[X4U] Aggravatingly slow beach ball

[Ed Gould]

On Oct 30, 2009, at 10:30 AM, Mark Des Cotes wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I'm at wits end here. My 2.1 GHZ iMac G5 iSight running 10.4.11  
> with RAM maxed at 2.5GB has become so slow to respond that it's  
> aggravating. The spinning beach ball is constantly appearing,  
> sometimes for a split second and sometimes for 10 sec or longer.  
> Simple tasks such as closing a Safari browser window will produce  
> the beach ball for 5 seconds or longer before the window finally  
> closes. Or creating a new mail message in Mail. When I click new  
> message the beach ball appears and it takes a couple of second  
> before the blank message window appears. This is all stuff that  
> used to be instantaneous. Yesterday I was copying text from MSWord  
> into Quark Xpress. I'd highlight a paragraph and copy. The beach  
> ball appeared for what felt like forever but was no less than 10  
> seconds, before the copy completed and I could finally switch to  
> Quark and paste. During the beach ball phase in any application, if  
> I right click on the app's icon in the dock it says "Application  
> not responding" but if I wait it out it works.
>
> My hard drive is only 60% full, I've run DiskUtility, DiskWarrior,  
> cleaned everything out with Onyx, I've even performed an archive  
> and install of the OS but nothing has fixed the problem.
>
> I'm a graphic designer and I use this computer every day for work.  
> It's become very aggravating having to wait for the computer all  
> the time. Does anyone have any suggestions?


Mark:

I too have a this issue. My sense is it is a finder issue. As the  
finder from time to time takes forever to just highlight 1 or 2 or so  
members in a folder. What may be *MY* issue is that some folders  
contain 15K of files. I have had issues with small folders as well.  
Just trying to highlight 2 items can take 30+ seconds in a folder of  
less than 1000 entries.

Even though I have my volumes indexed the finder can takes minutes to  
find items. Example: Today I got a call from my doctor and he wanted  
to phone in a prescription for me. My pharmacy's telephone number is  
in a document that I keep to hand to doctors to show what  
prescriptions I am on. I did a search and after about 30 seconds I  
put down the phone and went out to the last bottle I had gotten and  
read it off to her ( got it and read it off and the finder still  
hadn't found the document and I was searching on the name of the  
document not the contents.

The finder (to me) has become a slow moving turtle and at some point  
in the future it will stop working. Before anyone says... I have 50G  
available on the boot volume and 100G on my other volume . They are  
checked weekly bu tech tool pro and I have never had an error called  
out.

Ed