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Pictures screensaver insanely slow after updating to 10.6.2

After I updated to 10.6.2 I can not use the pictures screen saver anymore for large image collections.
Neither by using the "iPhoto" options nor by selecting the folder containing all my photos.

Displaying the iPhoto folder with a year worth of pictures causes a five minute delay before the screen saver starts. When I point the screen saver to a folder containing all my pictures in System Preferences the panel stalls with 90% CUP usage and my computer fans start, I have to force quit System Preferences.

Before 10.6.2 starting the pictures screen saver from the same map took 5 seconds at the most.

When I select a folder with only a few images it works fine.

When I use fs_usage to check out what's happening it looks as if the screen saver engine does a file-by-file scan instead of a spotlight search to scan the pictures folder.

A rebuild of the spotlight indices using "mdutil -E" does not solve this. Neither did a re-install of the 10.6.2 combo updater. For testing purposes I created a new user but that didn't help either.

Hope someone knows a fix easier than going back to 10.6.1 since displaying random pictures from all my photo's was one of the features I really appreciated (iMac in living room).

iMac 24", Other OS, 10.6.2

Posted on Nov 10, 2009 1:58 PM

Reply
17 replies

Nov 14, 2009 10:05 AM in response to Wimer

My apologies for being negative ... I was having flash backs to my Vista experiences. I just needed to vent a little since I had 3 problems with the 10.6.2 release and this was the biggest as it forced me to reboot many times for 2 days until I figured out the screen saver engine was consuming 100% cpu and locking the screen out. It is simple enough to switch to a different screen saver until the next patch.

I am a big fan of Mac and I know that Apple will turn this around quickly. My experience with Mac has been 95% positive and drastically better than Windows.

Nov 23, 2009 4:09 AM in response to Ernst Mulder

Thanks to the posters here on this issue. It's a relief to know the problem is not, most likely, some corrupted or idiosyncratic thing on my machine. I appreciate the workaround idea, though, along with some others, I'm running into some trouble locating and reactivating the 10.6.1 file. I'll wait for the update that fixes the problem (which I hope is forthcoming soon), and in the meantime, use the "word of the day" screen saver....

Jan 29, 2010 10:34 PM in response to lberk

Same problem: works for a single small folder of photos, but not for the larger parent folder. Crashes the preview in Preferences. I let that go, and it crashed the whole computer (stuck black screen saver with intermittent beachballing when I tried to do anything). I've seen several similar threads. Would appreciate a fix. Would know how to rollback (not so tech savvy). Thanks.

Pictures screensaver insanely slow after updating to 10.6.2

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