I have to ask.. is your Desktop & Screensaver section slow also?

[allan.nyholm]

Hi,

So what I've been wanting to ask for a number of weeks and months is this; when in System Preferences and the Desktop & Screensaver portion of same - Is this also so painfully slow that browsing and adding wallpapers is a minute long process at times?
For instance I have a series of wallpapers divided into folders that I want to have listed in the sidebar. That's all good and everything, but even having this folder show up and browsing for the desired wallpaper is soooo slow.

I can record a video if you want eyes on it. I use a homemade Fusion drive using an external 250 GB SSD from WesternDigital and I then use the 1TB 7200rpm hard disk drive internally inside my late 2015 27" iMac

The issue is there from the beginning with macOS Mojave and not yet resolved with latest public beta 3 of 10.14.6 released not many days ago.

I have been on non-beta for the longest time and I thought that eventually the slowness of mentioned System Preferences section would be fixed.

Neither the SSD or HDD is failing although the HDD shows some signs of usage via DriveDx. But not failing.

Also, the splitting up the Fusion drive doesn't do anything to help the issue. I have been on a regular macOS installation on the same SSD for many months.

All APFS drives. Having the internal 1TB hard disk drive on HFS+ doesn't matter and the slowness of the particular System Preferences pane is the same as with my current setup.

Hints and tips?

 

[Janichsan]

Not quite to the same extent as you describe it, but for instance switching between the Screensave and the Desktop tab takes age. When I'm on the respective tabs, everything is quite speedy (e.g. selecting a new background).

 

[allan.nyholm]

I have an update... I thought that it may have to do with my Home folder permissions - so I followed instructions here:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203538

That has helped much... . I might have done something wrong when using various backup solutions to an exFat partioned disk as an example. I don't know if the issue is resolved 100% and so I won't update the thread with a resolved marker but I will give it a week or so to test it all.

quick edit... System Preferences still struggle reading a whole lot of large dimension wallpapers such as beyond or near 4k and 5k and those larger than that. My collection of 5K wallpapers from David Lanham took its sweet time getting loaded. But it does appear -not as sluggish-. The general sluggishness might also be due to fact that I only have a 2GB videocard from AMD and the Retina desktop takes about 1.5GB of that to be operational, I read/heard. iStat Menus shows very little video memory available. I should have gone for the higher GB version back when I bought this iMac.

@Janichsan Maybe there's a 3rd party screensaver that isn't doing too well? I would like to suggest updating your Home folder permissions but I am unsure about it as I don't want to get people out on a journey that doesn't bring about any luck.

 

[TimothyR734]

I have an update... I thought that it may have to do with my Home folder permissions - so I followed instructions here:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203538

That has helped much... . I might have done something wrong when using various backup solutions to an exFat partioned disk as an example. I don't know if the issue is resolved 100% and so I won't update the thread with a resolved marker but I will give it a week or so to test it all.

quick edit... System Preferences still struggle reading a whole lot of large dimension wallpapers such as beyond or near 4k and 5k and those larger than that. My collection of 5K wallpapers from David Lanham took its sweet time getting loaded. But it does appear -not as sluggish-. The general sluggishness might also be due to fact that I only have a 2GB videocard from AMD and the Retina desktop takes about 1.5GB of that to be operational, I read/heard. iStat Menus shows very little video memory available. I should have gone for the higher GB version back when I bought this iMac.

@Janichsan Maybe there's a 3rd party screensaver that isn't doing too well? I would like to suggest updating your Home folder permissions but I am unsure about it as I don't want to get people out on a journey that doesn't bring about any luck.

much slower in Catalina dev beta 3

 

[allan.nyholm]

much slower in Catalina dev beta 3

That's unfortunate. Last know good macOS that was up to speed was for me High Sierra.

 

[Fuchal]

Yes, but it's always been painfully slow. Maybe one year they'll get around to caching thumbnails.