[peteypolo]

I have a Power Mac G5 (2GHz dual core, PPC) with 4 GB RAM running 10.5.3, and a Macbook Pro (2 GHz dual core, Intel) with 2 GB RAM running 10.4.11. I bounce my OF database between the two machines depending if I'm at home or work, and the DB backup file is 304kb in size.

On the laptop, OF works just fine. But on the G5 it can be as slow as an old dog. The simple act of dragging a task from the inbox to a project causes the OmniFocus process to spike to 40% or 50% of CPU usage.

Other than plunking down $2500+ for a new rig, is there anything I can do to improve performance on the G5?

[Lizard]

Rebuild your database periodically. It's an option in the File menu. How often is periodically? That depends on how many changes you make in a given time period. I might guess at once per week to start, and if you notice mid-week that it's slowing down again, do it more often.

If you need more performance than that gives, collapse any groups (Projects, Folders, etc.) that you're not actively using.

[peteypolo]

Just running a search of the whole db pushes CPU usage to >95%. I'll give the rebuild a go, thank you.

...

Response time is definately faster post-rebuild, but it still uses all available CPU. Hmm...

[Lizard]

Take a sample while it's churning at 100% CPU and email it to omnifocus@omnigroup.com so we can make sure OmniFocus isn't unnecessarily wasting time somewhere.

[Humbro]

I'm having the same problem, only worse. Doing pretty much anything in the side bar (apart from selecting a project) drives CPU-usage up to 100%, causing quite laggy performance.

I tried to rebuild the database, seemingly to no effect.

I'm sitting on a 2.1 GHz PowerPC iMac G5, running OSX 10.5.5. I do have Firefox running as well, consuming about 20% of CPU, as well as the Activity Monitor taking around 7%. There are a few other apps running, but all their processes are at under 1%.

[Brian]

I'm very sorry for the inconvenience this causes! The next time this happens, it would be quite helpful if you could send us the output of a "sample" command, so the lead developer can try to determine what OmniFocus is doing.

To do this, you'll want to do the following:

1) Go to your Applications folder --> Utilities folder--> and launch "Activity Monitor".
2) A window will open that shows all the applications running on your machine. In the list, select our application.
3) Click on the "Inspect" button on the toolbar
4) Another window will pop-up. Click the "Sample" button on the lower left corner.
5) When it's done taking the sample, click the "Save..." button on the top right and email the document it creates to the support ninjas. We'll have a look at it and figure out what's going on.

(Note: samples can be a large quantity of text, so please don't paste it into a forum post.)