iCal is VERY slow

Welcome to the discussions, BaronP.

Try working your way through this X Labs helpsheet.

Report back.

AK

Boot from your installation CD and run the disk utility from that. If possible, take a backup first.

AK

iCal has always been a slow, pokey application on my 800mhz iMac. Newer versions installed as I upgraded OS through the years to 10.4.8 haven't made it any faster. Right now it is almost unusable, going into spinning beachball waits after I type half a line of text. Does this application have some memory leak problem, or does it get chronically crippled after some thousands of entries are stored in its database? Other simple calendar programs I've used in the past for peecees and sgi machines never slowed the computer down to a crawl by just typing 5 words of text. Is there anybody out there running ical on an old 800mhz imac, with many years of calendar entries, that can use iCal without all the spinning beachballs and extreme wait times? Is there anything that can be done (disk defragmentation etc.) that can speed up the performance of iCal on a machine that doesn't have any hardware or font or permissions problems? And if this abysmal performance is universal for all users with iMacs that are a few years old, is there any other more efficient calendar program for macs that can import several years of ical data? Doesn't do much good to have a pretty application if it runs so sluggishly that you have to go microwave your coffee to kill time until it catches up enough to type another line of text.

How much RAM have you?

How much free disk space have you?

In the days when I used a Filofax, once or twice a year, when I added a new batch of pages for the months ahead, I removed the pages more than six months old and stored them away. iCal is not designed to be a journal of the past, and performs much better if you do the occasional bit of house-keeping.

Recurring events can be a problem, as for each event iCal has to work forward to see if a recurrence falls within the display window. If there are a lot of recurring events, or if the base event was a long time ago, this will slow iCal.

It is also possible that there is some corruption in your calendar files. You could export, delete and re-import each in turn to see if that helps.

My powerbook is only 867MHz and I have never found iCal to be slow.

AK

800mhz processor, 768 mb ram, 21gig free disk space on boot drive.
I only have severe spinning beachball problems with 3 apps: dreavweaver mx, ical, and sometimes safari if I have a crazy number of windows and taps open. I've always just assumed that ical had some buggy memory leak. I'll try another archive later today and re-import the data.