AE takes a very long time to open preferences.

[MaxAppian]

Hello all,

I am using AE 15.1.1 on a Mac running OS High Sierra 10.13.5.

For some reason when I attempt to open my preferences in any project, I get the spinning wheel of death. If I wait long enough (5-7 minutes or so) it will open up.  Then, when I go to empty my cache it brings up the spinning wheel for about 10 minutes before finally emptying (at the usual rate).  After effects otherwise runs perfectly.  Any ideas why it's doing this?

[Mohammad.Harb]

Have you tries to reset the preferences settings?

1- quit after effects

2- run after effects while holding cmd + opt + shift

you will get a message to reset the preferences setting

“ the message may not show up the first try, so keep trying“

let us know if that helps

[MaxAppian]

I was trying to find a way around resetting the preferences completely- is this the only way?

[P.M.B]

Have you tried shutting down and rebooting the computer?  Most people just log out or sleep their macs but when you reboot system temp, memory, swap, and cache files get cleared out during boot.   I'm not a mac user but on windows when things get inexplicably weird I'll reboot and often things get less weird.

[MaxAppian]

Thanks Gutterfish.  I definitely did that first, but it's always good to ask.

[Roland Kahlenberg]

As a side-track solution,m you can assign shortcuts to all the Commands found in the Edit>Purge menu - using shortcuts precludes you from having to jump into the Prefs.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi MaxAppian,

Check out the steps in this doc and see if it helps: Fixing permissions problem (slow startup)

Thanks,
Kevin

[Judge0]

I have this same issue, macos 10.15.7, ae 17.7.0.

I tried resetting preferences, but it made no difference. Ae also doesn't quit when I 'quit' ... I have to force quit every time.

Any other solutions?

[jackthegiantslayer]

There is no solution, they know it's painfully slow to open preferences but are compelled to toss out the usual placebo solutions. It takes a full 33 seconds to open my prefs on a maxed out Retina iMac running latest Catalina. Most everything else is snappy.

[mattl4904321]

I kepy getting stuck with this. Opening preferences would take forever. Clearing the cashe would take forever. Strangly what fixed my issue was opening Spotlight. Right after clicking Preferences the spinning wheel popped up, but as soon as I hit command-space (to open Spotlight) it loaded immediatly. When I went to clear my cache, the spinning wheel popped up. Once again, as soon as I hit command-space, it stopped lagging and cleared the cache. Hope that helps anyone. 

[alind0725]

I don't know how you figured this out but this is absolute genius. Saved my day today.

[MaxAppian]

Damn, I wish that worked for me as it did for alind0725

[Nishant.Kumar.2906]

What fixed it for me was disabling the Google Drive desktop agent. Im on a Windows 10 system. Perhaps other forms of network drives cause the same issue.

[jackthegiantslayer]

Today it took 50 seconds to open preferences on a fully topped off 16-inch M1 Macbook Pro Max. I am on latest Ventura and AE 24.0.1. Why on earth does it take so freaking long to open preferences??? Why can't you fix this?