Keith, I use an Imac Power PC G5
gertjan, could you send me your project, please? Incidentally, are you using non-English fonts? (When you send your project, you can always create a copy and then use Project Replace and replace random letters with other random letters to turn the text into gibberish if you don’t want me to read it; if the text isn’t in English, though, you don’t need to worry, given that I am an ignorant Englishman with only my mother tongue.)
It certainly shouldn’t be your system, and given that this problem remains after a restart, it sounds like your project.
One other thing to try first, though: search Finder/Spotlight for com.literatureandlatte.scrivener.plist. Move that file somewhere else (so you can restore it later if you want) and then launch Scrivener again. If everything speeds up again, then it was a preferences problem. Before trying this you could just try clearing your navigation histories (View > Document History > Clear Document History - do this for both editors).
Oh, and is the slowdown happening whilst typing, or only whilst bringing up the ctrl-click menu?
Thanks,
Keith
Keith,
in the documents I use Geneva.
The view-history etc didn’t do anything so I moved the plist and that did the trick. But it still isn’t as fast as it used to be.
I’ll sent you the file, it’s the book I wrote in Scrivener. But it’s written in Dutch so I suppose you can’t read it. Pity. For you. 
gertjan
Yes.
I have a 160mb project on an average PC (3.79 Ghz 6-core processor, 32gb RAM) and have been very gingerly trying to export sections to Word before Scriv crashes again. I tried to open it on a brand new Surface Pro 9 (16GB) last year and it simply could not. It would crash out halfway through. Only brand new (empty) files could be opened.
In fairness, I have about 100 different books in one file (I didn’t want a hundred thousand backups) - but 160mb file of text sure doesn’t seem like it should be big enough to cause problems.
Scrivener should be able to handle a 160 MB file without difficulty. Something else is going on. Please open a support ticket, here:
so that we can dig into what the issue might be.
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I have a 80 GIG project file on my Macbook Pro M1, and I have never experienced a crash associated with the file size directly. Sure, it’s slow to compile and index, but it’s never crashed because of the size.
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@NamoNakiMichi Wow! 80 G, you’ve got me beat by far. And I always thought I was the crazy one 
I’d love to learn from you.
May I ask how many documents that is and what kind of documents?
How do you search in this project? In my experience, projects with 6 G and 20,000 documents are no longer searchable because it takes far too long.
It contains two-thousand eight-hundred individual stories, with corresponding book bibles, six-thousand writing exercises, nine-hundred and twenty Morning Pages, my separate writing journal, two-hundred and fifteen craft read-only reference pages, and all of my miscellaneous notes.
Searching is quite easy, I just select the file I want to search, copy the contents, paste it into a temporary Scrivener file, I do whatever it is that I need to do and then I paste the modified text back into the original file.
When I need to do anything related to compiling, the manuscript goes into a new Scrivener file for all the finalizing and administrative activities.
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So you only search in one document/file at a time? Never in the whole project?
What happens if you search the entire project?
I have no reason to search through the entire file as each item is very separate from another. If I did for some weird reason, I’d do it in stages or write some python in order to facilitate the search.
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Mm, you use “file” alternately for a document or for a project. Let’s agree that a project consists of all the documents you see in the binder, ok 
In any case, if I understand correctly, you are only ever searching in one document (not project). Then I don’t understand why you copy that into a new project to search in it.
Anything inside a parent folder is what I generally consider one file.
I put whatever is being edited or worked on in a separate Scrivener file because I am a visually impaired user and VoiceOver can become EXTREMELY confusing if I click on the wrong thing on accident. When it’s the only thing in the binder of the temporary file, that confusion is eliminated.
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I see. Thank you for explaining it to me.
What do you mean?
I would do a full copy of everything in the whole entire Scrivener file, then I would write a small and simple search program in Python and the program would do the search for me and give me the desired results.
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I am not a coder. But you seem to be one. Would this work in a similar way to an EasyFind app? So, an app that searches several (closed) Scrivener projects and then shows in which project the search terms are?
No. It would not search a Scrivener file. A Scrivener file is a proprietary file system and it requires Scrivener to open, unless you’re KB or Astrid and have backend source control.
I would do a full copy of all of the text in the Scrivener file and then input it into the Python search program and Python would do the rest.
On a few occasions I have used corpus linguistics software on a Scrivener project. My choice is #LancsBox from the University of Lancaster. It is free to download. Check it out at #LancsBox: Lancaster University corpus toolbox
Provides excellent search features — that part is built on Apache’s Lucene software. Widcards, collocation, stemming, and a bunch of other useful tricks.
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Being curious, I just used DEVONtechnologies’ EasyFind to see what would happen. Searched in the folder where all my Scrivener projects are are located for a word I knew was in a couple of projects. EasyFind easily found all the RTF files where that word exists. Looking at the Location field of the found file you can see which project the word is located. But, Scrivener keeps all the files named the same “content.rtf” inside a folder structure with hashed names it knows all about.
File visible and found, but specific location is obscured by the hashed folder names.
So, while found, perhaps not particularly useful.
Meantime, not a good idea to make any changes or mess around with the contents of a Scrivener project to mitigate risk of project corruption.
@rms You have summarized that perfectly. Overall, apps like EasyFind are only of limited benefit. But they are better than nothing if you want to search in several Scrivener projects at the same time. If anyone knows a better solution, suggestions are welcome.
If it were me with this need, I’d make a list of all the projects that the search tool found, and then use Scrivener to search those projects with the priority placed on the projects I thought most likely to be useful.