M2 15" MacBook Air Can't handle Apple Pages

[ProlificWriter]

Okay that's a bit hyperbolic. But there is one task I do in Pages which has it running like this:

100.1% CPU usage! And it was getting pretty warm as well.

I used to do the same task on my 2017 iMac and it really struggled, so I threw the new MacBook Air at it, expecting it to fly through it. But, nope, >100% CPU usage.

What is this task, you're wondering?
It's... replacing straight quotes with smart quotes in a large text-only document.

You do this by selecting all the text, and going to Edit...Substitutions...Show Substiutions then check "Smart Quotes" and press Replace All.

And Pages REALLY struggles with this. I Force Quit it after 5 minutes of the beachball.

This was a big book -- 180,000 words, but I was expecting the M2 to handle it.

Must be a problem with Pages I guess. Wordprocessing isn't supposed to be that intensive a task!

 

[Marsikus]

You are prolific writer indeed ) It seems you hit some performance bug. Does it struggle the same way with other replacements?

 

[ProlificWriter]

You are prolific writer indeed ) It seems you hit some performance bug. Does it struggle the same way with other replacements?

This one was a book I was editing for someone else, most books I write are only around 60k!

A normal find and replace is no problem at all. And I don’t have a document with enough urls or hyphens to do another kind of “substitution” test.

I think it’s just the quote replacement it struggles with. And this book has over 10,000 of them.

 

[estabya]

Not sure if this is common knowledge, but the 100% usage reported by activity monitor is reporting the process using 100% of the time on one (performance) core, rather than the entire CPU. Makes sense for the sort of task you’re describing.

Like you said, I would assume a bug in Pages is causing this problem. This does not seem like the sort of activity that should cause beach balling or crashes on a modern machine IMO.

If I were you I’d report the issue to Apple as a bug.

 

[Isamilis]

Just curious. Are you able to try the same thing in Ms Word? I have experienced CPU up to 120% when I use handbrake. It’s still a bit warm anyway.

 

[Xian Zhu Xuande]

Today! Haha. And I just came across this thread while searching for information on just this issue. I attempted to run that operation on a very, very large amount of text, on a fully decked out M1 MacBook Pro, and it hung for a pretty extensive amount of time. I force quit Pages and just ran it again on a rather large, but not as large, subset of the data, and it completed after some time.

So maybe run a couple subsets (may go faster with less substitutions to make once the dataset is in order?) or give it more time to complete the operation.

I doubt this has anything at all to do with whether or not the computers “can handle it.” Not at all. But rather I suspect this is either a lack of optimization on Apple’s part for the feature, a bug in association with the feature, or something related. They may just not have ancipated that people would run the operation on so much text and did not take care to optimize it properly.