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I recently upgrades Xcode to version 4.2, and now whenever I search the documentation in the Organizer, it becomes very slow. For example, if I search for "NSString", I type it all within a second or two, but the search field hangs at "NSS" for about ten seconds, sometimes showing the spinning ball, then "tring" appears all at once.

The rest of Xcode runs smoothly. I can appreciate that it may take a while to search through the documentation, but it used to be much faster before upgrading. I have restarted, and activity monitor shows I have quite a bit of free memory. I have also deleted the project workspace as suggested in this question.

Under Preferences>Downloads>Documentation I have the following listed

iOS 4.3 Library
iOS 5.0 Library
Mac OS X 10.6 Core Library
Mac OS X 10.7 Core Library
Mac OS X Legacy Library
Xcode 4.2 Developer Library

My question is, is there a way to fix this slowdown? And, if it's caused by having too many Libraries to search through quickly, would it be a good idea to delete the old iOS 4.3 and OS X 10.6 Libraries?

Community
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Andrew_L
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2 Answers2

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You can limit your searches to specific documentation sets by clicking the magnifying glass in the search field. Otherwise, add your voice to the score of bugs already filed on this subject at bugreport.apple.com.

Jon Shier
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    I unchecked all of the libraries except iOS 5 and Xcode 4.2, and I don't get the slowdown anymore. I tried rechecking them one by one to see if any in particular was causing the slowdown, but it seems that as soon as 3 or more libraries are included in the search, the slowdown occurs. Any reason not to delete the old libraries? – Andrew_L Oct 23 '11 at 00:34
  • I'm not sure, since it isn't explained anywhere what the differences between the sets really are. I would think that the 10.7 library would include the 10.6 library as a subset, but who knows but Apple's dev writers. – Jon Shier Oct 23 '11 at 01:51
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    Why are they different? Simple: the document sets are updated to show that, in 10.7, earlier stuff was deprecated; in 10.6, it doesn't list 10.7-only stuff. – Joshua Nozzi Oct 23 '11 at 03:36
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    It also helps to set the Languages option too. Unless you're developing in all five: Javascript, Java, C++, Objective-C, and C, you can save search-cycles by limiting to just the languages you need. – Dave Oct 27 '11 at 01:18
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I would think that prefix search is less consuming than full text search too, if that works for you.

Marcus Hedenström
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