I’ve been using Scrivener for about 6 months now in one project on Snow Leopard and a well spec’d MacBook Pro 2009. It has 24000 words (all in plain text) spread over a few hundred entries in a few dozen folders. Not that big IMO.
But it’s slow as treacle to use these days. Opening the project (10 seconds), moving a few dozen entries from one folder to another (1 minute), or (most importantly) just moving from item to item in the binder can take a few seconds to refresh the main text box.
I emptied the trash, I didn’t see any option to compact the .scriv file. I started a new project with nothing in it and added some sample entries and the response speed was fine.
Is it worth doing some kind of export/import into a new project? Or is this just the way it is.
The timings that you are reporting are decidedly abnormal compared to what I have witnessed. There are indeed typing speed issues with Snow Leopard, generally when editing large texts, but seeing 60 second delays in moving a mere 12 items from one folder to another is definitely outside of what should be expected.
You could try using the File/Import/Scrivener Project feature to dump the data into a brand new project and see if you get better speeds. The only thing you’ll lose in doing so are your labels and status settings (indeed that might be enough to make this procedure only good enough for a test, depending on how heavily you rely upon those). If that solves your problem, there are some further, more drastic, steps we can take with your old project that might help.
There really isn’t anything like “compact” as the Scrivener project isn’t a database. That function really only makes sense in a database where excessive row deletions can cause table overhead to get unoptimised. Scrivener projects are just essentially folders and files.
So try doing the import trick into a new project. One other thing you can report here that would help: what is your total project size? If you select the .scriv file in Finder and Get Info, what’s the total calculated size of it?
Thanks for the quick reply. Luckily I don’t use tags or other advanced features (I just use it to organise short comedy routines and ideas).
I created a new project and imported it. Wow, now there’s a huge speed difference. I can finally move around without any problems. I wish I’d asked ages ago instead of putting up with it and thinking I was crazy 
There were 450 entries copied over and the old project size was 1800k/3.2M disk used, and the new one is 608k/1.9M disk used.
Hmm, the sizes you reported are not way out of band—perfectly normal for a larger novel, I’d say. My guess is that somehow the controller files that organize the project’s infrastructure got corrupted or bloated somehow. Now that you are using a new project those files have been completely rebuilt from scratch. Glad you got it fixed with that simple move!
Keith may chime in and want to see the damaged project for analysis, if this isn’t a known issue. So keep it around unless you hear otherwise, but you’re safe using the new project. Like I said, import transfers everything except for those two meta-data fields.