iCal in Tiger crawls like a snail

W.

Thank you for giving that ago. I am stumped. I have done a clean installation, an archive, and an upgrade. I have deleted the previous system. I have over a gig of ram on my G4 tower, and only 256 on my mini, they both take 10-12 seconds to paste a copied appointment. Infuriating... I will have to go back to 10.3 for now.

Jason

I've also found that the UI for pop-up reminders is so slow that I can't even manage to "snooze" reminders: the popup menu for the snooze period sometimes takes minutes to appear after I click on the little arrow icon!

Is there any way around this aside from abandoning iCal altogether?

I did a clean install of Tiger.

ICal doesnt work at all. starts up and than quits again.

Following the topic of this thread: Every fifteen minutes or so, iCal takes 80+% of my CPU (as indicated on Activity Monitor) and keeps it for 5 minutes or so, fan comes on, then iCal's CPU usage drops to 5% or so. This occurs whether or not iCal is active. I am not auto-syncing any of my iCal data with .Mac. I am subscribed to a couple of calendars.

Okay, I have had the same exact problems as many of you: after upgrading to tiger, ical took forever to open, minutes to cut/paste and even longer to close (with the dreaded "synchronizing modifications . . . " message).

After spending 40 minutes with Apple tech support, I think I have fixed my issue.

Check to see if you are also syncing iCal to something (.Mac, your Treo, your phone anything). If you are, I think the delays that you are seeing are actually iSync not iCal. I turned off my syncing (went into iSync > Preferences and unchecked "enable syncing on this computer"), then went back to iCal and the same calendars open AND close in seconds.

Of course, this means that you can't sync to your phone . . . I am working on that. I'll post what I find.

I have also expirenced the HUGE slowdown when I upgraded to Tiger (10.4)
After reading this post and all the helpful replies, I decided to jump in with
both feet, and try some of the suggestions in repairing the iCal SLUG. I first
clocked the amount of time that it took to start up, add an event, and shut
down iCal. Startup took over 80 seconds. Creating a new event took about
60 seconds. Quiting iCal took the longest at about 140 seconds. I was very
puzzled also when it would take a VERY LONG time even when I would just
open and immediately close the app with no changes made.
So, I first tried the reinstall suggestion (w/archive save) - no obvious change.
But after changing some of the settings on a few of my events that would repeat each month, I noticed these were set to repeat but NEVER end. After
adjusting this setting to a more reasonable timeframe, it fixed the problem
for my SLUG iCal... now it takes just a second or two. Good Luck, Mark

Possible fix/explanation...

Helicon Twist, "I (almost) have an iCal 2.0 fix!" #2, 10:38am May 19, 2005 CDT

I find it often taking 15-20% of my CPU when it ISN'T EVEN RUNNING! (I know it's probably processing somthing regarding pop-up reminders, but deciding whether it's time to put a pop-up window up shouldn't take anywhere near that much time!)

Hi slashk,

I turned off all synching, and all calendar publishing and subscriptions. No change. iCal is still intolerably slow. And it still does some kind of synchronizing, sometimes, when I quit the app.

I agree. I'm finding that iCal 1.5.5 is taking about 20% of the CPU when it's running but not doing anything. This is irritating when on battery power.

The problem in my case turned out to be that I had exported my calendar from palm desktop app then imported that into iCal. For some reason this caused iCal to chew on the CPU. When I exported my calendar from iCal, deleted all events, then imported the calendar, iCal stopped chewing on the CPU.

That link doesn't work Helicon.

I found that putting end dates on recurring items helped speed up iCal immensely. Instead of having something go on forever, I put a year 2010 in and it's a completely different application...actually usable!