Find Duplicates on big folder brings Finder to a halt

[Jim Mueller]

I doubt that this is a common problem, but I wanted to make folks aware of it - We ran the GC Browser > Find Duplicates tool on a folder that (we eventually found out) had over 25,000 assorted graphic items within its subfolders. It identified almost 7,000 identical matches. We set it to run on automatic so it would throw away the matches on the right-hand side. It discarded about 3,000 in a speedy manner, but then slowed down. The next twenty took about 3 minutes each for GC to discard them. Eventually it was about 10 minuted between discards as the psychedelic pinwheel spun. We switched to the Finder and tried to open the Trash to see how many files had been tossed, but nothing in the Finder responded. We ctrl-clicked the Finder icon in the Dock and selected Relaunch, which we were not surprised to see available. We were surprised to see GC immediately return to its original speed. After another 50 or so duplicates it bogged down again. Selecting Relaunch in the Finder icon brought GC back up to speed again, and it zipped through the remaining 4,000 matches. The files where it slowed down were not exceptional - icon-sized jpegs or Photoshop documents. There were no exceptionally large documents in the folders - 4 or 5Mb with GC-generated preview. The system is a 1.5Ghz G4 AlBook with 1.5Gb of RAM and MacOS 10.3.9 and over 10Gb of free space.