What the hell's going on with 10.2 and file search?

mack damonmack damon
Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
When I Pretzel-F from the finder and type in a very descriptive file name, "Rhapsody Street Letterhead". It takes YEARS. I've never made it all the way through a find file, after 18,200 items I get impatient and click out of it. Seriously, what the hell's wrong? I'm assuming it's me, because even Apple couldn't make something this painful.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 7
    chuckerchucker Posts: 5,089member
    Did you do a clean install? I did, and search is lightning fast on my disk - compared to the "yawn" search on Windows XP.
  • Reply 2 of 7
    code mastercode master Posts: 344member
    18000 items with Rhapsody Street Letterhead? Sounds like something is seriously wrong.. I doubt this would count for all of it, but check how many languages you are indexing in under Finder->Preferences
  • Reply 3 of 7
    torifiletorifile Posts: 4,024member
    [quote]Originally posted by Mack Damon:

    <strong>When I Pretzel-F from the finder and type in a very descriptive file name, "Rhapsody Street Letterhead". It takes YEARS. I've never made it all the way through a find file, after 18,200 items I get impatient and click out of it. Seriously, what the hell's wrong? I'm assuming it's me, because even Apple couldn't make something this painful.</strong><hr></blockquote>



    Are you searching your entire HD? That's unnecessary. Have it search your home folder (or other specific areas) and you'll have much better results. There are thousands of files in your system that you don't need to search. Are you doing a find by content as well? That takes even longer.
  • Reply 4 of 7
    ghost_user_nameghost_user_name Posts: 22,667member
    [quote]Originally posted by torifile:

    <strong>Are you searching your entire HD? That's unnecessary.</strong><hr></blockquote>Surely you jest. Why should this matter? If I don't know where a file is, which is exactly why I would use FIND, I'm going to search my whole drive. (edit: I suppose my case is different because I have more than one hard drive. True, not all people would need to search the whole drive.)



    I think you guys may be mis-reading Mack's post. He says that when he uses "a very descriptive file name" that it takes a painfully long time to search. That implies that simpler searches, like a search for just "Rhapsody", finish much faster.



    That said, it should be noted that more complex searches simply take longer to filter. As you add more parameters to check, the number of comparisons the code has to make increases greatly. Though, I'm not sure if that's what the problem here is or not. Most searches I do finish fairly quickly and I always have mine set to search both of my hard drives.



    [ 09-16-2002: Message edited by: Brad ]</p>
  • Reply 5 of 7
    torifiletorifile Posts: 4,024member
    [quote]Originally posted by Brad:

    <strong>Surely you jest. Why should this matter? If I don't know where a file is, which is exactly why I would use FIND, I'm going to search my whole drive. (edit: I suppose my case is different because I have more than one hard drive. True, not all people would need to search the whole drive.)



    I think you guys may be mis-reading Mack's post. He says that when he uses "a very descriptive file name" that it takes a painfully long time to search. That implies that simpler searches, like a search for just "Rhapsody", finish much faster.



    That said, it should be noted that more complex searches simply take longer to filter. As you add more parameters to check, the number of comparisons the code has to make increases greatly. Though, I'm not sure if that's what the problem here is or not. Most searches I do finish fairly quickly and I always have mine set to search both of my hard drives.



    [ 09-16-2002: Message edited by: Brad ]</strong><hr></blockquote>



    I was talking about needing to search the root of the drive (/System and /Library, not usual candidates for random files). But, I think that the problem is he was probably searching for particular content. That's the only time I've seen such slow search results.
  • Reply 6 of 7
    mack damonmack damon Posts: 65member
    I have 4 drives in my computer, (1) 40, (1) 45, (2) 60. I don't know where crap is. I've been an OS9 user til last month, so I have a folder system I use to organize stuff. I don't use home---documents for files that were pre-jag. The longer name should narrow the search faster, IMHO. Just like in OS9. If I do a search in 9 for "cat" It returns "category", "scat", and a ton of other cat derivatives. If I do a search of "cat pic", then I only return one or two entries, one of which is what I need. The point to my original example is that I know the EXACT file name, and after 42 minutes, my OS still couldn't find it. I had to go and look myself where I thought it could be and found it 15 minutes later. 1 hour to find a file seems like a pain in the ass. No thank you, Apple. I was not using FBC. I was searching file names. In the window, stuff that was NO WAY even close to my search of "Rhapsody Letterhead" was appearing in the find window. Like "Adobe Registration Utility" for example. WHAT?!?!? How does find file get one from the other? That's crazy. Jaguar came installed on this machine. Other than my OS9 apps I launch from my other drives, I have installed almost NO new OSX software, save: Office v.X, Wacom X tablet driver, Mozilla.

    I am so frustrated. Any suggestions?
  • Reply 7 of 7
    mack damonmack damon Posts: 65member
    BUMP
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