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Help: Finder Operations all take 8 - 9 Seconds

trag

Well-known member
I am using OS 9.1 on a Umax S900 motherboard with a PowerLogix 1 GHz G3 CPU. I have 520 MB of RAM and I do not use Virtual Memory.

Anything I do in the finder seems to take 8 - 9 seconds. How do I know? The clock freezes and when it starts running again, the difference in the two numbers is 8 - 9 seconds.

Close a folder hierarchy by clicking on a carrat--8 seconds. Click on a file name to change it. 8 seconds. Use the backspace key on aforementioned file name. 8 seconds.

Launch an application, before anything happens, there's an 8 second delay. Once I'm in an application, things are mostly okay, unless I open or save, in which case I'm in for another 8 - 9 second delay.

I thought this might be because my 30 GB volume was mostly full. So I cleared 5 GB of space on it and then ran Tech Tool Pro's defrag utility. No difference.

Is there a corrupt preference I can dispose of? My system volume still has 200 MB out of 1000 MB available, so I don't think a full system volume is the problem.

Surely someone has seen this before and knows the cause? A few more weeks of this and I'll just nuke and pave the system volume in hopes of fixing it.

I ran disinfectant and rebuilt the various desktop files as well with no change.

My system volume and a few others are part of a striped array of three SCSI disks on an Atto UL2D. The 30 GB volume is part of a 40 GB drive on an AEC-6280M. There are two SCSI CDROM drives on the built-in SCSI bus, a DVD-ROM and DVDRW on the 6280M and a 500 GB ATA drive on the 6280M. This problem did not arise when I added any of the drives.

 

trag

Well-known member
Never Mind, but thanks for reading.

Posting my request got me thinking. I booted into my backup volume and deleted a bunch of preferences that I either clearly didn't need, or looked like they might be relevant. E.g. Finder preferences, System Preferences.

When I booted back into my main 9.1 volume performance was back to being snappy.

I suspect that something like Finder Preferences was corrupted and every time the system accessed it things got slowed wayyyyy down.

At least I hope so. We'll see if it comes back.

 
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