Hi Ya'll,
Well, I finally upgraded to Leopard a few days ago. Everything went relatively well, except for a nagging problem with iCal. It uses at least 100% of one core of my 2GHz core duo macbook (2Gb RAM) and runs painfully slow.

As well, it won't quit. I do a force quit, and it restarts itself with a new dock icon sliding in to replace the icon that I just force quit.

I thought that there might have been something wrong with my upgrade install. So I did an erase and install. All seemed to work well up until tonight.

Again, iCal is running dog slow.

I did find this:
Apple - Support - Discussions - Remove Leopard iCal and install iCal ...
But no fix.

Anyone have any suggestions? Is there a database rebuilding option or equivalent somewhere?

thanks,
s

Anyone?

Ok, so I forgot the obvious -- trashing the preferences.

So far so good.
Nah, take that back. It lasts for about 5 minutes, then the processors start working hard.

Any ideas? Anyone?
I've repaired permissions. Trashed preferences. Reinstalled the system from scratch.

Have you got anything set up with iSync? Sharing any calendars online?

Nope.

However, in iSync I had the "Enable syncing on this computer" option checked. I'll uncheck it now and see how it goes.

-- Thanks

Nah. Didn't make any difference.

I downloaded this program:
http://jimmitchell.org/files/Yasu.dmg.gz

Ran it, restarted, and so far so good. Fingers crossed.

Nup. It has reverted back to hogging the processors which spins up the fans. Causing any kind of changes to iCal to take up to 30s before something happens.

Does anyone have any ideas about how to stop this?

s

After deleting all of my calendars and iCal was still running slow as could be, I realised that the only calendar left was birthdays. I looked at the iCal preferences and the "Show Birthdays" was unchecked. So I checked it, and the Birthdays calendar in iCal changed colour; no problems since.

Ok. So the problem has come back. And I have narrowed it down to the birthday calendar. If I check the "show birthdays" calender or whatever it is. Maybe "subscribe to birthdays", eventually ical seems to go into an infinite loop, hog the processor, and take at least 3 attempts to finally make it quit for good. It quits, opens itself back up again, so I CMD+Q again, and it opens itself back up again, and I quit it again.

So, it seems like no one has a solution to this odd problem. So, I'll just leave it out there....

Hey,
Found a possible solution. So far so good.

I used this Dates to iCal | John Maisey

With a bonus, it adds the person's age and a default alarm 2 days prior.

You are John Maisey and I claim my $5 <smiley face>

Ok, I think I have found the real culprit. Are you ready...

Growl!! Actually, I can't lay it all on Growl. It might also be Growlichat.app or Growlichathelper.app.

I have not done enough testing. Since I stopped loading these guys up at launch, my problems have stopped.

So there you go.

Scott, I hope your issue really *is* solved. I have many of the symptoms you did on one user's new MPB, and it was even worse on the MacBook she just turned in (2 GHz, 2GB Ram, etc.)

We're not growl users here, though, and even with the birthdays thing either way or the other, and all other apps stopped, we have an incredible latency on iCal's opening, and a good ten second delay after selecting another day (in week view, where she spends a good deal of time).

Activity monitor doesn't show inordinate RAM usage, processor or anything whacky locally, so I threw a couple tcpdumps up (one on her box, one on the gateway outa this network, and the proxy server) and, while there are a few too many ntp requests for my liking, nothing on networks looks too interesting.

Ever since we started looking at this issue, I've been asking as you did:

>> Is there a database rebuilding option or equivalent somewhere? <<

Any help is appreciated.

beevee,
Welcome to Australia!

Have you tried removing all iCal calenders, and then importing them one by one to see which of the calenders might have a weird entry?

This is what put me on to the birthdays calenders. Which made me think that it had something to do with addressbook.

When I went through addressbook and manually moved all the birthday entries to the notes field, the problem stopped.

This is all while I was still running growl.

So, I am assuming you have tried:
1 repairing permissions;
2 running onyx or some other scripting automation permission repairer thingy;
3 removing particular startup items;
4 reinstalling the OS from scratch;
5 testing ical in another user account;

I did all of these things.

The only thing I haven't done was call applecare, which was a suggestion from the maccast forums.

When iCal did run slow, it was using about 98% of the processor in Activity Monitor.

Are you on ichat?

Thanks for the prompt reply, Scott.

I'm able to check off most of the things you list, and then I am reminded that this is a brand new outa the box MBP, with Leopard on it (the MB has Tiger). We did backup and restore iCal, drop subscriptions and such as that, and kill other processes (logged in via ssh as root).

I am unfamiliar with onyx (but I can fix that after work today). I'm on a client site right now working, so can't chat, but will try to get back to this board in a bit.

I have an account on her box, and will export/ import the calendars onsey-twosey.

Again, thanks for the prompt reply,

bv