Frequent Pauses in Applications

Question

Level 1

9 points

Frequent Pauses in Applications

Recently I began experiencing pauses on my Mac Mini (M1, 2020, 16 GB RAM) running up-to-date Sequoia. I would be typing and suddenly, for several seconds, nothing would happen. Then the letters would appear and the computer would be functional again for a few minutes. Then another pause. This could happen in any application, including Pages, Google Docs, Chrome, Textedit, messages, texting, etc. I seem to have traced the problem to the fact that, several weeks ago, I had moved to my iCloud Drive the working copies in Pages of several LONG (300,000-plus words) documents that I keep open all the time because I frequently add or modify text in them. I was thinking this would be a good way to keep those book files saved in the cloud in case of a computer failure. However, it appears that Pages auto-saves documents frequently, even when not being used, and when it has to do the saving over the internet to the iCloud Drive, it temporarily locks up the computer. Once I moved the four big files from iCloud back to my desktop, the several-second pauses vanished. Has anyone ever experienced this kind of problem?

Mac mini (M1, 2020)

Posted on Mar 22, 2025 9:22 AM

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Answer 1

VikingOSX

Level 10

119,399 points

Mar 22, 2025 10:17 AM in response to Jack Sanders

Apple's iCloud is not a backup solution, it is a file-sharing convenience solution. For backups, use Apple's Time Machine with a suitably sized external drive.

With the use of Time Machine, you could keep those large Pages documents locally and regularly backed up. This would forego any autosave delays over a variable bandwidth Internet. With those documents open and all of the other activities you mention, you should launch Activity Monitor and see that your memory pressure is not in the red or that you have any indication of consumed SWAP. Those telltales would suggest you run fewer concurrent applications or fewer opened files.

You should not have any anti-virus product or use any so-called Mac "cleaning" applications as these can have consequences on application and operating system behavior.