Q: Slow loading Finder in Mavericks?

I tried everything from this thread and all over the web, nothing worked. I knew it wasn't a hardware problem because I could navigate the filesystem just fine on the command line, it was just Finder being a dog. The problem seemed to stem from coreservicesd and the IconServicesAgent (or whatever it was called), which would use about 60% and 30% CPU (of one core) when listing out any folder in Finder, big or small. So it wasn't exhausting my resources or anything, but that's way too much for just browsing files.

Eventually I stumbled across someone who said to try starting up in safe mode and see if the problem was there - and it wasn't. Coreservicesd and IconServicesAgent didn't feature at the top of Activity Monitor and everything was well again. But how do I fix the problem when not in safe mode? Well, I booted back into my user without safe mode and just like magic, the problem was gone and hasn't come back.

TL;DR try booting in and out of safe mode.

Same problem here (after Mavericks upgrade from 10.6.8).

Slowwww Finder opening Folders and moving files.

Tried

sudo defaults write com.apple.Finder NSAppSleepDisabled -bool YES

with no luck, but then followed this suggestion and booted in Safe mode (hold down Shift key at restart).

Problem now seems to be resolved ...

I tried booting into safe mode, deleting the kext caches, deleting the spotlight caches and  letting it rebuild them, still have problem that after every hard restart, it goes into spotlight and starts to index the imac hard drive. I have to wait three to four minutes before anything even responds. I never had any issues before 10.9. Come on apple, why can't you put a delay for the spotlight indexing that only uses 1-2% of the cpu over several minutes after 10-15 minutes after the computer is on, let it get all of the processes up and running so we can start working.....or even better yet...when the computer is inactive. This is so frustrating. Perhaps there is some way that they can offload to one of the 4 cores (in my imac) to do the indexing while still allowing the main cores to run full throttle.

rogerfromparma , you are indeed a genius.  At least your a notch or two sharper than I am.  I applied your fix.  Voila!  "Zippy" is the word that comes to mind.  Finder is working as it should.  I also went thru all the photography-related apps I use and turned off AppNap in GetInfo to avoid the napping syndrome, since I live in those apps.  Maybe now I'll get out of Mavericks its advertised benefits!  Again, Thanks!

I FOUND A SOLUTION ... IN MY CASE : I had the exact same problem. I read ALL the pages for that post, did EVERYTHING that was written to try to solve the issue, even made a clean re install of Mavericks and the problem came again ... AFTER I reinstalled Trimenabler ! So I made a clean uninstall of it with Mackeeper, repair the permissions under disk utility and now everything is working FAST and AS EXPECTED. I hope this will help all of you that do have Trimenabler installed on Mavericks. Ia Orana from Tahiti !

hey guys I may a bit late on this discussion but what worked right away for me was to go into Systems Preferences>Energy Saver and then unclick "Put hard drives to sleep whenever possible".
Voilà. I hope this helps.

This one fixed for me

Yup, solution on page 6 of this thread solved the problem for me too.

THIS WORKED!

I've tried everything to improve the performance of my powerbook, which replaced an older model right around the same time I updated to Mavericks.

Applications often took over a minute to launch, everything little simple task would set the color wheel spinning, web pages were loading slowly...

No one at apple could provide me with a solution, and this worked!

THANK YOU!

Dear Apple,

imagine you're the proud owner of a 2013 Porsche 911. You're nearly perfectly satisfied with your dream car, maybe one or two glitches, but overall you're just happy.

The other day, you receive a letter from Porsche saying that with your annual service they'll upgrade your navigation system, and the first annual service is free from now on. Cool.

Two days later, you get your car back. Nice, shiny, cleaned.

It's a sunny saturday and you decide to drive to a nearby lake and go swimming. You sit in your Porsche and turn on the music.

Nothing happens.

Silence.

You wonder whether the service broke your car, eject your cd, clean it and put it back in.

Turn it on, silence.

You think what the ****, ok, let's drive to the lake. At the first crossing, suddently, music starts to play..

Oh great, maybe that firmware reset needed a while.

At the second crossing, you decide, that you just don't want to listen to that 80s track right now. You push the next button.

Guess what, nothing happens.

You push back, forward, stop, next, play.

Yes, right, after 25 seconds, the next title starts.

You call your dealer. He says, oh well, yeah, that's a little problem with the new firmware.

"Seriously? I can't go to the next track anymore? Well.. sure they'll have a fix for that one soon?"

You wait for the next update, it comes, but there's no change. Still, if you want to skip forward to track 4 of your favourite cd, you have to wait for 4 times 30 seconds. One day, your boss gave you a cd with the meeting notes recorded on it so you can listen to them when you're in the mood for it. Guess what, track 7,18,19 and 20 are important for you. You decide to listen to them when you drive in your wife's car.

There's another firmware update. You immediately bring your car to the dealer. Guess what, same problem.

You google and crawl the whole internet, and you find all kinds of solutions. Increase the battery voltage to 14volts, install a second battery, turn the heating on and off before you start the car.

You try them all. Nothing changes. You try to disable each and every function of your car you don't need and try to see if it helps. No way.

Finally, you wonder whether you should replace the navigation system with some none-corporate one.

You start googleing for compatible navigation systems and find the the Porsche navigation system is deeply wired and endbedded in the rest of the car electronics, and every reasonable fix for less than

5000$ will ruin your Porsche experience.

You're a frustrated customer and wonder whether Porsche is the only car around.

Feel free to think this is just a small bug and your car's the best after all and you should offer the customer a free car wash or a new color for his next Porsche.

I disagree. He won't buy one.

Seriously - 40 seconds each time I open a large folder with some 100s of files of program code on the local hard disk? As fast as my floppy drive back in 1985 before my Victor Sirius got a HDD. THIS IS A MAYOR ANNOYANCE and THERE IS STILL NO WORKING FIX

Have you considered telling Apple instead of other Apple users?

Apple Feedback

Yes, I have considered that and done it prior to posting here. Plus I spend days of my life trying to fix that bug FOR THEM, and at least a hundred sudo commands. On the address you mention, I have already posted before. But since they limit any message to them by 800 characters, the only thing you can do there, is post a short bug report.

And - surprise - I didn't get an answer.

So - any other Idea on how to reach them? Maybe a kickstarter campaign on fixing that bug for them?? An article for wired?

Not getting a reply is normal (it's noted on the form) but that does not mean it is of no use. This issue will probably come down to the numbers of users affected. Making that known to Apple will help.

As for other methods? that's a personal choice don't you think?

I found a fix that seems to work, see http://blog.hsoi.com/2014/02/25/my-slow-mac-mavericks-coreservicesd-iconservices agent-and-how-fs_usage-saved-me/comment-page-1/

If you have the same problem and the solutions given in this thread don't work, please run sudo fs_usage -f pathname -w com.apple.IconServicesAgent | grep open in the Terminal and post your output here.

For me, XCode seemed to be the problem.

Uninstalled XCode by sudo -r /Applications/XCode.app. Cleared all caches by sudo rm -r /Library/Caches and ~/Library/Caches, then mkdir of the same (don’t know and think that this step is necessary). Reinstalled XCode.

Problem gone.

I've experienced something quite similar!

When looking at the activity monitor, "coreservicesd" was standing out as consuming lots of CPU time & resource, so I started to investigate into this one, and the solution--at least in my particular case--was something completely "arbitrarily" appearing!

I simply trashed Xcode and emptied the trash, and all of a sudden the load dropped like a stone, and the system performance sky rocketed!

Kind of odd, isn't it?