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Is iWork extremely slow to load for everyone else?

E

eleven7

macrumors regular
Original poster
Mar 14, 2009
195
0
Japan
I am currently in the process of making the switch from MS Office to iWork as I got sick of all the bugs that Microsoft refuses to address. Anyway, iWork is great, I only use pages, and it is more than sufficient for my work. Only problem is, it takes forever to load?! After a cold reboot, it can take up to 20secs, even after that, if I quit out of it, open another program and go back to pages, it takes around 10secs to open. Is this the same for everyone? I would have thought...

1. Being a mac application
2. Being quite light compared to MS Word
3. Running it on a 4 month old mac book
4. Only running 1 & 2 other applications at the same time

..that I should not have to wait anywhere near that time for a word processor app to load. I've tried updating it, but still no luck. Is this the same for everyone? Or just me?
 
It took around 5 dock bounces, and roughly 10 seconds to open for me on my old dual proc. PM G4 (to get to the startup window). ::edited out::

Edit: The next time I opened it on the G4, it took about 2 bounces and roughly 5 seconds.

Edit: On my MBP now with 4GB of RAM (more RAM, much faster proc. but a 5400 RPM drive as opposed to the 7200 on my desktop) and it opened in roughly 10 seconds as well (though this was the first time opening since boot). The second time I opened it, it took 1 bounce and about 2 seconds. Both Macs have all current updates, and I've always noticed that it feels slow in opening the first time, but whatever it saves to RAM makes it open quicker the next time.
 
I have a umb 2.0 with 4 gigs of ram. I closed Pages, then reopened it. It took about two quick dock bounces and it was open. So, it only took two or three seconds for me. I have five or six other apps running.

Just tried it again and it opened in one bounce.:D
 
Thanks for the replies, it is really frustrating how it takes so long, I know speed isn't everything but it's bloody important and with the processor and amount of ram I have you kinda expect more. Anyway, I guess it's something I'll just have to get used to. On a side note - I'm actually finding quite a whole lot of mac apps to be a lot slower on the load than on windows, but then again, the good features of OS X far outweighs its slowness of loading some apps so shouldn't really complain.

@holidaypf - I just tried doing what you said, quitting and opening pages and get roughly the same result, about a second or 2. Problem arises when I quit, do some other stuff for an hour with different apps and have to open pages again.


Is there a "quickloader" type service that anyone knows of, sort of like iTunes helper or something?


Is there some sort of application caching in OS X?
 
eleven7 said:
I am currently in the process of making the switch from MS Office to iWork as I got sick of all the bugs that Microsoft refuses to address. Anyway, iWork is great, I only use pages, and it is more than sufficient for my work. Only problem is, it takes forever to load?! After a cold reboot, it can take up to 20secs, even after that, if I quit out of it, open another program and go back to pages, it takes around 10secs to open. Is this the same for everyone? I would have thought...

1. Being a mac application
2. Being quite light compared to MS Word
3. Running it on a 4 month old mac book
4. Only running 1 & 2 other applications at the same time

..that I should not have to wait anywhere near that time for a word processor app to load. I've tried updating it, but still no luck. Is this the same for everyone? Or just me?
Click to expand...

Yes, I have noticed the same thing pretty much. Clicking on a Pages document when Pages is not yet running takes a long time to load the document. Sometimes, REALLY long.

Another pattern is that the first time the document is saved, that also is quite slow. Subsequent saves are much faster. Seems like design tradeoffs.
 
iWork apps do take a while to load for me as well and I use a 2-year-old MBP. Most of the time it depends on how large the document file is (i.e. documents with a lot of pictures & text) but not always. As far as your "quick loader," I usually just use Quick Look or the Coverflow in the Finder—that usually works well enough to scan a document without having to open it.

iWork is MUCH less buggier than MS Office, BTW, so I consider it a well deserved trade-off. Load times mean nothing compared to losing your docs due to constant crashes!
 
andrew.bussman said:
iWork apps do take a while to load for me as well and I use a 2-year-old MBP. Most of the time it depends on how large the document file is (i.e. documents with a lot of pictures & text) but not always. As far as your "quick loader," I usually just use Quick Look or the Coverflow in the Finder—that usually works well enough to scan a document without having to open it.

iWork is MUCH less buggier than MS Office, BTW, so I consider it a well deserved trade-off. Load times mean nothing compared to losing your docs due to constant crashes!
Click to expand...

Totally agree on the primary importance of stability.

I believe that some companies still don't get that.

Microsoft is the main culprit. I believe that their "DOS-think" of the late 1970's and early 1980's is so deeply embedded within the corporate DNA, that they have still not overcome it. That thinking was based on the premise that "computers are personal" and that "crashing once an hour" or rebooting once an hour is perfectly acceptable, and is about as serious as having to scratch your head.

To make this perfectly clear, I do not agree with the concept of crashing and rebooting frequently is a "good thing." It is a "bad thing."

I recently heard of a large Sun Solaris machine that was being decommissioned after being in service for 8 years. They discovered that the machine had never been rebooted once since its original installation. While this story cannot be verified, it is more like the design ideal that I would expect the industry to shoot for.

A reboot for a computer should be closer to "shutting down the HAL 9000" (that is, a "big deal") than scratching your head (that is "no big deal"). The DNA of Microsoft implies that a restart is like breathing, not like death.

My additional .02.
 
How often do you reboot?

Do you know that on a Mac (on OSX side) it's fine to just sleep the machine and wake it up without rebooting. Most people don't reboot until software update.
 
Consultant said:
How often do you reboot?

Do you know that on a Mac (on OSX side) it's fine to just sleep the machine and wake it up without rebooting. Most people don't reboot until software update.
Click to expand...

It sounds like you are thinking I reboot a lot. I am not sure how you got that from my previous post, as I was speaking in general terms about DOS and Windows of yesteryear.

Sorry if that was not clear.

I rarely reboot, just sleeping the machine as you suggest, and now that you mention it, probably only reboot on updates.
 
jasimon9 said:
24 iMac 2.8, which afaik has 7200RPM. Other apps are not "comparably slow" so IMHO it is iWork apps that start slowly.
Click to expand...

I agree. You can't blame it on the hard drive speed. The iWork suite is just SLUGGISH piece of software. Shame really because aside from that, it's really nice to use.


andrew.bussman said:
As far as your "quick loader," I usually just use Quick Look or the Coverflow in the Finder—that usually works well enough to scan a document without having to open it.
Click to expand...

Sorry, when I said "quick loader" I was meaning some sort of background process that is always running that would make startup quicker. I'm not sure if they have such a thing for mac but in windows, adobe has a "quick loader" process and so does open office which speeds up startup.
 
Agreed with "nice". I am getting used to it, having been a long time MS Office (Windows) user. I don't use much depth from these programs, being one of those "users of 10% of the Office functionality."

Pages seems fairly simple to adapt to, but Numbers is sufficiently different that I am much more slowly poking at it.

I used to use much more of the complex features of Office, but really have not needed those features for quite a few years now.
 
I use Pages all the time even though I also have Microsoft Office Suite. Pages mounts up in two or three seconds for me and opens a 31 page document I am working on in two or three seconds. I have an iMac 24, 2.93 GHz core 2 duo with 4GB of memory. The program works quickly and flawlessly for me and I am very pleased with it. It is iWork 08, version 3, and not the 09.
 
Gaelic2 said:
I use Pages all the time even though I also have Microsoft Office Suite. Pages mounts up in two or three seconds for me and opens a 31 page document I am working on in two or three seconds. I have an iMac 24, 2.93 GHz core 2 duo with 4GB of memory. The program works quickly and flawlessly for me and I am very pleased with it. It is iWork 08, version 3, and not the 09.
Click to expand...

I am using iWork 09, which could be slower. Also, 24 iMac 2.8 4GB, so that also has some effect.
 
Gaelic2 said:
I use Pages all the time even though I also have Microsoft Office Suite. Pages mounts up in two or three seconds for me and opens a 31 page document I am working on in two or three seconds. I have an iMac 24, 2.93 GHz core 2 duo with 4GB of memory. The program works quickly and flawlessly for me and I am very pleased with it. It is iWork 08, version 3, and not the 09.
Click to expand...

Also, it is not slower in general. Just start up, and file saving.
 
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