Growl On Leopard: Performance Problems, Slow, Crashes, Hangs, Delays…

I run Growl as a notification daemon on Mac OS, but ever since updating to Leopard I have suffered problems – notifications pile up in a big block, are posted literally minutes after an event, the daemon eats tons of CPU and crashes occasionally, stuff like that.

I still don’t know what the problem is, but I have found a workaround:

Growl & Mac OS X 10.5

It looks like the delay is all while loading the WebView for your display style. Try switching to a non-webview based display style such as Bubbles or Smoke. Does that make the issue go away?

Yes it did. Any idea what would be causing this problem? Any idea if I can fix it, and how I would if I can?

I was using the “Plain” theme for the notification bubbles, which appears to be hove off to some API that manages it; I swapped to using “Smoke” – apparently a built-in theme? – and the problems vanished.

Much happier now. Looks like someone needs to log a bug, but I am already subscribed to enough social networks without being overloaded by joining bug management tools too…

Comments

5 responses to “Growl On Leopard: Performance Problems, Slow, Crashes, Hangs, Delays…”

  1. I used to user GrowlMail extension for Growl, but when I upgraded to Leopard my Mail.app started to crash everytime I would get a lot of emails at once.

    Later on I found that GrowlMail is not compatible with Leopard. I read about some unofficial builds that fixed the problem, but I haven’t tested them.

    /i

  2. Oddly, Mail is about the only thing I *don’t* have hooked up to Growl… 🙂

  3. diamond

    Growlmail 1.1.3 is in beta, but growl.info has been down for quite awhile, so it can’t be downloaded. Apparently Growl 1.1.3 will include Growlmail 1.3, if the site ever comes back.

    http://groups.google.com/group/growldiscuss/browse_frm/thread/c662e038a38cf665/d38b1987c0d699a2?tvc=1&q=growlmail#d38b1987c0d699a2

  4. Thanks for the info, I’ve noticed that my Growl sometimes works and sometimes not after my upgrade to Leopard.

    What do you use Growl for? I’ve only recently loaded it with the Adium IM client and haven’t really checked it out.

    Steve

  5. Hi Steve!

    I use it for both Skype and Adium alerts, plus a script which gets called to let me know that a cronjob succeeded; good for background server monitoring, and if it fails the bubble can be made persistent…

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