Sketch is Running Super Slow Recently: How to fix the issue with this simple solution.
This is likely why Sketch is running slow for you and how to fix the problem.
If you’re in my line of work (UI/UX design), there’s a good chance that you use Sketch by Bohemian Coding on a daily basis. If not, I highly suggest it. I prefer Sketch because of its speed, efficiency, and ability to sync with many prototyping tools. Also, when paired with Zeplin, it’s a dream for front end developers. I switched to it for almost all of my digital design work about 2 years ago and haven’t looked back until recently when it started to have problems.
A few months ago, Sketch started to run a bit slower. I would attempt to select something and it would take a second to register. Or I would copy and paste a group, and it would take a few seconds to appear on my artboard. I figured that it was an issue with the recent software updates but quickly learned that it wasn’t when I attempted to revert to an old version. As time went on, Sketch got slower and slower. I tried looked everywhere on the web for an explanation along with a fix but couldn’t find anything. I was about to switch back to photoshop when I finally discovered the solution.
The Reason why Sketch is Running so slow.
Sketch is sluggish because of a hidden autosave folder that is clogging up my (and probably your) hard drive. Every time you save you save your file, a copy is sent to this folder. My autosave folder was full of 334GB of old Sketch autosaved files that I didn’t need anymore.
The Solution.
Open up your terminal, paste in this command line, and hit enter.
sudo du -sh /.DocumentRevisions-V100
Once you do this, type in your user password and hit enter. While you’re typing it, the characters won’t show up but don’t worry, it’s inputting.
Terminal will return the size of you .DocumentRevisions folder. If it’s over 50GB, it’s probably the reason that Sketch is giving you problems. This folder holds revisions from many pieces of software so be careful not to delete the whole thing.
In order to single out just the autosaves that are from Sketch, paste this into terminal and hit enter.
mkdir -pv ~/.Trash/SketchAutosaveHistory && sudo find /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/.DocumentRevisions-V100/ -name *.sketch -exec mv “{}” ~/.Trash/SketchAutosaveHistory/ \;
This will move all of the Sketch autosave files into your trash. To make sure that it worked, open up your trash can and take a look.
Comment and let me know if it worked or if your have any questions!
Edit: If terminal returns a “no such files exist”, try removing the / after .DocumentRevisions-V100. If you are getting any other error message, be sure that you are not copying and pasting any extra spaces into terminal. Also, try pasting into textedit first to remove the styles. Then copy and paste from there into terminal. Good Luck!
