Finder suddenly very slow

Since you said you were messing with permissions, I'd suggest running Disk Utility on the drive to check it with the First Aid function, and if all is well, do a reinstall of the OS from Recovery Mode, all your files and settings will be retained and the OS files will be restored to factory settings so it should undo any permissions you changed outside of the user account files

see in the below link, Repair your internal storage device and Reinstall macOS

Use macOS Recovery on an Intel-based Mac - Apple Support

Phenr wrote:

Sadly, reinstalling the OS didn't solve the issue :(

It wouldn't.

Your problem is most likely caused by some 3rd party file sync software like DropBox, BackBlaze, or a dozen other ones. Many of these apps have started using Apple's new cloud API, dramatically reducing the functionality that they used to have. Unfortunately, being an Apple API, it is probably extremely difficult to use and really buggy.

Hard to say what the solution will be. An OS update might fix it if Apple has admitted to a particularly egregious set of bugs in the API. But that rarely happens. And even when it does, you'll definitely need the latest, bleeding edge version of any file provider apps. That and a lot of luck.

Then again, you did mention Homebrew, so who knows? I've seen so many posts from Homebrew users who upgraded their operating system and suddenly can't do anything. This doesn't appear to be related to Homebrew but who knows what you've used Homebrew to install.

Try creating a new user and see if it goes away. If so, the issue is in the user profile

Is anything spiking in usage in Activity Monitor under %cpu when the problem happens?

it keeps all USER preferences and downloaded files, but I'm not familiar enough with homebrew to know where it's files are stored. If it's in the system directories there's a good chance they would be replaced with the default system files and preferences.

If you do a Time Machine backup before the reinstall, you could always restore if things are missing from homebrew

Yes, that's for the M1, which is Apple silicon

I am a half inch away from dumping mac's from my life due to how poorly finder has been working the last year or two. I have already installed a third party file manager but even that is not great. it feels like apple has just been using finder as a feature dump ground killing it. Its the one thing on the system that has to work, if it doesn't the experience is miserable like. it is now.

id that, after 1 hour it started operating extremely slow again

Pure BS, I've been having similar issues that have spanned the last dozen updates.

holy **** i am losing my mind, the problem is icloud drive. But apple shoves it into my throat so everything is now automatically on the icloud drive, if i try to remove something it takes for 300 years to move to my local desktop so my entire desktop is on the icloud drive. I tried to remove icloud drive but then my entire desktop dissapeared, tried to download the files from icloude website but you can't download folders, only individuals files...

what the actual fk ?????????? This slow finder issue has been going on for 2 weeks now since update to Sonoma.