Long Delay - Spinning Beach Ball when changing switching from other Apps. OSX

[Paul T]

Hi - I'm a new user, having just bought the program. It works great once it's running - however, it has severe delays when switching in and out of other applications, like Mail, Safari etc. delays of 30 seconds and quite often longer. Seems odd. Once running i.e. in the program and the beach ball has gone, it's as smooth as silk changing between images etc. but go out of the program and back in - there is always a huge delay.

Mac is a late 2015 5k Retina iMac 27" 4Ghz i7, 24Gb memory, Radeon R9 M395 2048Mb running OX10.11.5

Would love to be able to switch back and forth without the delay - as I often need to go into emails and things when editing. Anything I can check or adjust? I've already upped the size of many of the cache's in the prefs file, but maybe they could go even bigger? I notice from a quick search that others have had this issue - but I've not read of a solution to it, so any help would be appreciated.

[Kirk Baker]

Hi - I'm a new user, having just bought the program. It works great once it's running - however, it has severe delays when switching in and out of other applications, like Mail, Safari etc. delays of 30 seconds and quite often longer. Seems odd. Once running i.e. in the program and the beach ball has gone, it's as smooth as silk changing between images etc. but go out of the program and back in - there is always a huge delay.

Mac is a late 2015 5k Retina iMac 27" 4Ghz i7, 24Gb memory, Radeon R9 M395 2048Mb running OX10.11.5

Would love to be able to switch back and forth without the delay - as I often need to go into emails and things when editing. Anything I can check or adjust? I've already upped the size of many of the cache's in the prefs file, but maybe they could go even bigger? I notice from a quick search that others have had this issue - but I've not read of a solution to it, so any help would be appreciated.

Do the "spinning beach balls" only happen when switching into Photo Mechanic, or do they happen when switching out of  Photo Mechanic?  (Or both?)

When you switch back into Photo Mechanic, it responds by rescanning all of the folders you're currently browsing for changes made to any of the items in those folders.  If there are a lot of images in the folder(s) you're browsing this can take some time.  It will be especially slow on networked volumes because they are very slow to give back information about directories.

-Kirk

[Paul T]

HI Kirk

Spinning Beach Ball only seems to happen when switching into the App (PM). Not out.

I normally am only going into one gallery of images, containing approx. 3000-4000 images.

Thing is, the delay happens even when the images have already loaded on the screen and I then dip in and out of the program.

Images are stored on an external USB3 raid. CRU ToughTech 3SR. Which has two 1Tb drives inside (good old spin type). Perhaps, that is the reason for the delay? Maybe upgrading those to SSD's might speed it up? Is that the case?

Haven't upgraded them before, as I mostly work in LR and used to cull in LR and the drive speed for that makes no difference, as the catalogue is on a flash blade inside the iMac. For PM though, it's obviously having to look at the files themselves, so perhaps this is causing the delay? Although I'm still surprised that it has to rescan (is that what your'e saying?) the whole folder, when simply switching in and out of the app. One would have thought that it could sit there happily once it has done the scan and not have to rescan each time (if that's what it's doing).

[Kirk Baker]

Paul,

Spinning Beach Ball only seems to happen when switching into the App (PM). Not out.

I normally am only going into one gallery of images, containing approx. 3000-4000 images.

Thing is, the delay happens even when the images have already loaded on the screen and I then dip in and out of the program.

Images are stored on an external USB3 raid. CRU ToughTech 3SR. Which has two 1Tb drives inside (good old spin type). Perhaps, that is the reason for the delay? Maybe upgrading those to SSD's might speed it up? Is that the case?

Haven't upgraded them before, as I mostly work in LR and used to cull in LR and the drive speed for that makes no difference, as the catalogue is on a flash blade inside the iMac. For PM though, it's obviously having to look at the files themselves, so perhaps this is causing the delay? Although I'm still surprised that it has to rescan (is that what your'e saying?) the whole folder, when simply switching in and out of the app. One would have thought that it could sit there happily once it has done the scan and not have to rescan each time (if that's what it's doing).

If PM didn't rescan the folder(s) you're browsing then if you made a bunch of changes (copying files into that directory, producing JPEGs from RAW files, deleting files, renaming files, etc.) then PM wouldn't see those changes when you resume it.

-Kirk