filling that cache can be a good time to visit the rest room, get some food, or walk the dog.
 

arcamedia

macrumors newbie
Jul 20, 2008
12
2
Noticed it's been a while for updates in this thread (which sometimes is a good sign that something got fixed). Anything better in Ventura 14.5 making an upgrade worthy? Still running (painfully) Monterey because my raid drives are nice and happy with it loading the large directories. I cringe at thought of slowness I saw in Sonoma and Ventura but soon will have no choice as much of my software is aging out in Monterey forcing an update and life in the 'slow' lane. Running a Mac Pro Tower with 3.3 GHz 12-Core Intel Xeon and some raids by OWC and Lacie. Thanks all!
 
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