QC 4 takes ages to start

Try seeing what if you are opening QC in 32 or 64 bit mode by doing a "Get Info" on the QC app icon, and perhaps switching from one to the other to see if it makes a difference.

You just uninstalled 3rd party plugins, but kept the Apple plugins/qtz patches, correct?

What appears in Console.app during the beachballing?

the mode makes no difference and i only unistalled third party plugins.

nothing:/

what if you nuke ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.QuartzComposer.editor.plist? (rather than nuking it, moving it aside might be useful, so someone can inspect it if it's the problem).

Another interesting plist is com.apple.QuartzComposer.visualizer.plist

what hardware are you on?

i nuked those files several times. nothing helps.

i left it running for quite a while now and nothing was happening except it using 99.9% cpu and eating up more and more memory . see attachment for the values just before it managed to pull it off.

im on a macbook pro 5.1 (first gen unibody)

i have no idea what i borked and how i managed to do it:/.

edit: after it finally got going i changed the settings so id doesnt do anything on startup. i then noticed the beach ball happens when i create a blank file:/. if i dont it doesnt happen.

i think ill try and reinstall dev tools tomorrow.

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I think QC loads plugins only when the patch creator window is opened or when an editor window is created.

Are you certain there aren't any 3rd party plugins (/Library/Graphics/Quartz Composer {Patches|Plugins}, as well as /System/Library/Graphics/Quartz Composer {Patches|Plugins} -- a few will be in the /System one by default, but sometimes people add stuff there).

There could also be Image Units that are causing problems (not sure if those are editor/patch-creator load time, or app load time though).

Plugins could also be hidden from Finder (though I'm not aware of anyone doing that, as it's fairly malicious to hide executable code), so perhaps checking via Terminal.app could reveal something interesting.

If those all fail, using Shark or Instruments to see what it's doing would be beneficial.

I bet I know what this is. I found a bug I could not reproduce, but its happening now, and did before on my system.

If you made a smart group, it has somehow duplicated itself hundreds of times, and is loading those items over and over.

Delete your ~/Application Support/Quartz Composer/DTAssetLibraryGroups.plist file, and reload QC. Ill bet the issue is gone (as will your smart group be.

Let me know.

I've just started tracking this thread , most of the suggested workarounds I have never had to use on QC4, however, there is still the currently unmentioned ~/Library/Caches/QCCompositionRepository-com.apple.QuartzComposer.editor.cache, which I have found need in pre SL times to remove for reasons similar to the malaise described.

If all else fails, perhaps that would be worth giving a try.

YES! this was it. after deleting the file the problem is in fact gone. i did make a smart group just for the hell of it once. cant remember what is was though:/.

thanx a lot for solving this:).

Sweet, Vade, thanks for the tip!

Does anyone have a rogue plist (moved aside, rather than deleted) for inspection?

well, it seems that if you create an empty (default) smart group, every time you restart QC the number of them dubles. but if i create a smart group that looks for patches that contain the word private in the category. they only double when i add or remove any kineme plugin (maybe others but i dont have any to test with).

that would explain why my removing of the plugins made the situation get worse. every time i removed or added any, the number would double. in the end i had 12288 of them and it took QC at least 15 minutes to sort that out.

so i guess i wount be using smart groups in the future:).

Can you file a bug on this? Its doing it for me with a working/populated Smart group.

bug filed