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MacBook Air M2 2022 Sluggish with Large Word Doc

Aushiker

Aushiker

macrumors regular
Original poster
Hi

My MacBook Air M2 2022, 24 GB Ram, SSD Drive with 457.66 GB free is struggling with Word documents that are large, in particular the one that is giving me problems is 244 pages at present (and growing) and 59,000 words.

The OS is Tahoe 26.4.1.

Even closing down other applications and just leaving Word and MS Edge open does not seem to help

If anyone has any suggestions as to how to improve performance, they would be appreciated.

1778579591172.png
 
Okay, a little more experimenting. I have closed all by Edge and Word, and it worked fine, then I slowly opened apps, Excel, Outlook and Adobe Reader with a large file, and it bombed.

Closing all of them, bar Edge and Word, has not resolved the issue.

Could the issue be in Word and the way it interacts with other apps such as Adobe Reader?

1778580176036.png
 
Aushiker said:
Okay, a little more experimenting. I have closed all by Edge and Word, and it worked fine, then I slowly opened apps, Excel, Outlook and Adobe Reader with a large file, and it bombed.

Closing all of them, bar Edge and Word, has not resolved the issue.

Could the issue be in Word and the way it interacts with other apps such as Adobe Reader?

View attachment 2629393
Click to expand...
Have you restarted the computer itself any time recently? If not, try that.
 
Do you have to have Edge open when you're working on your Word document ?
Does it need to be open?
If yes...
Could you use a DIFFERENT browser (instead of Edge) ?
 
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Aushiker said:
I have tried that in the past, but I will do it again.
Click to expand...
In general, restarting the computer should be your first troubleshooting step.
Something is strange with your Backblaze client, it should not be running that many processes. Make sure that you have the "Automatic threading/throttle" setting enabled under the Performance tab in the Backblaze client preferences. It looks like you've probably set that manually to a very high number in the past and it's using all your computer's memory, and probably also affecting your computer's network performance, too.
 
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Thanks for the suggestion on BackBlaze. The settings are as you suggest. Will do another reboot and see how that plays out.

1778634619615.png
 
Fishrrman said:
Do you have to have Edge open when you're working on your Word document ?
Does it need to be open?
If yes...
Could you use a DIFFERENT browser (instead of Edge) ?
Click to expand...
This has been an ongoing problem, on and off, across different browsers. Edge is just the current one.

As I am working with documents, etc., accessed online, it really does have to be open. I might try and get used to Safari and see if that helps.
 
Playing around a bit more. One aspect I overlooked is that the document is stored in OneDrive, and AutoSave is turned on by default, so any change is saved as soon as it is made. I suspect that this is not an incremental change; with a large document, it causes it to be laggy.

I have now turned that off and will try Save auto-recovery information at 10-minute intervals and see how that works out.
 
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I haven't seen an app as memory incosiderate as this Backblaze in a long time, if ever. If that's a default behavior that's crazy.

Did you try decreasing the number of backup threads?
 
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StellarVixen said:
I haven't seen an app as memory incosiderate as this Backblaze in a long time, if ever. If that's a default behavior that's crazy.

Did you try decreasing the number of backup threads?
Click to expand...
BackBlaze is seemingly behaving properly so maybe there was a glitch that caused it to go off like it did. The settings are as below:

1778662494706.png
 
OP wrote:
"One aspect I overlooked is that the document is stored in OneDrive, and AutoSave is turned on by default, so any change is saved as soon as it is made."

Egads, man.
Why don't you keep the main (and working) copy of this document RIGHT ON your Mac?
244 pages is certainly not "that large".
Probably consume far FAR less space on your internal drive than all those garbage files that seem to be resulting from backblaze, etc.

Do this, and things will go faster, and I predict far fewer difficulties...
 
Aushiker said:
BackBlaze is seemingly behaving properly so maybe there was a glitch that caused it to go off like it did. The settings are as below:

View attachment 2629645
Click to expand...
I suggest manually setting BackBlaze to exactly 2 threads, then manually confirming it does limit itself to that. If it doesn't, then set it to 1 thread and see if that affects anything.

If even 1 thread doesn't limit it, then its settings are probably corrupted in some way, and you should clear them and start over.

It might also be useful to contact BackBlaze tech support or forum and ask them about this apparently runaway train.
 
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Fishrrman said:
OP wrote:
"One aspect I overlooked is that the document is stored in OneDrive, and AutoSave is turned on by default, so any change is saved as soon as it is made."

Egads, man.
Why don't you keep the main (and working) copy of this document RIGHT ON your Mac?
244 pages is certainly not "that large".
Probably consume far FAR less space on your internal drive than all those garbage files that seem to be resulting from backblaze, etc.

Do this, and things will go faster, and I predict far fewer difficulties...
Click to expand...
When you’re working on a file that’s saved to OneDrive, it’s also copied to your computer and you are using the locally copied file. It’s not as if the file only exists in the cloud.
 
I had a similar problem but with a Pages document that was saved in my iCloud Drive location. It's only a small 4 page 301KB file but whenever I had it opened my macbook would spool up and eat through the battery. I noticed in Activity Monitor that there were lots of iCloud backup processes going on, so I removed the file from iCloud Drive and stored it locally. Problem solved.
 
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Fishrrman said:
OP wrote:
"One aspect I overlooked is that the document is stored in OneDrive, and AutoSave is turned on by default, so any change is saved as soon as it is made."

Egads, man.
Why don't you keep the main (and working) copy of this document RIGHT ON your Mac?
244 pages is certainly not "that large".
Probably consume far FAR less space on your internal drive than all those garbage files that seem to be resulting from backblaze, etc.

Do this, and things will go faster, and I predict far fewer difficulties...
Click to expand...
Access to the document is also required in other contexts, which is why OneDrive is used.

With that in mind, I revisit I will revisit the use of symbolic links for this document.
 
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chown33 said:
I suggest manually setting BackBlaze to exactly 2 threads, then manually confirming it does limit itself to that. If it doesn't, then set it to 1 thread and see if that affects anything.
Click to expand...
I will give that a try. Thanks for the suggestion.

Edit: Just checked Activity Monitor and the behaviour is back so will try your suggested changes.
 
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I did a Google search, and one interesting suggestion was to shorten the file name/path (it was a long one). I have no idea why this would make a difference, but I have significantly reduced the name and, by extension, the path.

The document is now behaving well over the last 24 hours, but it could be because of this, other changes or a combination.

I know should have done one change at a time.
 
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