Annoying slowness of Preview after Yosemite upgrade

I am using a 2014 MBA with 4 GB of memory as well but having this issue with all of my ebooks. Do you think I should try to format and back up with TM? Or clear my RAM or what? So frustrating that my brand new computer can't handle a PDF

Hi,

You could try this:

First step: disconnect any external or secondary monitors, if any is present.

Second step: Shut down your machine and enter Safe Mode (press shift once you turn on your computer again, more info below). Once you're there, fix your disk permissions.

Guide of how to access Safe Mode: OS X: What is Safe Boot, Safe Mode?

Third step: From Safe Mode turn off your machine again and reset your System Management Controller (SMC). There are different methods, depending on machine, to do this. To know what method applies to yours read the following guide.

Intel-based Macs: Resetting the System Management Controller (SMC)

Fourth step: Once your machine completes a full boot after resetting the SMC turn it off again and reset your PRAM (THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT STEP, BUT THE PREVIOUS ONES ARE ESSENTIAL FOR THIS ONE TO WORK). The PRAM stores small bits of data that indicate our Apple computer how to interact with the devices connected to it, including monitors and video cards. It also affects software.

To reset it you should hold the OPTION, COMMAND, P and R keys in your keyboard immediately after turning on your machine again.You'll hear the start up chime, continue pressing the keys until the machine boots and the chime starts A SECOND TIME, then release. IF YOUR YOSEMITE INSTALLATION LOCKS UP AT A BLACK SCREEN AFTER THIS, DONT PANIC! It's normal, just turn off your computer and let it boot again.

More info about PRAM: OS X Mavericks: Reset your computer’s PRAM

Please let me know if improved.

I don't have my power cord with me at work so I can't try this until tonight. From what I understand resetting SMC generally helps when "the computer is running unusually slowly although it is not experiencing abnormally high CPU utilization" like Preview is doing right now whenever I scroll through the PDF. For the record, "reduce transparency" helped for about a minute and then it began freezing as I scrolled through the PDF that usually slides around like butter in Mavericks. I have also noticed that transitioning between Spaces is quick but the animation looks jittery. I will still give those steps a go tonight. Thanks for the quick reply.

Will try to reset of PRAM at some point today, I think that in these occasions is a good idea indeed.

Here are instructions for Yosemite (content seems to be the same of Marcelo's message, but being a Yosemite thread ... )

OS X Yosemite: Reset your computer’s PRAM

Please let me know if helped. For me pdf are so critical that I had to roll back to Mavericks. If there is a fix I may try to reinstall Yosemite.

Hello, reset the PRAM yesterday around this time and it has been good since. Now I have used it only for 24 hours, so might be early to say, however for me the reset of PRAM has helped to have a smoother mac!

Hope it helps for you as well.

Roberto

Yesterday I called AppleCare. First tech could not solve the problem -- ratcheting, herky-jerky scrolling through any digitally dense PDF, whether using Preview or Acrobat...clearly starting with upgrade to Yosemite from Mavericks. Then was elevated to a Senior Advisor who patiently worked through all the suggested fixes in this thread and associated others. All to no avail. We also established that the problem persisted even for a new user profile, and also in safe mode. The fact that I have the exact same problem on my MacBookPro as on my iMac was enough to suggest to the advisor that a reinstall of Yosemite was not a solution. I had previously found that digitally small PDF files, regardless of number of pages, did not present a problem. The digitally larger PDFs are the ones with the hang-ups in scrolling, in particular the ones that originate from my ScanSnap scanner. For example, I have a 90 page one of those where the problem is terrible. We tried excerpting ten pages from that 90 page PDF and found that the problem persisted there too. I am not an expert by any means but that suggests to me that the problem is somehow related to digital size per page.

The Senior Advisor was very patient. We spent almost two hours working on this. He uploaded one of my troublesome PDFs and a lot of data from my computer to forward to his engineers to work on. Seemed to be taking this quite seriously. I urge you all to make similar calls to AppleCare. The big problem is the wait time on the phone to get to someone. BTW, when they do a screen share with you, it is hard for them to appreciate the problem unless you expand the Preview window to as big as it can get.

Thank you, it is very important for those having Apple Care to contact them and let them know.

Is much less effective but for the ones who don't have Apple Care subscription, please leave a feedback, informing the issue:

https://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

Just adding my +1. Not only have I been seeing slowness in Preview itself, but it make my whole system laggy, even after Preview has been closed.

I started a thread on this prior to finding this one.

Preview.app causing system sluggishness/lag

I also filed a report using Apple's feedback tool.

Since installing Yosemite, everything is slow. The beachball of death is taking up most of my work time. It's the same on my 2014 Air, 2011 iMac, and 2008 Macbook Pro. Doesn't matter what software I'm using, Preview slowed same as Office, Safari slowed the same as apps purchased in the app store, and mail is tedious beyond words.

This is going to sound strange but these steps seemed to have helped me out a little only to a certain degree. On my smaller PDFs I noticed the jitteriness comes only when I scroll really quickly and on my larger one just over 1000 pages it is still having problems even scrolling just a few pages. Transitioning between spaces has gotten a lot smoother and I can turn transparency back on. It still bugs me that Preview is sluggish and the new annotate layout is absolutely terrible. Might try a to find how to do a format and fresh install if I can find the time.

Just dropped to give my +1. My husband had the wonderful idea of upgrading my MBA to Yosemite. Working with pdf files is now painful. Zooming is extremely slow, the spinning wheel is shows up all the time.

A possible reprieve. In a thread (http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=20260309) at the MacRumors forums about general Yosemite performance issues, and it was suggested (http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=20251224&postcount=86) to:

Delete /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver.plist

Delete ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.windowserver*.plist

Shutdown OSX

Startup, immediately press and hold the P and R keys while holding down the option (⌥) and command (⌘) keys before the gray boot screen appears, which resets the PRAM

I had previously reset the PRAM, so deleting the window server plists was new for me (even though I did a clean install of Yosemite, these may have been brought back in with my Time Machine restore).

I did this, and I have had promising results. I just fired up Preview with 15+ PDFs (along with almost all of the ~15 applications in my dock). I did a lot of scrolling and annotating in Preview. Sure, thing slowed down a bit with all this open (Preview itself still performed rather poorly compared to Mavericks, but it was usable), but my system did not get into its normal laggy state that persists even when I close everything.

We'll see how things stack up with some more long-term use (*fingers crossed*).

I have been in contact with Apple Care, the representative could reproduce the issue himself with my pdf files. He informed the engineering team, so finger crossed, and lets wait for the Yosemite update.

+1

Clear difference with Yosemite. I keep a lot of large electronics pdf datasheets and schematics open at any given time. Some I used routinely in in Mavericks are now unusable.

Not just a performance issue, some large schematics render in a hit or miss manner: most of the time they render as meaningless visual gibberish such as black boxes, dots, and visual screen fragments from other applications.