Why does my Finder do this?

[sammich]

Whenever I open up a new Home Folder window, the Finder will seems to automatically 'scan' through the entire contents of my hard-drive alphabetically, from the root folder. I know this because whenever this happens I can hear the hard-drive suddenly 'seek' alot my computer slows down somewhat.

This is confirmed when I look at Activity Monitor when I see the Disk Usage line is hovering around 5 meg/s and the Finder is using about 50%+ of the CPU. Plus when I look in the 'Open Files and Ports' tab in the info for the Finder, down the bottom I can see my files and folders being scanned.

It doesn't last very long (3-4 mins), but it also means my computer is almost rendered a turtle (17" C2D MPB) for the duration.

Normally I would blame the Finder for attempting to calculate the size of the files/folders in the window, but I have turned off that option and sorted it by name only.

Perhaps the Finder is calculating the space usage of the whole hard-drive? Does anyone else have this happen to them? Is this normal, or is there something I've turned on by accident?

Similarly, is the update-prebin process a cron job at happens at midnight?

 

[mad jew]

So Finder only slows down when you open a new Home folder, or does it always act this slowly? Do you have any themes or system hacks installed? Are you connected to any network or external drives?

Similarly, is the update-prebin process a cron job at happens at midnight?

Kinda. Last time I checked, the pre-bindings are updated weekly on my machine, at about 3:00AM. If my machine is asleep at the time, they run the next time I use my machine. If it's shut down then the process gets skipped and ignored 'til next time.

 

[sammich]

I do have shapeshifter installed but not activated. It happens regardless of what i'm connected to (network, drives, internet).

To test, I've got the Finder 'Open Files and Port's window open, and scrolled to the bottom. Went to the Finder, opened a new window (nothing happens) but when I change directory (shortcut, double-click etc.) the Finder will respond by scanning the new folder and subdirectories. I tested it just then, by clicking on my main drive shortcut, the Finder proceeded to scan all directories...without fail. Every single time. Same with the Apps folder, even small folders.

This isn't a real problem, since I've discovered how little I actually navigate between low level directories. But it'll be nice to figure out what's happening.