This might help speed things up

Like many of you, I have been frustrated by the slow performance of BC on my iMac. Today, while working on planning routes for an upcoming ride, I decided on a whim to try something radical, and it worked.

Under Preferences --> Advanced, there is a slider for setting disk cache. All the way to the right, which uses 5000 MB of disk space to cache maps, is labeled "Better Performance." That's where I've left it for years. Today I moved it all the way to the left, where it says it uses 75 MB of disk space and is labeled "Less Disk Space."

It's not that I lack room on my HD; rather, it occurred to me that using memory (I have 8 GB installed) could theoretically be faster than accessing the drive. Sure enough, it is.

-dan

0 daknudsen over 4 years ago

Glad it worked for you; not sure if I'll try it - BC is hardly the pokiest application on my iMac. We bought a new 2019 iMac not long ago, thinking that it would speed things up and help run all of the new bells and whistles in Catalina and beyond. Lo and behold, it almost seems worse. Mac software has definitely become more and more bloated in recent years to the point that opening an Office doc for example can take over a minute. Safari's performance might have improved some, but so much is going on in the background, it's confounding. If Time Machine is doing a backup, you might as well wait for it to finish before launching into anything else. Progress??...

0 danham_ over 4 years ago in reply to daknudsen

To be clear, my "trick" didn't turn BC into a speed demon. It just made things better. Don't want to go off-topic, but I'd suggest looking for a stuck process or other semi-hidden cause for your general slows - this isn't typical (other than, perhaps, the bloatware known as Office).