Why do FCP Libraries take so long to delete in Sequoia?

Type id in the Terminal and it should show you a verbose output.

I haven't seen the FCP library deletion slowdown.

However, there is a severe MacOS performance problem involving file management. That happens only on HFS+ and involves populating the File>Open or "File>Save As" dialogs in a folder with more than about 1,000 files. It happens on both mechanical and SSD drives. It does not happen with APFS on either mechanical or SSD drives.

It did not happen on Monterey. It first appeared on Ventura in a less severe form, and on Sequoia it is quite bad.

As one example, when editing a 1k TXT file in TextEdit, here are the delay times for File>Open to populate the dialog. This is Sequoia 15.4 on an M1 Ultra Mac Studio, using an HFS+ 4-drive RAID-0 SSD Thunderbolt array. This happens with any app or disk type, but only with HFS+. The delay time for APFS on either SSD or mechanical drives is about 1 sec.

Number of files in Delay until File/Open

current folder or File/Save As populates:

500 files: 8 sec

1,000 files: 16 sec

4,000 files: 1 min 5 sec

14,000 files: 3 min 45 sec

There is also a periodic, intermittent problem whereby just opening a large folder in Finder may cause significant delays waiting for the List View window to populate. I don't know if the two manifestations are related, but I think this also only happens on HFS+, not APFS. The first scenario is 100% reproducible. This second one is somewhat random.

While it does seem slow, it may be worth remembering that a large library is not a large file, as the library is a bundle (in effect a folder or directory) conraining hundreds or thousands of files.

It might be an interesting experiment to time the deletion of such a large library using Finder, versus using Terminal. This might help determining if it some Finder peculiarity or some file handling issue at a lower system level.

You don't need the sudo.

CAUTION - any error in typing this command could cause you to lose precious data. You have been warned

rm -rf ~/.Trash/*

gives a warning: "zsh: sure you want to delete all 67 files in /Users/lsequeir/.Trash [yn]?"

and by pressing y

the contents of the trash are emptied.

Maybe the problem is that there are multiple trashes - depending on where the deleted files came from - for example, the above does NOT delete stuff that came from iCloud Drive, or an external drive; only stuff that was trashed from local folders under your home folder.

I recommend those rm commands not be used for this purpose. I did lots of testing, and found some combinations that delete files or folders from .Trashes, but it's quite risky.

By that, I don't mean the normal risk of using terminal 'rm' commands on regular files or folders. There are some anomalies about how it works on .Trashes that are complex to handle.

I have years of experience using terminal, and while I got it to work (with lots of trial and error), I would not feel comfortable using it myself as a regular procedure.

However it's possible to use an AppleScript command to tell Finder to empty the trash, exactly as if you had used the Finder's "Empty Trash" command. It handles all trash locations, including those on external drives, and respects all the usual safeguards. I haven't done any performance testing to see if it's faster on deleting FCP libraries from the trash.

osascript -e 'tell app "Finder" to empty trash'

If you run it with nothing in the trash, it will give error (-128), which is normal in that case.

You can obtain a list of top-level files/folders in the trash with this command:

osascript -e 'tell application "Finder" to get count of items in trash'

Joe Redifer wrote:

Luis,

rm -rf ~/.Trash/*

doesn't do anything when copy-pasted into Terminal.

Doesn't do anything... meaning:

a) there is no output in Terminal?

b) the files in trash remain in trash?

a) is perfectly normal; it indicates that the command was run without producing any error

b) this may be normal, or not, depending on where these files came from, in the first place.

Example 1: you have a file somewhere inside your home folder (say, in Movies folder) and drag it to trash in Finder; then the Terminal command should completely remove it.

Example 2: you have a file somewhere else, like under /Library, that is not part of your user area, and drag it to trash; then it will not be in ~/.Trash, and as such the Terminal command above will have no effect.

Joe Redifer wrote:

Luis,

I just tried again and it seems the command only deletes stuff from the system drive, aka Macintosh HD. The files I'd like to test deleting live on an external APFS-formatted SSD connected via Thunderbolt 4.

My point, exactly!

Each external drive has its own hidden trash folder.

If you want to delete those files using Terminal, you have to know the appropriate file path.

In this case, you will need to use sudo.

For example, to delete all the files that you have moved to trash from an external drive called "A", you might use the command below.

Be VERY CAREFUL if you are to use something like this command!

If the drive name contains spaces, they have to be properly "escaped".

sudo rm -rf /Volumes/A/.Trashes/501/*

(this example is assuming that your user id is 501 - that is the id of the first account created in a Mac; if not, that needs to be adjusted accordingly)

Quoting the whitespaces in Edit Drive 3. You could probably also escape them with backslashes, like /Volumes/Edit\ Drive\ 3/.Trashes/501/*

Be really careful with that sudo rm -rf command! One typo and you could be really unhappy.