Slow Typing In Mail: A Permanent Fix???

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Level 5

4,888 points

Slow Typing In Mail: A Permanent Fix???

Ultra slow typing in Mail seems to be a Leopard "feature". Quitting and starting again, restores a semblance of good behaviour. Not as fast as, say, TextEdit, but acceptable. And then it starts slowing down once again... until one quits and restarts.

This seems to be a bona fide bug. Is there a "true" fix?

G5 1.8Dual, 2GB RAM, Mac OS X (10.4.8), 20" App Dsplay, ext. Lacie, iPod, Bach on Al-Lansing, Canon 5D, Canon L glass

Posted on Jan 17, 2008 8:13 AM

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Answer 1

Jan 17, 2008 9:02 AM in response to RTP

certainly am not typing slow in leopard mail myself. do you have any plug in or input manager still installed with mail.app and that may create such a behavior? if so i would get rid of them and see if that clears the issue. look in homefolder/library/mail, they shold be located in a "bundles" folder. you may also want to look in hard drive/library/mail and see if there are bundles folders there too.

hope this helps

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Answer 2

RTP Author

Level 5

4,888 points

Jan 17, 2008 2:55 PM in response to Pascal Bouvier

Thanks Pascal. I know that many users do not have this problem, which is kind of infuriating if you see what I mean... :-))) My only plug-in is SpamSieve which never caused me any problem until Leopard. I tried with or without SpamSieve, and the same problem reappears - slowing down after a few days, until I restart.

I must add that Mail never caused me any problems until 10.4.11 included. Never. This is something new... Next move: I am going to search and destroy any plist file associated with Mail. If it doesn't work, I will reinstall Mail from scratch.

Other users have reported the same problem here, and their posts went unanswered. Their only work-around was also to quit and restart. Strange.

Thanks for contributing 🙂

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Answer 3

E V

Level 1

8 points

Jan 26, 2008 5:06 PM in response to RTP

What is a plist file, why does my plist window show for about a second and then close?

DId you find a longer term solution to the slow text entry in mail? The vacuum trick worked a few minutes ago, but I'd like to know where to look next, or what to do next.

tia

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Answer 4

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

116,060 points

Jan 26, 2008 6:06 PM in response to RTP

Other users have reported the same problem here, and their posts went unanswered. Their only work-around was also to quit and restart.

How about "vacuum" thing from Dec?

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1287168&tstart=0

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Answer 5

RTP Author

Level 5

4,888 points

Jan 28, 2008 2:16 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

Hello Tom, sorry for the delay, I've been out for several days on a job, somebody has to pay for tomorrow's lunch, you know how that is... 🙂

No, I didn't try it yet, will do as soon as I've cleared my mailboxes. It may be a while before I reply though, probably more than a week. The reason is simple: after two consecutive reboots, the problem disappeared, or it would be more precise to say, has not reappeared yet. In trying it right now anyway, I will not be sure which operation cured the problem on my machine.

What do you think? Should I wait a bit before trying it, in order to see if the problem went away only by restarting and/or rebooting?

Thanks,

RogerG

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Answer 6

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

116,060 points

Jan 28, 2008 2:50 PM in response to RTP

Should I wait a bit before trying it

Yes. If it's not broke, don't fix it...

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Answer 7

david::

Level 1

0 points

Jan 29, 2008 2:51 PM in response to RTP

Same behaviour to me, with no bundles.

Opening Activity monitor and typing in Mail I can see that, when stroking the keyboard, mail goes to 70-80% CPU.

I tried stopping the spell checking on the fly, but it didn't work.

sad.

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Answer 8

RTP Author

Level 5

4,888 points

Jan 29, 2008 3:53 PM in response to david::

David,

Typing in Mail uses about 20-25% CPU in my case.

This is definitely more than Safari or TextEdit for example. Mail is now slightly sluggish. Nothing to write home about at the present time, but more sluggish than it was.

I will try Tom's suggestion tomorrow and report on it, CPU usage included.

RogerG

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Answer 9

david::

Level 1

0 points

Feb 4, 2008 2:43 AM in response to RTP

I forgot to say that I've done the vacuum trick but no success :'(

It seems something different. When quitting Mail and relaunching, everything goes fast, low CPU usage and all OK. But after writing some mails (about 10) typing start slowing and CPU usage starts rising. After about 20 mails it becomes absolutely unusable.

Hope somebody fixes it...

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Answer 10

RTP Author

Level 5

4,888 points

Feb 4, 2008 5:56 AM in response to david::

David,

I took my time before reporting back to this topic because I wanted to be certain. Sure enough, Mail has slowed down and is now using slightly more than half the power of my Dual G5. It took about 100 emails before getting to this point.

The time it takes may depend on a variety of factors, of course, among which processor(s), memory, et cetera.

I am now due to try "the trick" and see for myself if it works or not in my case.

RogerG

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Answer 11

R Thomas

Level 1

0 points

Feb 10, 2008 1:18 PM in response to RTP

I tried the vacuum trick, but no luck. Mail is fast when I start it, but it quickly slows down. I leave Mail open all of the time, and wonder if there's a leak. I had no problems with Tiger, and don't remember problems with 10.5.0. I really hope a fix makes it in to 10.5.2.

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