Help - Stickies runs unusably slowly on High Sierra...

jdiamondjdiamond
Posted:
in macOS
Hi All.  I have a 2015 15" Macbook Pro and recently updated (in place) from Sierra to High Sierra.
A lot of people discussed having issues reading their old Sticky databases in High Sierra.  I had no problems - I can see all my old stickies.

The problem I have is that stickies runs unusably slow - when you type, it buffers up and outputs about 1 character each second!  I've never had such a problem on any prior version of Stickies, and this doesn't happen on any of my other Mac software.

I did some experimenting - if I create a new sticky, I can type at a normal rate.  But if I cut and paste a large sticky into that window, it's slow again.  The stickies literally slow down based on how much text is in the sticky!  Also weird - the further down in the sticky you edit, the slower it gets!  So if you edit the very top of a sticky, it's not too bad, but if you edit the middle, it's unusably slow again.

Just as some people use Excel for everything, I manage my life with Stickies, and this is a huge problem for me.  It seems like a simple bug Apple could fix, but I doubt anyone has reported it.

Should Apple be unable to fixe stickies, can anyone advise on a good replacement?
Thanks so much,
 - Jeff

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 6
    jdiamondjdiamond Posts: 125member
    Quick update - just to emphasize, it's not just character output that's slow - everything about the app slows to a crawl, for example, scrolling, using menu keys, etc.
    What I'm doing now as a temporary solution is dicing up my sticky notes into multiple smaller stickies so that the performance is usable.  But this makes no sense.  Stickies runs at full rate on my 2010 MBP that's on Sierra...  I can't think of what went wrong.

  • Reply 2 of 6
    jdiamondjdiamond Posts: 125member
    One more piece of information:  My entire stickies database is only around 300KB, so it's not that huge - in fact, it can easily fit on on-chip L3 cache! :) . And the slow down is definitely related to text PER sticky, not total amount of text.  My understanding is the sticky app is built on a single MacOS GUI object, so it's possible that this particular input GUI is slow on all of MacOS at this point but it's only visible in Stickies.
  • Reply 3 of 6
    jdiamondjdiamond Posts: 125member
    On other test I did - I posted my largest stickie into Notes.  Honestly, it looked like Notes was simply going to die and crash, but eventually it stopped beach balling and I could edit the Note and . ....  it's at full speed!  So it looks like Notes does not use the same base input GUI as Stickies and doesn't share the problem.  However, because Notes is not designed to keep a lot of free floating windows around, it's not as good a match for my use case.

    But even if it were, this sounds like a fundamental issue with High Sierra that the Mac OS team should check out.
  • Reply 4 of 6
    jdiamondjdiamond Posts: 125member
    And just noticed - the NOTES app loses all the formatting into (like color) from Stickies.  :(
  • Reply 5 of 6
    jdiamondjdiamond Posts: 125member
    Still testing stuff.  Seems like the slow down is superlinear with sticky size, which you'd expect to reach the point where it's noticeable.  Is there some kind of O(N^2) search going on in Stickies now?
  • Reply 6 of 6
    catimpcatimp Posts: 1member
    FYI, it's not just you. I have the same problem. Guess I'll have to experiment, see if I can speed it up somehow. 
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