3 second delay after invocation before I can type

[TStein]

Recently updated to El Capitan 10.11.2 and Alfred 2.8.2 build 483.

 

Now there is a noticeable delay after invoking Alfred before it will accept characters typed. I'd say about 3 seconds. This only happens after I haven't used Alfred in some time. So, for example, I might wake my Mac from sleep in the morning, invoke Alfred, then notice the delay. After that, there is no delay. However, if I don't use Alfred for a while, then the delay returns.

 

I has an unfounded suspicion that this has to do disk activity, but not sure. Also, this is new behavior since the OS upgrade.

 

Any suggestions?

[Vero]

Any suggestions?

 

 

Do you have any external or network drives in your search scope? If so, I would remove them and create a file filter search for these particular volumes instead.

[jbilsten]

I'm having this same issue. I've followed all the suggestions from http://www.alfredforum.com/topic/1376-alfred-2-laggy-slower-compared-to-v1/page-2but nothing seems to change the consistent lag.

[Vero]

I'm having this same issue. I've followed all the suggestions from http://www.alfredforum.com/topic/1376-alfred-2-laggy-slower-compared-to-v1/page-2but nothing seems to change the consistent lag.

 

 

Hi there,

 

Could you provide some more details so that I can help you further?

 

1. Did you let your Mac's reindex complete? This can take up to an hour, and you need to ensure it returned "Indexing enabled" and successfully started indexing.

 

2. Is your Mac under heavy load from demanding apps running? You can check in Activity Monitor. Is the delay consistent or only in certain circumstances?

 

3. Are you including external drives in your search scope? This can sometimes affect speed, as Alfred is awaiting response from the external drive.

 

Cheers,

Vero

[tornado]

I've been having the same issue for a couple of months now. I've tried to debug this with Andrew and haven't gotten a solution yet. I'm pulling out my hair on this one.

 

Here is a video of it in action with Activity Monitor running in the background (so you can see the processes).

Note I'm hitting the Alfred hotkey and then typing "mail" as soon as it appears. Then I hit the spotlight hotkey and do the same to show you that my machine is not "stuck".

https://vimeo.com/204962821/ebb31925e3

 

What I've done so far which has resulted in no change to the problem:

1. I’ve tried turning the Spotlight Metadata on and off - seems like no change.
2. I’ve tried turning off contact searching altogether (since then I've turned it back on).
3. I've sampled the processes and sent in for analysis. I can provide another copy of this if you'd like it.

ANY advice on this would be appreciated. Thanks!

 

 

[Andrew]

Have you tried fully resetting Alfred and running it as if it were a fresh install? This could possibly be caused with some corruption somewhere.

 

Here are the instructions for resetting Alfred 3:

https://www.alfredapp.com/help/troubleshooting/reset-alfred/

 

(You can back those folders up before resetting).

 

@tornado in your case, the sample you sent back in December points to your issue being a metadata related issue, and macOS is halting Alfred during attempting to set the query search scope. This call should return instantly but it's halting. You could try unticking "Include folders in Home", and removing all items from the search scope (except /Applications) from Alfred's Features > Default Results to see if that helps? Did you try a hard reset of your metadata including the option to delete the /.Spotlight-V100 folder?

 

Cheers,

Andrew

[tornado]

Quote

Here are the instructions for resetting Alfred 3:

https://www.alfredapp.com/help/troubleshooting/reset-alfred/

Thanks. I've tried resetting, but no change. 

 

 

Quote

 

(You can back those folders up before resetting).

 

@tornado in your case, the sample you sent back in December points to your issue being a metadata related issue, and macOS is halting Alfred during attempting to set the query search scope. This call should return instantly but it's halting. You could try unticking "Include folders in Home", and removing all items from the search scope (except /Applications) from Alfred's Features > Default Results to see if that helps? Did you try a hard reset of your metadata including the option to delete the /.Spotlight-V100 folder?

Removing everything but Applications seems to be working in initial tests! Would you advise I start re-adding the default list until I find the culprit? Thanks!

[tornado]

After adding and hunting in the home folder I finally found the culprit. It was an NFS share that was trying to be automounted, probably every time Alfred tried to do a search. Thanks for sticking with me on this Andrew!

[Andrew]

@tornado Excellent - I'm glad you got to the bottom of this! These things are always tricky

[Andrew]

@tornado I forgot to add, now that you know what is causing this, it might be worth hitting "Reset" at the top of the scope list to add back in Alfred's defaults for things like preference panes etc