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OS X Yosemite: Severe Performance Issues with File Open Dialog

I am experiencing severe sluggishness in using the File Open or Save dialogs:

4-5 second of
excessive CPU usage
  • 3-5 second delay in getting to point of being able to use the dialog.
  • Occurs with images or HTML files.
  • Occurs in icon view or list view, but not multi-level list view.
  • Scrolling and sorting by column invoke similar delays.
  • Drawing glitches (see below): blank-out, errant controls drawn in list areas, blank-out, list finally drawn.
  • Sorting by columns shows no indication of which column is chosen, and clicking on a column has the same 1-3 second delay in drawing the result.
  • Speed is a problem in list view or icon view. In icon view one can watch the generic icons draw (they don’t just appear in an instant as they shoudl), as if the system were reading each and every file.
  • Persists after logging out or rebooting.
  • This is on the fastest Mac Pro available today (3.3 GHz 8-core, 64GB, 1TB SSD, D700 GPUs).
  • Transparency turned off.

This more than anything is a really severe problem with OS X Yosemite; I use this dialog hundreds of times a day. Something is badly broken here.

It looks like Spotlight is involved, because every time I click on a folder, I see CPU usage in the 'mds' and 'mds_stores' processes spike. And with no disk I/O (probably all cached), so it looks to be a pure algorithmic bug in OS X Yosemite with no caching and with no regard for responsiveness to the user.

MPG suspects the performance issues run deeper, and are possibly associated with GPU usage, meaning many, many new bugs.

Typical File Open dialog glitch in OS X Yosemite
(happens twice in succession while drawing)

Matej P writes:

MPG can’t speak to all of this but can summarize simply as “professionals should proceed cautiously to Yosemite”.

I have a 6-core, 32GB RAM with dual D500’s and 512GB SSD and after upgrading to Yosemite I have noticed a big “lag” in graphical performance.
I tried stuff in multiple applications I work with:

• Photoshop CC 2014.2 - more than 1 second of “lag” when I do strokes with my pen (intuos drawing tablet), which makes photoshop pretty useless now. I tried disabling GPU assistance and openGL in photoshop, but nothing helps, it seems this low graphic performance is system tied.
• Autodesk sketchbook pro, this one is actually the only application that works fine (strange isn’t it?)
Maya 2014 - low FPS while having loaded a model with around 2000 polygons or more. Can’t work with that too :(
• Unity - same as maya, load up a level and there is like 10-35FPS.
• I also tried World of warcraft (yeah I also play some games time to time on my mac even if it isn’t made for that) - I have enabled vertical sync on 60Hz, if I don’t do anything in game (not even move), FPS is around 60, but when I move camera or character FPS drops, sometimes even down to 15FPS.

Programs mentioned here works perfectly normal in windows 8.1 64-bit under bootcamp.

I also tried doing CineBench test and here are the results:

OS X: openGL: under 70FPS, CPU: around 940 score
windows 8.1 64-bit: openGL: over 100FPS, CPU: around 930 score

It seems like we got a drop of more than 25% performance on graphics compared to windows (openGL) even though windows do not natively run openGL applications or commands so there is little overhead there.

And even more findings: after reading some things around I opened “openGL driver monitor” application that is a part of xCode developer suite and checked out what are my two GPU’s doing in OS X yosemite.

Well computing GPU has 0bytes free VRAM, while rendering GPU is jumping from 4MB - 2GB free VRAM while not doing anything graphical intensive on computer (safari, mail,…). Sometimes I start up computer and there is almost no free VRAM without any application being open at all!

There must be some bugs with GPU’s in yosemite, I tried a lot of things to fix this: -clear PRAM and reset SMC -verify and fix permissions -verify disk

Nothing helped so far. There is even one more interesting thing: when I try to start OS X Yosemite in safe mode I only get black screen with mouse cursor and nothing more, while in normal boot system boots up normally.

Sorry for long mail and bad English -> not my native language :)

Please when you get new iMac 5K test out graphics performance as I’m really considering switching my mac pro for new iMac because I can’t stand this low GPU performance any more, and Apple does nothing to fix anything and it seems like I wasted a lot of money on this computer for nothing.

MPG: MPG doubts that an iMac GPU will solve anything. The issues look to be horrific new bugs introduced by Apple.

As for GPU performance, it has long been the case that Windows runs faster than OS X; that is not new. It is the sluggish response time in stuff that used to work that is the issue.

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