Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Very Sluggish Preview

jasnw

jasnw

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Nov 15, 2013
1,058
1,139
Seattle Area (NOT! Microsoft)
Just upgraded a 2018 Mac Mini (8GB, 126GB) from Ventura to Sonoma (14.7.1) and the Preview app is suddenly behaving very badly. It will open a first image file, but the second file takes spinning-beachball-forever, and the third file is about twice that. No problems with Preview at all under Ventura on these same (small) files. Same for png and pdf (haven't done exhaustive testing). Also, when I look at "Open Recent", the list is always empty. I tried clearing the list, but that didn't change anything. I've rebooted this system several times since the upgrade.

I have Sonoma on a newer Mini (2023 M2 Pro, 16GB, 512GB) and haven't seen this problem.

Is Sonoma just pushing this admittedly-minimal Mini to some performance limit?
 
jasnw said:
Just upgraded a 2018 Mac Mini (8GB, 126GB) from Ventura to Sonoma (14.7.1) and the Preview app is suddenly behaving very badly. It will open a first image file, but the second file takes spinning-beachball-forever, and the third file is about twice that. No problems with Preview at all under Ventura on these same (small) files. Same for png and pdf (haven't done exhaustive testing). Also, when I look at "Open Recent", the list is always empty. I tried clearing the list, but that didn't change anything. I've rebooted this system several times since the upgrade.

I have Sonoma on a newer Mini (2023 M2 Pro, 16GB, 512GB) and haven't seen this problem.

Is Sonoma just pushing this admittedly-minimal Mini to some performance limit?
Click to expand...
Check memory usage in Activity monitor, there you will see how much memory is being used by all processes along with memory swap usage (RAM being extended by using SSD capacity). It's likely viewing the 2nd and 3rd opened image files are using memory swap to SSD now. Your memory bandwidth is way faster on your M2 Pro mini, and even if it was 8GB RAM it would still R/W way faster to SSD compared to that old 2018 intel based Mac mini. :)
 
Mistake in my initial post - the 2018 Mini has 16GB memory also.

According to Activity Monitor there's no swapping going on. In this testing, I pushed it up to four open PDFs and Preview stopped responding, had to force-quit it. AND, all this was working just fine under Ventura.

My guess is this may have something to do with the low-ish amount of space remaining on my internal SSD (33GB), but I'm not sure what it would be. I had to move some large apps off of the main SSD and onto an external SSD (a Samsung T9) just to get Sonoma to install, but I had some apps on the external SSD under Ventura as well (Preview is not one of them).
 
jasnw said:
Mistake in my initial post - the 2018 Mini has 16GB memory also.

According to Activity Monitor there's no swapping going on. In this testing, I pushed it up to four open PDFs and Preview stopped responding, had to force-quit it. AND, all this was working just fine under Ventura.

My guess is this may have something to do with the low-ish amount of space remaining on my internal SSD (33GB), but I'm not sure what it would be. I had to move some large apps off of the main SSD and onto an external SSD (a Samsung T9) just to get Sonoma to install, but I had some apps on the external SSD under Ventura as well (Preview is not one of them).
Click to expand...
Related topics for you to look though for preview on Intel Macs
This points out the PDF can be very ram intensive, and suspecting SSD running out of space might be a good suspect. Your built in Intels graphics consumes storage/RAM because it uses RAM as VRAM.

preview, insane RAM usage - Apple Community

discussions.apple.com discussions.apple.com
Have you substituted another app that can read PDF's to compare?
 
Followed the lead of the empty "Open Recent" list I discovered that Preview evidently doesn't have a plist file in Preferences (I couldn't find one, anyway), but did have some files in ~/Library/Saved Application State. I manually deleted everything in the com.apple.Preview.savedState folder and things appear to be working correctly again. I hope that does clear it up.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Realityck
jasnw said:
Spoke too soon, and other apps are having odd trouble (Photos, for one). I'm now suspecting that Sonoma just can't run on a 128 GB SSD.
Click to expand...
Shame but likely. Well it's not going to cost you a lot to replace it with a newer mini dependent on how new you want. get one with 512GB storage this time maybe. :)
 
It's not a Intel only problem, Preview is just as bad at rendering PDFs on Apple Silicon too.
For the same ~50MB document opened in full screen, Preview uses five times more RAM than Foxit PDF Reader.

Preview.jpg
 
  • Like
Reactions: Realityck
Not so sure disk size is the problem. I moved some files to external storage, mucked out some cruft in ~/Library, and got rid of all APFS snapshots, and now have 55GB free space, nearly 50% of the size of the drive. Preview behavior is the same, and other apps are also miss-behaving now. Sounds like either (a) a bad Sonoma install or (b) a dying Mini. When I find some time I may try doing a fresh install over the current one. I can't do a clean install (a company IT person has to do that), so I'm not optimistic this will work.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back