Long delay launching/opening search results [general macOS help]

[maxp]

I'm not sure if this is Alfred-caused, but it definitely affects it. I'm using Alfred 4.6.1 [1274] on Big Sur 11.6.1 on a 2017 iMac.

 

Inter-application events (launching apps, opening folders, opening an url from Mail or Terminal) are either dropped or greatly delayed (90+ seconds), both in Alfred and generally. Opening a file from within the app (File > Open) works fine. It's somewhat intermittent. Rebooting doesn't fix it.

 

Any suggestions?

[vitor]

32 minutes ago, maxp said:

both in Alfred and generally.

 

Then it is not caused by Alfred. What Alfred does in the situations you described is essentially tell macOS “hey, open this” and then it’s out of its hands. In other words, if launching things is slow in general they will also be slow to launch via Alfred because it’s the same mechanism.

 

What other tools do you have running in the background (e.g. BetterTouchTool)?

 

Have you tried creating a new user account and see if the slowness is there? If it is, the issue will be either with your macOS installation or the physical machine. But if the new user account behaves correctly, you’ll know the cause is something specific in your setup. Then you just start disabling things until it no longer happens (meaning you found the cause).

[maxp]

It doesn't seem to happen with a test account, though it's hard to say for sure since it's intermittent. I have tried disabling various things without any success yet. Sort of hoping this symptom would ring a bell with someone.

 

I'm not using BetterTouchTool but I do have a variety of things installed: Adobe Creative Suite seems to install a bunch of resident stuff, Little Snitch, iStat Menus, Magnet, Smoove, Yoink, Pastebot, Timing. I've tried eliminating the ones that are easy to quit (ie, not Little Snitch), but I'll keep at it. I found some remnants of Karabiner Elements installed and uninstalled that but no luck.

 

Thanks.

[deanishe]

What does Console.app say when a script is hanging?

[vitor]

10 hours ago, maxp said:

I've tried eliminating the ones that are easy to quit (ie, not Little Snitch)

Last year there was a global macOS app launch slowness caused by trouble accessing the notarization servers, so any app that can mess with network requests is what I’d check first.

 

It being intermittent could be explained by the times it does the network check or not. It would also explain why a reboot doesn’t fix it but a new user account does.

[maxp]

6 hours ago, vitor said:

Last year there was a global macOS app launch slowness caused by trouble accessing the notarization servers, so any app that can mess with network requests is what I’d check first.

 

It being intermittent could be explained by the times it does the network check or not. It would also explain why a reboot doesn’t fix it but a new user account does.

 

I bet you're right. I'm not declaring victory just yet, but uninstalling Little Snitch seems to have fixed it. It may have been blocking those requests.

 

I see from LS's change log that there was an automatic update on 11/17, which sounds about right. It did get progressively worse but that's about when I first started noticing it.

 

Thanks.

 

 

Edited December 9, 2021 by maxp

[deanishe]

6 minutes ago, maxp said:

It may have been blocking those requests.

Hmmm. That shouldn't actually cause the problem. If macOS can't contact the server to check the hash, it just lets the app run. (Blocking with Little Snich was one of the first suggested solutions for this stupid system.)

 

Then again, my info is Catalina vintage. It's possible they've made it even more stupid since then. 

[vitor]

1 hour ago, deanishe said:

If macOS can't contact the server to check the hash, it just lets the app run.

 

I’m thinking something like (from the linked article):

 

Quote

When an Apple device can't connect to the network but you want to launch an app anyway, the notarization validation is supposed to "soft fail"—that is, your Apple device is supposed to recognize you're not online and allow the app to launch anyway. However, due to the nature of whatever happened today, calls to the server appeared to simply hang instead of soft-failing. This is possibly because everyone's device could still do a DNS lookup on ocsp.apple.com without any problems, leading the devices to believe that if they could do a DNS lookup, they should be able to connect to the OCSP service. So they tried—and timed out.

 

Maybe Little Snitch isn’t outright blocking it, but leaving it “on hold” (like when asking you to approve or deny).

 

2 hours ago, deanishe said:

Then again, my info is Catalina vintage. It's possible they've made it even more stupid since then. 

 

I think they have changed it, but I haven’t checked what’s the new behaviour.

[deanishe]

16 minutes ago, vitor said:

Maybe Little Snitch isn’t outright blocking it, but leaving it “on hold” (like when asking you to approve or deny)

Nah, it blocks it (or at least does on Catalina). Immediate failure. 
 

The DNS explanation sounds more likely. Adding the hostnames to /etc/hosts is a common way of blocking it. That's incredibly annoying if Apple broke DNS blackholing instead of fixing the damn service.

 

Personally, I'm so annoyed by what they've done. I bought a top-of-the-line iMac last year, and the damn thing launches apps more slowly than the 2008 Mac Pro it replaced thanks to this bollocks security theatre.