Is anybody else experiencing a lot of spinning beachballs while using Dorico? I get them a lot. It’s not enough to stop my progress, but it certainly affects efficiency quite a bit.
I am on a 2023 Mac Studio with an M2 Max chip and 64 GB of memory. 8 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores. Tahoe 26.5.2. I’ve got more than enough computational power.
I’m keeping Activity Monitor open while I work but I need to rearrange things on my second monitor so it is always visible. When I have caught it during a spinning beachball, Dorico is the top CPU user at something above 200% with nothing else at a notable level. Note that one core’s worth of usage is 100%.
It can be disrupting when I click on something or hit a key and nothing happens so I click again, then see the beachball and just have to wait for both clicks to take effect, the second click being something I really don’t want, like hitting the space bar to stop playback only to find that second click starts playback again.
The project is fairly large with 32 flows coming to about two and a quarter hours of music.
Hi @Gregg_Butterfield, possibly the Auto Save causes the spinning ball. For bigger Projects, the autosave can take some moments: what is the autosave interval you set in Preferences>Files? You can try to temporarily deactivate Auto Save and see if the spinning ball behaviour changes. You can then decide which interval to set that preference, to balance security with efficiency.
Autosave was set to 5 minutes. I’m getting beachballs way more often than that, but maybe the save takes some time. I set it to 15 to see if it helps.
Thanks.
Hi!
Since I have had this recently, but not only with Dorico, and my configuration is similar to yours, could you please go to this folder, press Cmd-I, and report on its size?
~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight (that’s in your user library; open a Finder window, press Cmd-Shift-G and paste this exact path in there).
There have been wide reports in the last 2 years about this folder growing to an insane size and causing the whole system to almost grind to a halt.
Yes, I had this problem in spades last year when I was working with Final Cut Pro and Previs Pro. If Corespotlight is the problem it usually shows up in the Activity Monitor. I’m a big Apple fan but this problem is really unforgivable. It something that should have been fixed in Tahoe, but I have read reports that it got even worse. But lately I have not seen the sort of activity in the Activity Monitor that I was seeing when I had the Corespotlight problem last year. Still, it doesn’t hurt to delete the data cache and let it rebuild every now and then. Another thing that can help is to boot into recover mode, open Disk Utility and do disk repair on all of the volumes. But I have done that fairly recently.
Another possibility might be Time Machine backups. I haven’t found a way to restrict them to night time only.
The reason I’m focusing on Dorico is that it is generally at the top of the CPU usage list, by a large margin, when I get the spinning beachballs. VSTAudioEngine can also get high on the CPU usage list at times, but not as high as Dorico.
I did check on my CoreSpotlight size and it was a little large. I deleted the folder and it did reduce the spinning beachballs, but they are starting to recur already.
Also, a side effect seems to be that search in Mail for people’s names doesn’t work correctly and search in Messages for threads doesn’t work. Force quitting Mail and restarting it seemed to mostly fix it, but it didn’t work for Messages.
It is odd that Activity Monitor was not showing significant CoreSpotlight activity.
Things seem to have improved after updates to Pages (15.3) and now macOS 26.6 where (breaking news!) Apple directly announced an improvement to CoreSpotlight in the update’s description in System Settings. It must have been bad enough.
After updating to 26.6, my CoreSpotlight folder went down from 26GB to … 5GB!
I have also read about Pages contributing to the problem. Since that’s what I have my libretto in I do have it open quite a bit while I’m working in Dorico.
I really hope that they have made progress with Corespotlight.