Josh Centers 26 March 2018 26 comments

Freezing Finder? Dropbox and Overstuffed Folders May Be the Culprit

For the last few months, my iMac had been getting slower and slower. Specifically, I was seeing the dreaded beachballs of death far more often than I care to, and the Finder was freezing regularly, forcing me to relaunch it multiple times per day. (If you ever need to do this, hold down Option, click and hold the Finder icon in the Dock, and choose Relaunch. For more Dock tricks, see “macOS Hidden Treasures: Dominate the Dock,” 6 March 2017.)

I first tried all the usual fixes, like deleting all the Finder plist files in ~/Library/Preferences/ and running First Aid in Disk Utility. On a hunch that Dropbox was somehow involved, I had even tried revoking its Accessibility access, and although that seemed to help for a while, the frequent beachballs returned. The main thing I had left to try was a clean install, but since I had done one of those when I installed macOS 10.12 Sierra, doing another so soon seemed excessive.

I kept looking for a solution that didn’t involve repaving my iMac, and after some spelunking through the Internet, I found that turning off Dropbox’s Finder integration fixed the problem. Here’s how you do that:

1. Click the Dropbox icon in the menu bar.
2. Click the gear icon in the upper-right corner and choose Preferences.
3. Uncheck “Enable Finder integration.”

The downside to disabling Dropbox’s Finder integration is that doing so eliminates the sync icons in the Finder for files and folders synced with Dropbox, along with the special Dropbox options in the Finder’s contextual menu. I wasn’t thrilled about losing those capabilities, so I kept searching.

Eventually, I found some hints that a folder containing a very large number of files could cause Dropbox, and thus the Finder, to choke. It doesn’t make sense that this could be true of folders outside the Dropbox folder, but after I cleaned much of the junk out of my Downloads folder — it had over 1500 items in it and consumed over 26 GB — I was able to re-enable Dropbox’s Finder integration without bringing back the beachballs or freezes.

However, I have some folders that are legitimately large and not just full of junk. After re-enabling Dropbox’s Finder integration, a week of solid performance was ended when the Finder choked while browsing one of these folders, which has some 8800 items in it. I turned off Finder integration again and relaunched the Finder, and I haven’t seen any problems in a week since. I hope the solution sticks this time.

So if you’re suffering from Finder problems along these lines, it’s worth toggling Dropbox’s Finder integration and taking a few minutes to clean out unnecessarily overstuffed folders. You probably have an idea of which folders contain vast numbers of files, but if not, DaisyDisk is a handy tool to find them. For free options, you could turn to OmniDiskSweeper or the open-source GrandPerspective.

If you’ve experienced similar performance issues while using Dropbox, let me know in the comments. I don’t know if the problem lies with the Dropbox app, with the Finder, or with some combination of the two in particular circumstances, but I’d like to try to help the relevant engineers get to the bottom of it.

Comments About Freezing Finder? Dropbox and Overstuffed Folders May Be the Culprit

Notable Replies

Patrick Demaret

4 April 2018

Hi Josh,

I had observed a phenomenon similar to yours : I had the Finder freezing from time to time, and sometimes I had to wait for 10 minutes to get back control (sometimes I had to restart the Mac). In all these cases, fans were at the maximum speed during the hang-up ;-).
I had the Downloads folder full of files as well : 26 thousand items for 21 Gb !
So I turned off the DropBox Finder integration two days ago and, presto, no more hang.
I’ll wait for another week before updating this post with a final result.
Thank you very much !

Patrick.
Josh Centers

4 April 2018

I’m glad the article helped someone!
Patrick Demaret

13 April 2018

Update as promised : all hangs I experienced for more than 6 months are gone !
Thanks a lot !
ConPhoto

27 November 2018

Dropbox does have it limitations. Dropbox tends to cough and splutter at folder with +7,000 items in them. And if your overall Dropbox is +500,000 items it can be a little shaky

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Participants

Charles
26 March 2018

Random freezes have been driving me crazy for months. I had a theory it was because my internal RAM was almost the size of my Fusion Drive's SSD, causing VM churning. No way to tell.
Most Mac users will be familiar with Finder freezes when sleeping disks wake, this is particularly frustrating when contextual menus freeze when looking for other apps to open a file (even if you don't use that option, it scans drives anyway). So I try to keep external drives dismounted unless necessary. This seems to have reduced some freezes, but not all. So I will clean out my Dropbox and see if this helps. I suspect there may be an iCloud Drive issue too.
Peter U
26 March 2018

I had a similar problem with Google Drive on Mavericks a few months ago (before I upgraded to High Sierra): Finder windows would open in slow motion with tracks all over the screen. It turned out Google Drive was the culprit, so I stopped using it (havent' tried since High Sierra, maybe it works now).
- Adam Engst
  27 March 2018
  
  There's a new Google Backup and Sync app now that replaces Google Drive, so it might be worth trying again. Or it may be related to something that was in your Google Drive folder and gumming up the works — I've seen that sort of thing in the past too.
Bill
26 March 2018

One measure that is not mentioned in your article, Josh, is to "free up" memory. I haven't had the Finder freeze problem, but my Mac Mini does slow down dreadfully on occasion. I've found that memory is usually close to full when this happens and freeing it up solves the problem. One app or other is not cleaning up after itself properly. I use Clean My Mac for this, but I'm sure there are other apps as well, maybe even free, which CMM is most definitely not. Perhaps this would help those who have found your Dropbox solution doesn't help.
- Rick
  26 March 2018
  
  One alternative is Memory Clean from FipLab, available from the Mac App Store.
- joestoner
  27 March 2018
  
  I've seen the "rotating pizza of Doom" so much recently it reminded me of the early days of MacOSX! I've been using Memory Keeper which has shown my 16GB of memory being reduced to double digits of MB! I used to use Chrome but it's DREADFULLY inefficient with memory usage: over a dozen "Helpers" running way more than the number of Tabs running! So I've changed to Firefox which is more efficient but still the same "vanishing memory syndrome" till I stopped leaving a Tab open to SpeedTest.net now I can even have PhotoShop running and STILL have nearly a quarter of my memory available!!! I've downloaded Memory Cleaner which only agrees with Memory Keeper after I Optimize!! Memory management is still smoke and mirrors it's not a science and Google don't care about Chrome's pathetic performance! I suspect that they are not alone:((
  - B. Jefferson Le Blanc
    28 March 2018
    
    You'll find that Safari uses a plethora of helper apps to manage individual web pages. This has the theoretical advantage of allowing Safari to manage pages separately, but can still hog a lot of RAM. So a single web page can no longer bring the whole thing crashing down—mostly. I used to use Chrome as a secondary browser, running naked without security plug-ins because some web sites would't work with Safari armored up. But I have reverted to Firefox, which has seen some important improvements recently and runs blindingly fast. Of course I don't have as many windows and tabs open as I do with Safari, so this may make a difference. But Safari has seen a lot of improvements recently so it's more fun to use now as well. Most importantly, to me, you can turn off auto running for embeded videos, which helps a lot on Macworld.com. And you can set text size for individual web sites. You can also micro-manage passwords. Since most web browsers can synchronize bookmarks and other preferneces from other browsers now, you can easily use more than one, say one for security and one for speed.
Rick
26 March 2018

I must confess I wasn't aware that Finder integration was a thing, nor that I had it turned on. It seems to me at first glance that losing it is no big deal, but in time maybe I'll find it inconvenient.
Mike P
27 March 2018

I've been having a similar problem, too. It happens whenever I open the first file after opening a new app or then use a new menu item (like Format in Excel). I tried the Dropbox remedy, but that didn't change anything.

I do know that some folders are stuffed, because they are filled with photos filed in hierarchical folders:

Pictures/Digital Camera/Year/Month/Date (back to 2008!)

And Pictures has more in than just the Digital Camera folder.

Do you have suggestions how to store these differently so they're not so stuffed? Should they be off my hard drive altogether?
- Adam Engst
  27 March 2018
  
  That feels like a font problem, since new apps might have to build a font menu cache, and the Format menu might have to do something similar.
  
  I see no reason this would be connected to folder contents, since you're not doing anything related to folders when you see the problem.
  
  Also, hierarchical folders aren't an issue (that's how the Photos library works under the hood), just folders with a flat list of thousands of files.
  - Mike P
    27 March 2018
    
    Saying "new app" wasn't that clear.
    
    What I meant was: first opening an app in a given session on the computer, not when it's new—as in the first time used after being downloaded.
    
    For example, whenever I open an existing Excel or Word file, it takes 20-25 seconds for the actual file to open, with the beach ball going, though the app menu appears immediately across the top of the screen. Then if I want to format a cell in Excel, it takes another 15 or so seconds for the format menu box to appear. FilemakerPro does the same thing.
    
    But once these things have been done once, everything works normally thereafter, unless I quit the app and then open it. Then the same things repeat.
    
    It's like it has a hard time loading things into RAM. I have 8GB on the iMac.
    - B. Jefferson Le Blanc
      28 March 2018
      
      This is still probably a font problem, probably a corrupt font cache. You can use a repair solution like Cocktail (a paid product) or a free app like Maintenance to clear font caches.
      
      As for start times, after you've launched an app the first time in a work session, subsequent launches will go faster because OS X caches the necessary launch files and thus can access them more quickly. This is a separate issue from your font problem. It used to be, back in the day, that having a lot of activated fonts could slow down app launch times, but with modern computers, fast CPUs and Ample RAM have mostly eliminated this problem. That's not to say that a huge font list won't impact apps a little, but it's not near the problem it used to be. Having a healthy font cache is probably the reason it no longer matters much.
    - Adam Engst
      28 March 2018
      
      You can check memory pressure in Activity Monitor — well worth doing — and then see which apps are using a lot of memory.
Eric Roller
27 March 2018

I haven’t deleted anything from my Downloads and Trash folders for many years ... because I have installed TrashLater which does it for me. TrashLater is highly configurable and runs as a launchd daemon (read: it is not an application that runs continuously in the background). However, it is a Darwin tool that lacks a neat installer and requires UNIX skills to set it up.
- Adam Engst
  27 March 2018
  
  Since Sierra, macOS can automatically remove items left in the Trash for 30 days. Look in Finder > Preferences > Advanced...
Jerry
27 March 2018

I would recommend turning off preview of icons in Finder (cmd+j for window view settings) - that I know could be problematic and had one folder left open with 700 photos in that eventually made me have to force restart Finder, but I do not really have more items than that myself, so keep it on.
David Byrum
27 March 2018

Hello,
You say "Eventually, I found some hints that a folder containing a very large number of files could cause Dropbox, and thus the Finder, to choke." but it is not clear to me where this folder is located.

Is this any folder that is only my Mac? Or is it a folder on my Mac that is linked with DropBox? Or is it a folder that resides only in DropBox?

Thanks for the clarification.
Jeff Hecht
27 March 2018

I've been seeing something similar, usually when I wake up my 2010 MacMini, which runs off an external Firewire drive, but sometimes at other times. The machine is so busy I can't even open Activity Monitor to see what's keeping it busy. I had thought this might be because I'm running on a spinning hard disk, but I do have some folders with lots of files, as well as a Dropbox account. FWIW, preview of icons is off.
James Reynolds
27 March 2018

I wish Box Sync had something like this. It is constantly scanning, even when I don't change anything in my Box folder, and if TimeMachine is running at the same time my Mac because practically unusable. It is the top resource user on my Mac. I've contacted the company but they seem to not care. It literally has one setting: on or off. I would dump Box so fast but my employer has a contact with them and I have to use it.
Kate Derie
27 March 2018

If you are looking for folders that contain many files without subfolders, you can set up a smart folder with Kind is Folder. Then add a criterion for Other… and find "Number of Items." Set it to "is greater than" whatever number of files you feel is an appropriate maximum. I used 1000 and found mostly email message folders and media folders set up by various applications. I saved this smart folder to check on from time to time.
B. Jefferson Le Blanc
28 March 2018

I really like Daisy Disk. The biggest problem I've found is the SleepImage file which laptops use for fast restart and recovery. But it's mostly useless, other than to take up a lot of space on a small hard drive. I use the script, sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0, in terminal to disable it and then Daisy Disk to remove it.

As for all those files, I expect that shoving them into subfolders would eliminate most of the stress on the Finder. Not organizing your stuff is always a problem in one way or another. ;-)
Daniel TidBits Kegan
28 March 2018

8800 items in a single folder. Might help to find a logical way to have subfolders, each maxed at 500-1000 items.