iTunes running slowly. Any suggestions?

[knobtwiddler]

Howdy,


Running iTunes 6.0.4 on an imac G5 w/ 10.4.5 and for about a month now itunes has been running very slowly. Very annoying. It has to stop and think about everything and the beachball (or whatever it is) icon just sits there spinning, not allowing me to change songs for a few seconds or so. It was never like this before. Note: I had the same problem with the previous version of itunes as well. Everything else on the computer runs very well. Could it be because of my library size (40 GB)?

 

[john159]

the size of your library shouldnt affect the speed of your computer

do you have alot of other big programs runnign while you have ituens running?

40gb wont make itunes run slow by itself

 

[calebjohnston]

long shot, but have you recently installed a browser in addition to safari? any time i install a second browser, my ibook slows down all over the place.

 

[mad jew]

Interesting. My 75GB library on my iMac is no slower than the 25GB library on my iBook, they're both very quick.

Have you got many people attached to your Shared Library? Are you playing through the internal speakers? If you open up Activity Monitor in the Utilities folder and make it show All processes, is there a process using up a lot of resources as iTunes struggles?

As a start, I'd drag a file named com.apple.iTunes.plist to the Desktop whilst iTunes is closed and see if that helps. Remember where it came from because you'll want to put it back there if this doesn't help and you'd like to preserve your settings.

 

[frankblundt]

how much RAM do you have? - i got a definite slowdown in iTunes once the Library got too big for the amount of RAM and it had to start pushing the database onto the HD for live browsing, and I know of others with the same experience, who solved it with more RAM (my B&W will only take 1GB so no chance for improvement for me until i switch machines )

 

[DaftUnion]

Try going to preferences/general/ and uncheck the box automatically check for updates.

 

[Meromo]

More suggestions: scrolling in particular became incredibly slow and jumpy for me in iTunes: and a suggestion that I eliminate the horizontal scroll bar by increasing the size of the iTunes window or reducing the number of fields showing worked brilliantly. It fixed scrolling, and sped up general UI action everywhere.
Having too many smart playlists can also apparently slow things down, though exactly how many is too many, I don't know.