Archive utility chokes/extremely slow on Mac Studio with M1 Max

Question

Archive utility chokes/extremely slow on Mac Studio with M1 Max

Mac Studio 2022

Apple M1 Max

Ventura 13.1

4TB SSD

Every time I use the Archive utility within a Finder window to either compress or unzip files on this brand new machine, the progress window opens and progress bar starts but then does nothing for what seems like forever. Attempting to cancel the operation by clicking the CANCEL button or closing the progress window also does nothing.The only way I can cancel the operation is by opening Activity Monitor, searching for "Archive", and force-quitting the running Archive processes.

Steps to reproduce:

Open a Finder window.
Double-click a .zip file to uncompress it.

Or...

Open a Finder window.
Select multiple files.
Right-click and select Compress to compress them.

The only way I've found around this is using "zip" and "unzip" commands in the Terminal, which is okay for developers like me, but definitely inconvenient, and not everyone is comfortable in the Terminal.

What's the deal? This worked perfectly on my machine with Fusion Drive.

Posted on Mar 3, 2023 6:45 AM

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Answer 1

Mar 3, 2023 7:57 AM in response to rogerthedrummer

There have no been pervasive reports of this or similar issues with archive utility.

You should also consider that you might be low on drive space or that the files you are dealing with may be damaged.

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Answer 2

Mar 3, 2023 8:18 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Thanks for your response, Grant, but this is a brand new machine with 3TB+ of available storage. So I doubt the issue would be insufficient storage space. 😆

I have noticed that SOME .zip files seem to work fine, ex: programmatically compressed database backups exported from content management systems like Craft CMS, or from database management apps like TablePlus. Those behave as expected when double-clicking the .zip file in a Finder window.

So you raise a fair point that certain .zip files generated outside of my machine might either be corrupted, or possibly generated with a different file system format (i.e. MS-DOS (FAT) and ExFAT).

Regardless, this seems like something the OS should be able to handle. I never had these issues on my previous machine (late 2015 iMac with Fusion Drive).

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Archive utility chokes/extremely slow on Mac Studio with M1 Max

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