Workspace animation lag (with screen recording)

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Workspace animation lag (with screen recording)

Both my Macbook and Mac are suffering from a disturbing lag, right after workspace animation finishes the window gets its focus a split second late. During the time, the OS ignores any input, so one have to wait until this lag is over. For those who change workspace rapidly, this is a huge workflow problem.

I recorded a short screencast of the problem with two Terminal windows running on two workspaces. But the behavior is the same for any app (e.g. Finder), inability to take any inputs shortly after animation is frustrating:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aD9k3nBOj30

When I set Preferences - Accessibility - Screen - Reduce Motion the animation changes form movement to fade, however, the lag is still there. I noticed this in Monterey and Ventura, perhaps this bug is there for a longer period of time.

It almost looks like the animation has slow start and ending which creates the lag feeling. But with the Reduce Motion function, I would expect it to be snappier or something.

In older versions of MacOS, it was possible to change the animation speed with a setting (via defaults command). This no longer works. Still, having uses trying to find a workaround does likely mean that this feature would benefit from review and rework.

This is Macbook Pro 16 (M1/32GB RAM) running MacOS Ventura 16.1 with default settings. Looks like disabling or enabling ProMotion have no effect on this lag. I tested this also on Mac Mini M1 16GB RAM with LG WideScreen (75Hz/60Hz) display with the same result.

Do you see the same? Which MacOS version?

Any known workaround for this issue?

Thanks for help!

Posted on Oct 31, 2022 04:00 AM

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Answer 1

Nov 2, 2022 11:04 AM in response to malaika242

Greetings malaika242,

f you have concerns about the performance form your Mac, begin by following the guidance found here:

If your Mac runs slowly - Apple Support

View memory usage in Activity Monitor on Mac - Apple Support

"You can see the amount of system memory being used on your Mac.

In the Activity Monitor app on your Mac, click Memory (or use the Touch Bar) to see the following in the bottom of the window:
Memory Pressure: Graphically represents how efficiently your memory is serving your processing needs.
- Memory pressure is determined by the amount of free memory, swap rate, wired memory, and file cached memory.
- Physical Memory: The amount of RAM installed.
Memory Used: The amount of RAM being used. To the right, you can see where the memory is allocated.
Compressed: The amount of memory that has been compressed to make more RAM available.
- When your computer approaches its maximum memory capacity, inactive apps in memory are compressed, making more memory available to active apps. Select the Compressed Memory column, then look in the VM Compressed column for each app to see the amount of memory being compressed for that app.
Cached Files: The size of files cached by the system into unused memory to improve performance.
- Until this memory is overwritten, it remains cached, so it can help improve performance when you reopen the app.
- Swap Used: The amount of space being used on your startup disk to swap unused files to and from RAM.
To display more columns, choose View > Columns, then choose the columns you want to show."

Take care.

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Workspace animation lag (with screen recording)

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