Too many items on Desktop causes Finder to crawl
Alec Jacobson
December 03, 2012
Recently Finder was crawlingly slow on my Mac. I had the spinning beach ball all the time and it even seem to affect the rest of my computer: mouse not responding etc. Finally I figured out that it was because I had too many items on my desktop. I had been outputting screen shots to the desktop and must have amassed some 10 thousand png files. So many that when I issued:
rm ~/Desktop/*.png
I got an error:
-bash: /bin/rm: Argument list too long
After finally deleting these files, Finder and my computer returned to normal.