Pages - Glacially Slow

[thequicksilver]

I've done a fair bit of Googling before making this post, and there's been a few reports of Pages being a little sluggish on the Mac Web, but nothing like the experience I'm having.

Pages is, in a word, unusable.

I can't work out what's going on. I'm not taxing the thing, I'm multitasking only moderately, but Pages is just ridiculous.

• It's a CPU hog. I have an almost blank document open in Pages, nothing more. I've varied between it being the active window and a background one, and CPU usage has varied between 8% and 68%. This is not a joke. See the proof.
• It takes about a second for a keystroke/mouse click to be registered.
• It frequently beachballs, with Activity Monitor informing me it's hung.

I knew it was a far from perfect app when I purchased it, but I expected it to be, at the very least, useable. I'm not sure what else I can do. I presumed it was a bad installation, so I deleted the entire iWork suite, restarted, repaired permissions, restarted, reinstalled iWork, restarted, repaired permissions, restarted, and tried it again. Result = the same. I'm running the latest 10.3.7 with no haxies installed, btw.

Incidentally, Keynote 2 works admirably.

My system's not exactly a speed demon (1.07GHz iBook G4, 768MB memory etc), but it's more than sufficient to run iWork comfortably according to Apple's guidelines. I can't believe I'm the only one having such severe problems here. Short of reformatting, does anyone have any advice as to how to fix this, or am I resigned to waiting for Pages 1.0.1/1.1 to arrive in Software Update?

 

[alywa]

Pages

I'm using pages on an eMac, 1Ghz with 1GB RAM.

I find it slow, but usable. I've been able to assemble a couple of family newsletters and a house brochure, and they have come out great.

Granted, it's no speed demon, but I'm sure future updates will help streamline it.

I don't know what to tell you. Our machines should be pretty close in performance. I'll try it on my wife's ibook (same exact specs as yours), and let you know.

-alywa

 

[fjs08]

Hi,
I love it as a page maker for my .Mac Home Page. I found out how to get the html format uploaded and it's really nice.

As for a word processor, I've returned to the old standby, Word. I couldn't find out how to do Labels nor could I find out how, if possible to use synonyms. Not even sure either of those features are in the program???

I think it has great potential, but it is very young and needs to be brought along a bit more.

Frank

 

[abhishekit]

• It's a CPU hog. I have an almost blank document open in Pages, nothing more. I've varied between it being the active window and a background one, and CPU usage has varied between 8% and 68%. This is not a joke. See the proof.
• It takes about a second for a keystroke/mouse click to be registered.
• It frequently beachballs, with Activity Monitor informing me it's hung.

snip....

Well thats strange. I am using Pages on 1.33 Ghz pb and it works really good, infact faster than M$ word runs on my machine.
Except when starting up, it doesn't take any appreciable cpu at all. i have attached a picture.

So I guess the problem is something other than a basic flaw in pages itself.

 

[thequicksilver]

Thanks for that post abhishekit - very useful and it's sent me back to the app to try and hunt down the exact problem.

I've just opened Pages, and just typed in it. I've not opened a single palette, and it's worked fine, like you described. Activity Monitor below.

However, the second I open the Media palette (emphasis there to stop anybody saying it's a random occurrence ) the CPU usage ramps up and up.

Even on closing the palette, the CPU rating stays high, flitting round anywhere between 0 and 25%. Pressingly, when the CPU Activity is flitting around, the Real Memory used is going up and up by about half a meg a second.

What worries me most is the amount of Virtual Memory this app is using. 304MB for an app which I've typed approximately fifty words into, and opened a grand total of one palette. (For reference, that's double that of my Camino window with six tabs open.) I dread to think what it would be like for a ten page graphic heavy newsletter - it may just kill this machine the way it's going at the moment.

My iPhoto library (as accessed by the Media panel) is a not exactly massive 2535 images. I wasn't even dragging them into the document or anything like that - all the panel was doing was displaying the bloody thumbnails.

Can anyone else testify as to their experiences with the Pages Media palette?

 

[wide]

Sometimes this happens in Windows....CPU usage goes up to 100 percent and stays there no matter what you do....

That said, Pages should run beautifully on your iBook 1GHZ. The minimum requirement is a 500 mhz G3.

-some other people have been experiencing this too:

http://discussions.info.apple.com/webx?14@656.gSXwa7XbN2f.0@.68a570cc

http://discussions.info.apple.com/webx?50@656.gSXwa7XbN2f.1@.68a561ea

-some people have is running quite well:

http://discussions.info.apple.com/webx13@656.gSXwa7XbN2f.1@.68a50496/19

http://discussions.info.apple.com/webx?50@656.gSXwa7XbN2f.1@.68a55446

I would either wait for a software update (which should be published soon because people are having mixed results on the inital installation), or make an appointment with a genius at the apple store and see if they can fix it, and if they cannot then try to get a refund.

 

[hob]

This is why I never buy anything when it first comes out!!

Hob

(sorry to be of no help)

 

[abhishekit]

However, the second I open the Media palette (emphasis there to stop anybody saying it's a random occurrence ) the CPU usage ramps up and up.

Can anyone else testify as to their experiences with the Pages Media palette?

Yes, you are right. When I open the media palette, the usage is going up. However I have only 150 images in iPhoto and about 9 movies in Movies folder. So it wasn't as bad as in your case. For a brief while (3-4 sec) the cpu usage shot up, but was back to the low value.

One thing I noticed though, that it loads up thumbnails of movies and photos all together, no matter what you have chosen in the drop down menu. Because once it has loaded the thumbnails of say iPhoto, and then you change the selection to Movie, it does not take any cpu. So may be it is not able to handle even 2500 pictures that you have. Or may be you have a lot of movies too in the Movies folder. Either way, your point holds true and I take back my earlier statement that nothing is wrong with Pages in general. It needs some tweaking.

 

[Abstract]

Its funny how so many people diss Microsoft for making a slow, clunky wp, and when Pages obviously has problems from what I've read so far, nobody really blames Apple.

I'm sure Apple will get this fixed up, but for the slowdown with 150+ pictures in iPhoto, imagine having more. Most people have more, as 150 isn't a lot to take using a camera with no film. I only have 1500, but I know some people with 15000. They'd be sitting on a Mac forever before Pages finally becomes responsive again.

 

[kwajo.com]

I have used pages a lot since it came out and I love it. in fact the first thing I noted was how efficient it is. Word 2004 is a terrible processor hog, and pages runs on very little resources, and is very responsive with everything I've tried. this is on my 1.5GHz pbook w/ 1GB ram, but it also seemed to work very well on my father's eMac, and I got it installed and running on my mother's iMac G3 400 which is below apple's system requirements, so I don't know what to say, i'm not sure where all these reports of poor performance are coming from, cause my copy works fantastically.

 

[Daveway]

Keynote does this for me as well. That whole development team must not know how to make efficient software.

 

[annk]

I´ve given up already on Pages, at least in its current form - the CPU shoots up to between 80 + 98%, and I get the dreaded spinning beach ball of death - BEFORE I type anything on the page.

 

[varmit]

All I can say is that it worked fine for me. And that was on a 600 G3 iBook. I really didn't see that much of a slow down at all, and I was even able to stream a video in keynote wirelessly with no problems at all. It seems that Pages can be unstable for some reason or another and causes massive CPU usage and memory usage. Do you have third party RAM, because I have a full bank of 640MB that is all Apple RAM? RAM is my guess.

My thread when I was using it is here with screen shots of some of the things I was doing: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/106294/

 

[thequicksilver]

A few of us on another messageboard have got to the bottom of this. I'm pasting my post from there:

When you open the Media palette, it accesses your iTunes and iPhoto libraries. It also begins to cache, one by one, the files in your ~/Movies folder, to provide thumbnails and whatnot. However, it doesn't remember what it's just cached. So if I open the media palette, close it, and reopen it again, it'll recache all of them.

I have 4.5GB of video in ~/Movies, much of it DV.

It's not surprising it's a one off bork, but I find it impossible to believe that it's not capable of storing the thumbnailed movie catalogue. Surely Spotlight has taught Apple a thing or two about metadata?

I've moved my Movie files from ~/Movies to Macintosh HD/Movies so Pages can't find them, and it's now working about as well as everybody else is getting - ie it's slow with certain templates, but certainly usable. Even so though, it's nothing short of ludicrous that if I close the Media palette for only a second, it has to examine the entire Movies folder again. Very un-Apple like, and smacks of a rush job and/or a lack of beta testing.

Pages 1.0.1 fixing this ASAP please Apple. Half an hour of beta testing on a real world system should have discovered this.

 

[varmit]

Just opened it, you can see my activity in the top left doesn't go to 100%, but since its a 600 G3, I expect spikes like that. I open my largest media, with is iTunes for me, and after a spike, its back down to 0%.

 

[Bear]

...
Pages 1.0.1 fixing this ASAP please Apple. Half an hour of beta testing on a real world system should have discovered this.

May I suggest you provide the feedback to Apple here? If you do so, Apple has a way to track it and such. Also, the more people who report an issue or make a feature request, the more seriously it'll get looked into.

 

[thequicksilver]

Just opened it, you can see my activity in the top left doesn't go to 100%, but since its a 600 G3, I expect spikes like that. I open my largest media, with is iTunes for me, and after a spike, its back down to 0%.

That's because for iTunes, it's merely accessing your iTunes library metadata file. Same with iPhoto, where the thumbnails have already been created and saved as part of the app.

How many movies do you have in ~/Movies? Like I said, I moved my 4.5GB worth out of that folder to elsewhere, and it's now fine. No question that this was the issue at my end.

 

[thequicksilver]

May I suggest you provide the feedback to Apple here? If you do so, Apple has a way to track it and such. Also, the more people who report an issue or make a feature request, the more seriously it'll get looked into.

Already have done, don't worry.

 

[Bear]

Which version of iPhoto?

Are the issues with iPhoto 4? Or with iPhoto 5? (Or both?)

I ask this since iPhoto 5 added support for video clips as well. Although that would mean the stuff in ~/Movies would have to be managed by iPhoto.

 

[thequicksilver]

Are the issues with iPhoto 4? Or with iPhoto 5? (Or both?)

I ask this since iPhoto 5 added support for video clips as well. Although that would mean the stuff in ~/Movies would have to be managed by iPhoto.

I'm using iPhoto 5. The video clips imported into iPhoto don't actually go to ~/Movies, they simply form part of the regular iPhoto Library. The stuff in ~/Movies is simply the stuff I put there of my own volition - in this case DV, iMovie and iDVD stuff, football videos, and so on. On moving all of this stuff out of there, Pages is OK.