My Tiger report: Spotlight and Dashboard are amazingly sloooooooow
Here’s the hardware: 1.67GHz Powerbook, with 1GB of RAM. (That’s the model with the fast, 5400rpm drives.) A fair number of apps running - um, 31 at latest count, though quite a few of those aren’t doing anything (eg PHP Function Index, which I just refer to from time to time. It’s terrific.)
I also have Keyboard Maestro (the old, 1.2 version) running in the background, because I have various Applescripts linked to keyboard shortcuts. It gets my email signed with different signatures according to what I’m doing, things like that.
But when I hit the keyboard shortcuts for Spotlight, or for Dashboard (the latter of which I’ve changed to alt-space), there’s a delay of seconds before either Spotlight will start finding stuff, or the Dashboard will appear.
Look, I’ll show you. See? Dashboard took about three seconds to do anything there. I get the impression that it’s swapping memory in and out.
Is anyone else seeing this, or got any ideas? Could it be Keyboard Maestro, which traps passing keyboard input to see whether it matches any of the keystrokes in its records?
- These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
- Get it while it's late: my exclusive review of Tiger (you know.. that new software thing) (2 May 2005; score: 131.99%)
- How not to write an operating system review: Paul Thurrott shows you (16 April 2005; score: 74.74%)
- Tiger: a rush to market means that it's full of interface errors (27 May 2005; score: 71.57%)
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June 1st, 2005 at 3:42 am
Simple: you likely have your answer. Turning off that old Keyboard Maestro (considering it’s up to 2.0.3), is probably a wise idea. I run a 1.03Ghz iBook with 768MB and see no such slowdown with Tiger.
June 1st, 2005 at 6:16 am
I’ve experienced no such delays on my aging 500 MHz, PM G4. Ditto for my wife’s new Powerbook, which is identical to yours except it’s the 1.5 GHz model. Disabling Keyboard Maestro would seem to be the first troubleshooting step to take.
June 1st, 2005 at 8:19 am
Well, I’m not seeing in on a 1GHz PowerBook. You must surely be running some pooh in there, m’dear.
June 1st, 2005 at 9:18 am
You provided the answer yourself. With 31 apps running you probably have very little free memory left. When switching between apps memory will be swapped in and out, which takes time.
This should not come as a surprise to anyone who is using a computer.
June 1st, 2005 at 9:32 am
Charles
I have a 512MB, 667Mhz Powerbook with a 5400rpm drive. I do NOT see what you’re experiencing even after a few days of use. Dashboard and Spotlight are effectively sub-second response. I don’t have 31 apps running, but I do usually have at least about 7-8 of the usual apps, and a few little ancillary things.
You might look at a few things to help you. Menumeters is a great little accessory that shows different performance things in your menu bar. It doesn’t add much at all to processsor load but is very useful (you can see CPU, network use, memory and disk, but any or all can be turned off or fine-tuned.) You could use this at the first hint of issues to identify where might be problem (memory or cpu for instance). Then use Activity monitor to look for the culprit, though of course this stops you doing your normal work.
Another neat utility is swapmenu - it just shows how much swap space is allocated. I’ve found once this goes to 2x my available RAM (in my case 1GB), then my performance is hit a bit - more fan etc - though nothing as bad as you describe. Strangely the swapmenu reported does not match what Activity monitor says is my VM. This is often around 5GB these days - 10 times my RAM! The VM system is really quite good with OS X, and I don’t think you should be having the problems you mention unless either one app is badly behaved (eg your keyboard app) OR a lot of these apps need to be constantly doing something rather than sitting in the background doing very little.
Incidentally, Word - even when doing nothing with a blank document in background takes at least 10% of my cpu all the time! So look out for those things.
Ian
June 1st, 2005 at 3:22 pm
I’ve got a 1 Ghz Powerbook and I find dashboard unusably slow. It can take the better part of a minute to refresh the widgets. And I’m not running this keyboard maestro thingy.
June 2nd, 2005 at 10:29 am
Slightly Off Topic, I know but I’m using Amnesty with Panther. My Dancing Hula Homer appears instantly.
June 3rd, 2005 at 11:13 am
Charles,
Did you fix this problem?
Ian
June 3rd, 2005 at 11:47 am
Not fixed. I’ve heard from other people that they see the same. I upgraded my version of Keyboard Maestro, and cut out a lot of extraneous macros so they’re limited to a particular app. No difference - still takes a while to wake up Spotlight (though it’s good once it’s up).
That’s with 20 apps running, including Graphic Converter doing a big picture, Safari (still, because it has the RSS subscription button, which then sends to NetNewsWire), Mail, MarsEdit, Word. They all chew up processor time and memory quite a lot.
Perhaps that’s my fate :-)
June 6th, 2005 at 11:37 am
Charles
I’ve been experiementing a bit. Currently I’m at 4 days uptime and used a lot of Safari and NNW in that time (with a bit of Omniweb & firefox). Also had iTunes, Word, Excel, iCal, iPhoto and others up and down over that time. Still with 667Mhz and 512MB RAM, I’m showing 206MB free (though 174MB is inactive, so just 31MB really free whatever that means!). Performance is fine.
I’ve quit Safari and NNW a couple of times though. I noticed that NNW uses a lot of memory also, and perhaps builds up after a few days. Also, it behaves not so well on certain sites (eg FT.com main page), just like Safari. So, I wonder if you try quitting and restarting these apps every so often, whether that helps.
Ian
June 7th, 2005 at 2:05 pm
Do you have Tiger installed on another Mac - or Firewire drive - either a vanilla install or without your 31 apps?
If so, may I recommend a test of booting from that other Mac or drive and checking Spotlight and Dashboard. It will certainly confirm whether it be the PB itself or something you have added to Tiger.
June 7th, 2005 at 7:42 pm
I could try putting Tiger onto a Firewire drive that I have. However, the 31 apps thing is.. well, I want to run those apps. (Right now I’ve got 21, not including background apps.) Spotlight and Dashboard come up OK just after a reboot and before I’ve started other apps, but then things start to pile up… and it gets slower.
June 8th, 2005 at 12:04 am
Hmmm. Maybe start one app at a time and look for the steepest decline in performance. Some good advice from correspondents above about likely resource hogs. If you know that S&D are snappy just after a restart and when none of the extra 10 are running you know it’s not your PB - which must represent some relief, I’d hope.
June 25th, 2005 at 10:39 am
I too had found Dashboard and Spotlight very slow on my G4 PowerBook (512MB). My problem was linked to my NetGear V1 router; updating its firmware caused the tiger sluggishness to disappear. I found everything worked faster.