Finder really freaking sucks.

I was doing my usual development and I have always felt like my computer is really slow. I’ve always blamed it on my development work-flow. I have a pretty intense set-up that I tab between very quickly. I have a few browsers open up at a time, with several tabs within each, and then I have Ruby running with a few processes including a server, and Compass compiling CSS stylesheets.

Because of my work-flow, I’ve always thought that the slow-down on my computer was because of all the development. I never really noticed a slow-down outside of it.

Anyway, today I started to get fed up. I had to wait 10+ seconds to refresh a page and get the CSS to compile from Compass and SASS. Then I had to wait another few seconds for Firefox to respond and render the request. Ugh, sluggish mess of hell! At this point I’m really frustrated so I started to investigate.

I loaded up Activity Monitor and noticed that Finder was at 60% usage most of the time. I thought to myself, “Meh”, it’s probably just some resource management thing that OS X does that tries to optimize where the CPU is going; it also could have been spotlight reindexing the hard drive.

Spotlight wasn’t reindexing my hard-drive, and I started to think my theory of the CPU utilization was bullshit. So I started tinkering around with Finder settings….

HOLY MOLY FINDER SUCKS AND MY COMPUTER IS FAST AGAIN!

I unchecked “show item info” and clicked “use as default.”

Queue the sound of absolute harmony… my computer already felt different the sudden I clicked that. It was almost as if I jumped from 5 FPS (game terminology) to 120 fps+.

Lo' and behold' my CPU usage in Activity Monitor was <1% for Finder on average now.

Finder sucks.

Finder really sucks and can eat up a TON of your CPU usage if you have the show item preview on. I don’t know if it’s a bug, or just a side-affect of the feature but due to the MASSIVE decrease in performance it seems like a bug.

Apple needs to do something about this.

edit: Forgot to point out. It’s not “Finder Preferences”, you can get to the settings by right clicking inside a finder window (in icon mode) and then click “Show View Options.”