Big Slow

TidBITS Talk
1

My nickname for “Big Sur” is “Big Slow”.

Aside from the Finder failing to open the Preview and MS Word apps when double-clicking Preview and MS Word file icons after startup, my biggest beef with “Big Slow” is slowness of the Finder.

I have several folder aliases in my dock. When I click one of them, the folder’s files and sub-folders are displayed. When I hover over one of these sub-folders, the Finder is extremely slow to display that sub-folder’s contents. This continues down through the folder hierarchy.

This extreme slowness did not occur in Catalina, which displayed sub-folder’s contents virtually instantaneously.

Reinstalling Big Sur did not fix this issue.

I’m using a 27-inch Retina iMac Late 2015 with 24 GB of RAM and 2 TB of storage.

2

When you say 2 TB of storage, are you talking about an SSD or a hard drive?

If it’s an SSD, something is very wrong, since vast numbers of people are running Big Sur without any such issues.

If it’s a hard drive, that’s your problem, and the solution is an external SSD, which we just wrote about.

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3

Thank you for your reply, Adam.

It’s a Fusion Drive.

So sad that it was so fast in Catalina but so slow in “Big Slow”.

4

I haven’t had a spinning boot drive since c. 2014 on any Mac, but I have not noticed any slowness in Big Sur at all. Some beta bugs when I have the betas installed, but otherwise it’s been very solid for me. Annoying and fiddly at times, but speedy and stable.

5

Did you do a clean install, or a normal reinstall?

6

I performed a normal reinstall.

Do you think a clean reinstallation would fix the slowness?

7

That would be the next thing I’d try. It’s a hassle, but if it’s not a hardware issue causing the slowdown, there’s a good chance some piece of installed software is causing it. A clean reinstall, restoring your data, and then reinstalling your apps is the best way to see if it’s a software issue. If you’ve not been able to find the cause of the slowness some other way, this is probably the next thing you need to do unfortunately.

8

Thank you, Jolin, for your comments.

I guess I’ll have to set aside a chunk of time to do this.

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