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Slow loading Finder in Mavericks?

I bought the brand new Macbook Pro Retina that came with Mavericks plus I upgraded my old Macbook Pro Retina to Mavericks before my new one came. On both computers I am noticing a few different things that are rather annoying.


When attaching documents to emails, etc... it is taking my finder forever to load the contents of the directory I am trying to access. It is doing this on both computers, so I am assuming this is something to do with Mavericks and not the new computer. It is rather frustrating because for my job, I am contstantly attaching documents to emails every day, but having to wait a good minute or two for a directory to load to find what I am looking for to attach is getting rather annoying.


Even my stickie notes load slow now when opening them in Mavericks and it has never done that before. They kind of appear laggy when loading. Usually they just popped right up.


Is anybody else experiencing this problem? Any suggestions for a fix? I really enjoy Mavericks but it seems to be messing with the overall performance of some things.

Posted on Oct 30, 2013 8:05 AM

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261 replies

Oct 30, 2013 10:45 AM in response to kufan0001

I'm also having this problem. The Finder seems rather laggy in 10.9. When I go to rename or move files, things seem to slow down — to the point that when I go to move a file, or attempt to rename a file after it appears an initial rename didn't work, I get an error message (which I'll save and share here the next time it happens).


Also, when I go to move a file, I get the progress bar that seems to take forever — just to move a single little file. Strange, no?

Oct 30, 2013 11:35 AM in response to kufan0001

I did do one thing that has semi helped my problem. I went to System Preferences then General and made sure that "Always" was checked for the Show Scroll Bars option.


This has helped my issue of it taking a long to show document contents when browing my files in the mail app to attach documents to emails.


It has not helped ALL the issues though as it still takes awhile to load document contents in other apps. Hoping maybe Apple realses a fix for it. Trying to be patient.

Nov 5, 2013 3:35 AM in response to kufan0001

This problem really negates any benefit that Mavericks may offer simply in the reduced productivity this slowness creates. I really struggled with it and was seriously contemplating reverting to the previous version of Mac OS X Mountain Lion. However, on reflection, I identified one of the features of Mavericks that could be responsible. App Nap. As I understand it, App Nap is designed to conserve energy and automatically slows down applications that are loaded but not currently active. If this is the case and it is applied to the Finder, then this could be the cause of our frustrations. On most Apps. in Maverick, using Get Info will present amongst other options, an opportunity to disable App Nap for the specific application. However, this option is not available for the Finder app. (/System/Library/CoreServices/Finder/Contents/MacOS/Finder).


I checked with Activity Monitor and discovered that the Finder process did get App Napped if unused so how to disable the App Napping? Happily, after some Googling, I came across these folks who had the answer:


http://www.tekrevue.com/tip/disable-app-nap-os-x-mavericks/


So I opened terminal and issued the following command:


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


Hey Presto, finder appears to be restored to its normal operating speed.


I suspect that to reverse this step, the above command should be issued with the argument NO.


If you try this, you do so at your own risk but I wanted to share it because of the frustrating impact it is having to so many folks.


Good Luck and please let me know if it works for you.

Nov 5, 2013 5:48 AM in response to kufan0001

This problem really negates any benefit that Mavericks may offer simply in the reduced productivity this slowness creates. I really struggled with it and was seriously contemplating reverting to the previous version of Mac OS X Mountain Lion. However, on reflection, I identified one of the features of Mavericks that could be responsible. App Nap. As I understand it, App Nap is designed to conserve energy and automatically slows down applications that are loaded but not currently active. If this is the case and it is applied to the Finder, then this could be the cause of our frustrations. On most Apps. in Maverick, using Get Info will present amongst other options, an opportunity to disable App Nap for the specific application. However, this option is not available for the Finder app. (/System/Library/CoreServices/Finder/Contents/MacOS/Finder).


I checked with Activity Monitor and discovered that the Finder process did get App Napped if unused so how to disable the App Napping? Happily, after some Googling, I came across these folks who had the answer:


http://www.tekrevue.com/tip/disable-app-nap-os-x-mavericks/


So I opened terminal and issued the following command:


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


Hey Presto, finder appears to be restored to its normal operating speed.


I suspect that to reverse this step, the above command should be issued with the argument NO.


If you try this, you do so at your own risk but I wanted to share it because of the frustrating impact it is having to so many folks.


Good Luck and please let me know if it works for you.

Slow loading Finder in Mavericks?

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