iPhoto '09 8.0.3 Update - iPhoto painfully slow now

Nope, not running Font Agent Pro.

Agreed 🙂

I tried rebuilding the entire library and also tried trashing the plist file - no changes, still unbearingly slow.

Tried rebuilding the library with iPhoto Library Manager, but unfortunately the results are the same - still unbelievably slow.

Unfortunately checking off Show Item Counts doesn't make a difference except that with it checked it's even slower.

Here's what I noticed:

- In Activity Monitor, iPhoto's shared memory size is fluctuating widly, ranging from 0 bytes to 16,777,216.00 TB (!!!)
- When switching to Places or Faces, it almost seems to freeze (iPhoto is indicated as "Not Responding") and the "spindump" process is started -> it then recovers
- the "mds" and "mdworker" processes are started and use a lot of CPU time
- the "socketfilterfw" process is started
- looking at the Console, nothing is being written
- doing anything in Faces (eg. selecting a different thumbnail image for a person, renaming a person) takes forever
- working in "Events" or "Photos" is okay speed-wise
- doing anything in Places is really slow, but not as slow as Faces

I've used iPhoto's tools to rebuild my library and also used iPhoto Library Manager to rebuild my library, but unfortunately nothing helped.

This started with iPhoto 8.0.3, all previous iPhoto versions were okay speedwise.

Not sure what's going on here, but iPhoto has essentially become unusable for me which is a shame. Good thing I tagged all Faces and Places before this update came out...

I reported it to Apple, but am not sure what to do now. I guess we'll have just have to wait to another update?

Hi Terence -

Terence Devlin wrote:
Tim

I suspect the problem may be related to Spotlight trying to index the metadata when you add faces and places.

really appreciate all your suggestions and information!

After seeing the mds and mdworker processes I thought so as well, so I re-indexed my entire HD. Unfortunately, no difference. (Sorry, should have mentioned that in the summary post).

I have no process called 'spindump'. However, given than spindump is a tool to report hangs, and I'm not having one, no surprise there.

I think the spindump process comes up because the system thinks that iPhoto is hung, but it eventually recovers. There entries in system.log indicating that:

Jun 8 18:25:10 iMac-G5 /usr/sbin/spindump[779]: process 663 is being monitored
Jun 8 18:25:55 iMac-G5 /usr/sbin/spindump[779]: process 663 is being no longer being monitored
Jun 8 18:27:51 iMac-G5 /usr/sbin/spindump[944]: process 663 is being monitored
Jun 8 18:28:10 iMac-G5 /usr/sbin/spindump[944]: process 663 is being no longer being monitored

mds and mdworker are both spotlight processes, and when I work they take up no significant extra resources, whereas in your case they

use a lot of CPU time

It's just consistent behavior that they take up a lot more CPU time while iPhoto is switching to Faces or Places. Once the switch has happened, they calm down again. However, to clarify, iPhoto takes up about 92% of the CPU resources and mds and mdworker the rest. However, when not in Faces, these processes take up virtually nothing.

The 'socketfilterfw' is a part of the firewall system on your Mac. It runs on mine and takes no significant resources.

This is another process which takes a lot more CPU resources when iPhoto switches to Faces and then it calms down again. Maybe this has to do with iPhoto doing some online checking (I don't subscribe to any Photos and have no Albums published to Facebook or Flickr to the like).

What to do? This hang could be caused by a glitch in the Spotlight database. You could try force Spotlight to re-index the Pictures Folder (assuming that's the location of your Library), and see if that helps.

Unfortunately that didn't make any difference.

I wonder if this has something with Safari 4.0 being installed?

I just noticed that publishing to Facebook no longer works in iPhoto and iWeb. When the setup/login window appears up two odd things happen:

1. You can't change the email address that is entered. It can be selected but the actual text can't be changed.
2. If you enter the password and try to click on the "Login" button, the cursor changes to a half arrow with the round status globe and nothing happens.

It now basically stays there until you click Cancel.

I wonder if some of the slowness comes from it trying to unsuccessfully connect to Facebook? I do have "Check for new published Photos" set to Manual though.

Just reported it 🙂