My new MacBook Pro had been behaving remarkably badly for the last few days, it would start up and get to the login screen quickly – but then once I logged in it would sit do nothing for a good few minutes, perhaps with the search icon showing in the top bar. Once started, many programs apparently hung while loading. This was a bit frustrating, as it’s a brand new Mac so it should be running optimally.
Unsurprisingly it turns out to be ‘my’ fault. I’d loaded my collection of fonts from my PC into the FontBook font management software the other day and it wasn’t handling the few thousand fonts that well. So I went into my user resources and just moved all the fonts out, then restarted the machine, and now everthing is fast again. My next quest is to locate the few key fonts I need regularly and install just those, rather than suffering from font overload.
Of course this is my own stupidity, but I also wonder why the Font Book wasn’t managing the fonts as expected. I had turned off all the fonts except a few, but it seems like the system is still looking at all the fonts before it then cross-checks with the font manager to see which ones are active. This seems a bit daft to me – surely if the integrated font management software says ‘this font is off’ then the system should ignore it until told otherwise? Plus that also raises the question – “How many fonts can my Mac run before slowing down?“. There doesn’t seem to be an answer, but I’ll let you know if I find out.