Mavericks: Slow finder / spinning beach ball

[JonnyAlpha]

I upgraded to Mavericks around Nov, I too experienced a lot of Beach Balling and for the first time ever my Mac became unresponsive a few times which I have never experienced with ANY of my Apple products.

I was on Leopard and had upgraded to Snow Leopard a year ago never did get to Mountain Lion.

I upgraded my Macbook Pro Late 2008 unibody to Mavericks (Keeping all existing content i.e. NOT a clean install) and had all sorts of problems so much so I was tempted to downgrade again!!!

I persevered and started to remove several Third Party applications, can't remember which ones, (but none had come up as non-compatible when doing the pre install). just lately things seem to have calmed down and I don't seem to be getting any more Beach Balling or crashing, fingers crossed......

 

[Regal]

I too experienced a lot of Beach Balling and for the first time ever my Mac became unresponsive a few times which I have never experienced with ANY of my Apple products.

Happens to me as well, lately the unresponsive behavior has gotten a lot worse on my MBP Retina.
I googled the problem and it seems that others are affected also.

 

[CarreraGuy]

Accidentally posted a dupe thread...maybe I search use the "Search" feature on this forum?

Anyway this helped me, hope it helps anyone having similar problems with Finder.


**********

I had a problem with the Finder and folders shared being laggy. Even navigating these folders locally was laggy. I poked around and disabled SMB and the problem went away, screenshot attached.

System Preferences -> Sharing -> Options...

This is still a bug but if you don't need SMB I suggest disabling it for now. And not sure if this is specific to Mavericks.

This may be a dupe but I didn't find anything exactly like this. I know the Finder has been slow for others but not specifically with shared folders.

If this helps anyone else out Merry Christmas!

 

[Cryptoraptor]

Yes!

I recently installed Mavericks on my 2012 13" MacBook Air (2.0/8GB) and have experienced a few issues.

The finder is kinda slow - especially when accessing folders for the first time after being logged out / waking up. It's shows the folder, but the content will only be shown after 20-30 sec. If I access it again it shows the content immediately...

Also I see the spinning beach ball a lot more than before. But only for like half a second. Sometimes it shows up when right clicking somewhere, changing text in Photoshop or doing something else. It does not affect my work, but I would really like it to stop...

I also experience safari being slow to load websites once in a while.

Everything just seems slower - before my MacBook Air was just blazing fast!

Has anyone else noticed the issues with the slow finder and spinning beach ball? And is there a way to fix it? Maybe it is just some bugs that will be corrected in an update...

Absolutely. Endlessly-spinning beach ball, as well as the Finder issue you mentioned, though I hadn't connected it to the other issue.

Just did the upgrade; hopefully it addresses the issue. HOPING AGAINST HOPE.

----------

It doesn't affect the performance here as well.

What about the content/files of folders not showing immediately when accessing the folder from safari/apps ??

Never use Safari, so I don't know. Am sorta forced to use it on my iPhone, however.

I use Firefox, exclusively, on my iMac; it's nearly infinitely better.

 

[macdragonfl]

Try this it's worked on 3 iMacs

Do a command r at boot and select restore OS X your files and programs will be saved. Even if you did a clean install. Do not know why it works but it has for three iMacs I have helped with.

 

[iosuser]

I complained about this soon after Mavericks was released. 10.9.1 still does not address this issue (I just exported some pictures in iPhoto and had to wait ~15 seconds before I could access the folders).

I had a feeling this issue has something to do with network sharing, although it is disabled on my MBP. It's like years ago when Windows Explorer freezes trying to connect to a mapped drive that it can't find.

Accidentally posted a dupe thread...maybe I search use the "Search" feature on this forum?

Anyway this helped me, hope it helps anyone having similar problems with Finder.


**********

I had a problem with the Finder and folders shared being laggy. Even navigating these folders locally was laggy. I poked around and disabled SMB and the problem went away, screenshot attached.

System Preferences -> Sharing -> Options...

This is still a bug but if you don't need SMB I suggest disabling it for now. And not sure if this is specific to Mavericks.

This may be a dupe but I didn't find anything exactly like this. I know the Finder has been slow for others but not specifically with shared folders.

If this helps anyone else out Merry Christmas!

 

[sambrannon]

This worked!

Not sure, but after permissions repair in disk utility, try this below. Can't hurt to try.

Clear the kext caches:

sudo chown root:admin (enter password)

sudo kextcache -system-prelinked-kernel
sudo kextcache -system-caches

Do in terminal and reboot. make sure your start up disk is still selected correctly in preferences.

 

[Zenzz]

This worked!
What a relief. spend 2 days trying all other solutions,
Now my 27" iMac is speeding again. Thank you xgman!

Not sure, but after permissions repair in disk utility, try this below. Can't hurt to try.

Clear the kext caches:

sudo chown root:admin (enter password)

sudo kextcache -system-prelinked-kernel
sudo kextcache -system-caches

Do in terminal and reboot. make sure your start up disk is still selected correctly in preferences.

 

[pardesi]

4 gigs is not the problem. My Imac is barely six months old and is running 12 gigs of memory, and I am having the same finder problem as the original poster, and all sorts of innumerable small glitches and delays we never had before.

Mavericks really sucks.

Apple doesn't care about people who don't buy new Macs regularly. Apparently theyjust don't care about us cheapskate laggards.

My perfectly good older Macbook Pro is now unbearably slow. I can't work like this and I can't go out and buy a new computer to keep up with their OS...

I would have appreciated a nice big warning on install: "You are running an older Mac... You only have 4GB memory... Mavericks does not run well on older systems like yours..."

Too late now. Anyone got a few thousand they can lend me?

This is truly unacceptable.

 

[AeroZ]

Try this too

http://osxdaily.com/2013/11/24/slow-open-save-dialog-problem-mac-os-x/

 

[ryanmcv]

Not sure, but after permissions repair in disk utility, try this below. Can't hurt to try.

Clear the kext caches:

sudo chown root:admin (enter password)

sudo kextcache -system-prelinked-kernel
sudo kextcache -system-caches

Do in terminal and reboot. make sure your start up disk is still selected correctly in preferences.

Try this too

http://osxdaily.com/2013/11/24/slow-open-save-dialog-problem-mac-os-x/

I used both of the methods and things seem to be working normally now! Thanks!

 

[doctor-don]

I recently installed Mavericks on my 2012 13" MacBook Air (2.0/8GB) and have experienced a few issues.

The finder is kinda slow - especially when accessing folders for the first time after being logged out / waking up. It's shows the folder, but the content will only be shown after 20-30 sec. If I access it again it shows the content immediately...

Also I see the spinning beach ball a lot more than before. But only for like half a second. Sometimes it shows up when right clicking somewhere, changing text in Photoshop or doing something else. It does not affect my work, but I would really like it to stop...

I also experience safari being slow to load websites once in a while.

Everything just seems slower - before my MacBook Air was just blazing fast!

Has anyone else noticed the issues with the slow finder and spinning beach ball? And is there a way to fix it? Maybe it is just some bugs that will be corrected in an update...

Three weeks ago I 'upgraded' to Mavericks 10.9.1 from Mountain Lion 10.8.5. My complaints mostly are about things such as Tags (more difficult to identify files / folders I have assigned colors for quickly accessing), 'Spaces' (command+number of Desktop does not work, only left-right arrows), opening a drive or folder with command+click (now it only opens a new tab making it more difficult to copy / move files).

That was until last night. I woke my Mac Pro (2008 Dual-Quad/16GB) from sleep after 4 hours sleeping, and I got a window (below) with the message that I was out of applications memory because I had too many applications open. I was forced to force-quit ALL of them. Quitting one did not alleviate the problem. I kept seeing that beach ball with every window. Finally I force quit all and shut down. All is fine this morning - for now.

An update to Mavericks might address some of these problems, but the 'improvements' I noted in the first paragraph probably will not be changed back to what they were in ML. ALL change is not good.

 

[doctor-don]

Accidentally posted a dupe thread...maybe I search use the "Search" feature on this forum?

Anyway this helped me, hope it helps anyone having similar problems with Finder.


**********

I had a problem with the Finder and folders shared being laggy. Even navigating these folders locally was laggy. I poked around and disabled SMB and the problem went away, screenshot attached.

System Preferences -> Sharing -> Options...

This is still a bug but if you don't need SMB I suggest disabling it for now. And not sure if this is specific to Mavericks.

This may be a dupe but I didn't find anything exactly like this. I know the Finder has been slow for others but not specifically with shared folders.

If this helps anyone else out Merry Christmas!

On my Mac Pro, I do not see Options when I select System Preferences -> Sharing ->

But I do have Printer Sharing and Bluetooth Sharing selected. That because I don't have ANY file sharing selected. Maybe you should have typed System Preferences -> Sharing -> File Sharing -> Options.

 

[afd]

Having the same issue with my 2011 imac, scrolling through finder windows very laggy and lots of beach balls. Next to no slowdowns using apps and the bar graphs in system monitor are all very low. Have tried most of the suggestions here too, with little success.
Anyone had a positive experience with a clean install? Or should I wait for the next mavericks update?

Thanks
AFD

 

[bluetortilla]

Repair Permissions has helped a lot. Still really slow sometimes (beach balling) in Open/Save dialogues.
For a database now accessible from just one window, the OS X Finder sure feels bloated.
Also, I do have a lot of custom icons, but that doesn't seem to matter. Even in directories with generic icons it's still slow. A rescan by Spotlight seemed to help too. Finally, access is worse in subfolders that contain, say, a bunch of mp3's or something.

 

[mgallo]

works for me

Here’s how to fix things:

Quit the Mac App Store with Command + Option + Q
Open Keychain Access from Applications > Utilities
Go to Keychain Access > Preferences > Certificates
Set ‘Certificate Revocation List (CRL)’ to ‘Off’
Quit Keychain Access
Relaunch the Mac App Store and you should be set

 

[RonanR]

If people are still experiencing slowness after installing Mavericks, here's an excellent fix that will almost certainly fix your problem. Read this post here. Mac Slow After Mavericks??? Here's How You Fix It? MachMachines

Besides the tips in the post, check out Cyro's comment as well. That one also seems to be a very popular fix.

 

[Traverse]

I'm running 10.9.5.

My Finder isn't slow to navigate or populate files in list/icon view, but it is slow to move files around, particularly in icon view. When dragging files around from one folder to another, or even within the same folder (when I used icon view and custom sorting) there would be a lag after I selected the files and dragged the mouse and another when let go of the mouse.

I get no "beach ball" or freezing just minor (.5-1.5 second lag) that doesn't sound like much, but when you're manipulating a lot of files in the Finder it can get old really quick. I'm on a rMBP with PCIe flash so it isn't the drive.

 

[grahamperrin]

… a lag after I selected the files and dragged the mouse …

Do you mean that the on-screen movement of the dragged items is not synchronised with the on-screen movement of the pointer?

 

[Traverse]

Do you mean that the on-screen movement of the dragged items is not synchronised with the on-screen movement of the pointer?

Correct. The on-screen pointer moves in sync with the mouse, but the files will often sit there and then jerk to the location of the pointer and then follow it the rest of the way.

Then, when letting go of the mouse, the documets will often have a brief lag before they are let go by the crusor. It isnt' terrible lag, but noticable. Still, it isn't as big of an issue as it used to be since I've started using list view more.

 

[grahamperrin]

Priority to on-screen movement of the pointer

Correct. The on-screen pointer moves in sync with the mouse, but the files will often sit there and then jerk to the location of the pointer and then follow it the rest of the way. …

And if, for example, the desktop is sorted by date modified, and if the selected files are not adjacent to each other, then the end of the drag – before the drop – is followed by rearrangement of the selection to show a different order.

I see the symptom – a delay before apparent movement of the selection – only sometimes.

If I recall correctly there's a greater likelihood of delay, or of greater delay, when the Mac is busy with (for example) the file system; busy in a way that's not measurable with Activity Monitor.

The apparent lag/delay probably by design. Preferable to have (a) a delay, then one smooth movement then one smooth rearrangement (sort), than (b) the selection moving in perfect synchronisation with a juddering pointer.

 

[macgig]

I have a mid 2007 imac 2.0 ghz, 4gb ram with snow leopard. just installed mavericks over it. no clean install. I have the finder delays also when duplicating or deleting a file. 3-5 second delay. still trying to figure out if I can fix it without having to format the HD and do a complete clean install of everything. this delay was not here in snow lep....