Leopard Help Menu Slow, or Just Me?

[Makosuke]

I'm so far mostly happy with Leopard, but I noticed that whenever I try to drop down the Help menu there's a relatively long pause, usually with beachball.

It can be longer or shorter depending on the app (Finder is maybe 1/2 - 1 sec, Adobe Reader is like 3 seconds), and I assume it has something to do with the new find-in-menus feature, but it's annoying the heck out of me.

Is this true of all Leopard installs, or is it something specific to mine? (This is a MBP w/2GB RAM, 30% free drive space, and an archive-and-install, so it's not a simple hardware performance issue, by the way.)

 

[72930]

Perfect for me (MB C2D 2.16 1GB, Fresh install)...

 

[Makosuke]

Huh. I've done some more experiments, and it appears that there's some caching, but not all apps do it (or as much of it).

All the Apple apps I've tried (iPhoto, Finder, Safari, Preview) pause briefly on the first click, during which I can hear some disk access, but then are instant after that. This caching seems to stick at least across launches of that particular app--haven't tried reboots yet.

Some other apps, however, always pause. Camino, for example, has about a half-second pause every time you drop the menu down. Adobe Reader (8.1) paused for about 3 seconds the first time (there was even a brief beachball), and still causes about a 1-second delay every time after that--certainly long enough to be annoying, if nothing huge.

I wonder if there's a caching hook that app developers can take advantage of...

Also, I note that it's not that I hit the Help menu often (almost never, in fact), but I frequently sweep past it with the menus when I'm skimming across and overshoot, so I noticed this delay immediately.

 

[ktrix]

Funny, when I read the OP, I decided to check the Help menu in Firefox. Guess what? There was a pause, a beach ball, and then Firefox crashed. So I'd say, yeah, I think there's a problem with the new Help menu in Leopard. Firefox (2.0.0.8) is otherwise extremely stable. Isn't beta testing fun?

 

[Makosuke]

Ok, glad to hear at least it's not ONLY me.

Isn't beta testing fun?

To be fair, since all of Apple's apps appear to handle it smoothly, this may not be a case of a buggy feature so much as a new feature (menu search) that requires some sort of new in-program flag ("cache this!" or whatever) to take full advantage of.

That said, I'll reserve judgement on whether this is actually the case until I either hear something more concrete (I'm not enough of a developer to go reading through the docs on this) or the behavior changes on a point update of the OS.