Open and Save Dialogs Slow to Open and Populate

Same here. I have it on all macs and suspect either Snow Leopard or Time Capsule because I never had the problem before.

I had noticed a delay in Open and Save on my machine, although not as dramatic as some others have reported. It would take perhaps 2 seconds for them to appear and populate, whereas before Snow Leopard it was always instantaneous. Some things I read seemed to implicate communication between the OS and "foreign" file systems on other devices or over a network, so I've taken to ejecting my Vista partition as soon as I boot up. I have not noticed the slowness since I started doing that.

And FWIW I can't imagine how in the world the presence of Smart Folders, which aren't actually being used, in the Sidebar could have any effect at all. They are just little mini scripts which have to be clicked on to be active and do something. And I had, and still have, five of them present in my Sidebar. It may be that turning them off writes to the sidebar.plist file, changing it in some way that corrects something in the plist that is causing a problem. If so, simply dumping the plist altogether and letting it be recreated would probably accomplish the same thing.

Now whether Spotlight, via the mds process and/or mdimport, could be causing the problem... that is a different matter and is plausible, since those processes do actively look at all media connected to the computer, although why this would cause Open and Save dialogs to slow down, I don't know. But it is possible.
Francine


Francine
Schwieder

What I saw up to now in my case the fiendish delay occurs only with (FW) external storage mounted....

_____ greetings karl

Thanks Karl. That is a good one. I think you are right. I have my music on a separate hard disk connected to the Airport (idea to have all music centrally located for the family). That disk appears to be constantly busy and laming the whole system. Unfortunately iTunes does not support network players (such as Linn's Sneaky). Therefore I have to keep the stupid disk there. Hope that Apple fixes this. I heard that Windows 7 is great! (I thought people will love this remark in an Apple forum.) Cheers. Thomas

Thank you, BoWi, I heard too! 😉
(Wondering, since the beginning of this thread three months ago nobody from Apple did just a smallest remark....)

Have fun whereever you go and with your music, too.

___ k.

Home Sharing on iTunes fixes this.

BTW, since I eliminated the "search for" under finder preferences, all my previous delays are gone!

Open and Save became very slow on my MacBook Pro. I called Apple Tech Support several times. Each technician had me try a different solution. First, remove and reinstall MS Office. Then, use Disk Utility to verify and repair the disk. Finally, the time consuming step of reinstalling the operating system and all programs. Each of those steps helped for a few days. Then, the problem with slow opening file saves began again. Today, it took two minutes for an Excel file save dialogue box to open!

I switched from a Windows computer to an Apple computer because I thought problems like this would be solved. I'm tempted to switch back.

The other night I had my iPod plugged to add some songs to it, left it attached as it needed to charge (it is an elderly iPod, and uses the Apple supplied gizmo connected to a firewire port), and for the first time in quite awhile I noticed the slow Open and Save dialog boxes. The next day, after restarting, with no external drives mounted, and my Vista partition unmounted, everything was back to normal speed. I spent many hours on the computer using Photoshop, iTunes, Safari, TextEdit, and Eudora (which runs in Rosetta) and the speed remained normal. So for me at least I'm quite sure there is nothing wrong with my hardware or the file system, it is something in the system, whenever there is an external drive or a Windows file system present.
Francine


Francine
Schwieder

Aak, my new system is experiencing the same problem. At first I thought it was shared folders and turning that off helped for a while but now opening or saving files has slowed to a crawl. The same problem does not occur on my laptop (thankfully) also using 10.6.2

I have rebuilt my LaunchServices, cleared my caches, have no smart folders and have disconnected my time capsule. Nothing helps! this is a bug. The whole system seems just a bit slower. It has to be solved or Snow Leopard is dead. Does Apple know?

Roy Levien wrote:
I've tried all the things you mention; nothing helps.

The only "pattern" I can see is that older machines (regardless of what version of the OS they're running) seem immune, while newer machines have the problem in a big way.

Deep firmware bug?

I can attest that it's not just newer machines. I have a 2007 8-core Mac Pro with 17gb of RAM and I'm experiencing the same problem. I basically have to restart my machine daily to get rid of this problem. Still looking for a proper fix.

I'm running 10.6.2 and came to the forum to see if anyone else noticed their Mac was slow to open dialog windows...usually when I go to File -> Save and such.

I'm having the same problem. Guess it must be the OS