system preferences very slow, beach ball, solved

If you are having a problem with System Preferences being extremely slow, with a lot of beach balling between mouse clicks, check your system log and look for notices that aosnotifyd is crashing (if so it will probably be creating crash reports every ten seconds, or "aosnotifyd: bootstrap_look_up failed". If so, here is the solution that worked for me:

You will need "Mountain Lion Cache Cleaner" (latest version just released) for this. Works fine in "Demo" mode:

Open up Mountain Lion Cache Cleaner (MLCC). Select "Demo" mode if you haven't got a license yet. Under the "Internet" tab, select "Unload Apple Push Service Daemon". Alternatively you can do this (I think this is better because MLCC does not use the -w switch) Using the terminal.app:

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.apsd.plist

MLCC has an option to rebuild the Location Services DB, however, I found that rebuilding it that way did not solve the problem. Instead, do this: (subsitute your user folder name where mine says "jim"):

sudo cp -r /var/db/locationd/ /Users/jim/Desktop/

sudo cp com.apple.AOSNotification-FMM.server /Users/jim/Desktop/

If the file doesn't exist ignore the error

Now do:

sudo rm /var/db/locationd/Library/Preferences/ByHost/*

sudo rm /var/db/locationd/clients.plist

sudo rm com.apple.AOSNotification-FMM.server (ignore if it doesn't exit)

Now open MLCC, under the "Maintain" menu, do "Rebuild LS Database". When it's finished the file /var/db/locationd/clients.plist should exist (it's a binary file, to see it's contents do this: defaults read /var/db/locationd/clients.plist).

Finally, restart the push daemon, either using MLCC or like this:

sudo launchctl load -wF /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.apsd.plist

To verify it's running: sudo launchctl list | grep apsd

This worked for me and survived repeated reboots.