Why with Mavericks some folders just disappear and reappear randomly for just a few seconds?

Question

Why with Mavericks some folders just disappear and reappear randomly for just a few seconds?

Answer 1

Hi Alinc,
I find that this happens with folders that either have a lot of stuff in them, when there is a lot of large files on my desktop, or when my computer has it's RAM bogged down. I'm guessing it's just a benign performance issue, and so far it hasn't cause me any serous problems except for one folder that constantly take a while to load but I'm not surprised because that folder has 8000+ files and is over 25GB in size LOL.
If this is still an issue for you, or you folders disappear for so long that it becomes an inconvenience, I would recommend trying the following things:
1) Save your work and close any open programs, but don't close your Finder folders though. Click the Apple Logo  in the upper left hand corner of the screen, then choose Force Quit. In the windows that comes up select Finder and choose Relaunch. This should force all of your open Finder folders to get refreshed. Please note this is a very brute force operation so it might be the most elegant solution.
2) A better but less potent thing to try is cleaning up you finder folders. If like me you have hundreds of files in one folder, or there is more than a gigabyte of data in the first level of the folder, then it might be a good idea to clean it up by moving some of those files into subfolders.
3) This is my favorite fix to try, and I recommend it to almost everyone because it's super easy and has a reasonable chance of improving your computer's performance at least a little bit.
3.a) Go to Disk Utility, and click on your hard drive.
3.b) Go to First Aid, and click each of the following one at a time: Verify Disk, Repair Disk, Verify Disk Permissions, and finally Repair Disk Permissions. Each of those actions should take several minutes (3 to 30) to complete on a fast hard drive, so make sure you don't need your computer for any serious work during this time.
3.c) Once those operations are complete click on your Macintosh HD partition (right below the hard drive you clicked before) and repeat step 3.b.
3.d) If you have any other connected hard drives or partitions you can do this for them as well. BUT, I don't recommend doing this on any Windows formatted drives, like FAT or NTFS, or your Bootcamp partition — although the First Aid buttons on the Bootcamp will probably be disabled anyway.
Best,
Vlad