3 ms·

I get a beach ball All-the-time with Messages lasting 5-10 seconds. I struggle to imagine that anything it’s doing is that computationally intensive.

Angostura 7y ago
I suspect this might be a problem with your installation - if you create a new MacOS user account for testing, does the problem persist? I don't recall Messages every beach-balling for me and I'm not exactly on new hardware.
- oarsinsync 7y ago
  Tangentially, this appears to be the general (and usually, only) troubleshooting step you can do with Apple products. Yes, creating a new user resolves the problem. Yes, resetting my device to factory settings without restoring from backup resolves the problem. How do I resolve the problem without deleting my entire history?
  - Angostura 7y ago
    So if you have problem that goes away with another user, the problem commonly lies in a corrupted preference related to the app, so you start hunting out the .plists for the application and moving them to the desktop before relaunching and seeing if the problem is fixed. If not, then you start poking about in Application Support for the app.
    - oarsinsync 7y ago
      After 9 years of Apple use, I have successfully made this method work one time (iMessages), and even then, it took a full system reboot after each file move to validate whether or not that had made a difference. The whole process took the better part of a day. It was long, it was tedious, but at least I got there in the end. There was no paid-support story that would have done this for me, but hey ho, it all worked out. I can't imagine I'll ever have the time to go through that much effort again. The same cant be said for my iMessage history on my iPhone, which has been lost repeatedly as the only solution was "don't restore from your backup".
      - Angostura 7y ago
        Ah - I used to use it fairly frequently in the good old OS X 10.2-10.6 days - for various apps. Seemed to work fairly well.

Angostura 7y ago

I suspect this might be a problem with your installation - if you create a new MacOS user account for testing, does the problem persist? I don't recall Messages every beach-balling for me and I'm not exactly on new hardware.

oarsinsync 7y ago
Tangentially, this appears to be the general (and usually, only) troubleshooting step you can do with Apple products. Yes, creating a new user resolves the problem. Yes, resetting my device to factory settings without restoring from backup resolves the problem. How do I resolve the problem without deleting my entire history?
- Angostura 7y ago
  So if you have problem that goes away with another user, the problem commonly lies in a corrupted preference related to the app, so you start hunting out the .plists for the application and moving them to the desktop before relaunching and seeing if the problem is fixed. If not, then you start poking about in Application Support for the app.
  - oarsinsync 7y ago
    After 9 years of Apple use, I have successfully made this method work one time (iMessages), and even then, it took a full system reboot after each file move to validate whether or not that had made a difference. The whole process took the better part of a day. It was long, it was tedious, but at least I got there in the end. There was no paid-support story that would have done this for me, but hey ho, it all worked out. I can't imagine I'll ever have the time to go through that much effort again. The same cant be said for my iMessage history on my iPhone, which has been lost repeatedly as the only solution was "don't restore from your backup".
    - Angostura 7y ago
      Ah - I used to use it fairly frequently in the good old OS X 10.2-10.6 days - for various apps. Seemed to work fairly well.