# Extremely long times fetching Julia General registry on macOS

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/extremely-long-times-fetching-julia-general-registry-on-macos/70123>\
**Category:** Package Management\
**Tags:** pkg\
**Created:** [October 21, 2021, 2:38am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/extremely-long-times-fetching-julia-general-registry-on-macos/70123 "2021-10-21T02:38:26Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![CameronBieganek](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/cameronbieganek/32/6915_2.png) [@CameronBieganek](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/CameronBieganek)\
**Post date:** [October 21, 2021, 2:38am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/extremely-long-times-fetching-julia-general-registry-on-macos/70123/1 "2021-10-21T02:38:26Z")

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Has anyone had this problem?

 ![image](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/original/3X/f/a/fade3882c09a9583a21a16206f0146367ceb216b.png)

This is on my personal laptop, which is on a somewhat old version of macOS (version 10.13.6).

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**Author:** ![hendri54](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/hendri54/32/9621_2.png) [@hendri54](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/hendri54)\
**Post date:** [October 21, 2021, 12:17pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/extremely-long-times-fetching-julia-general-registry-on-macos/70123/2 "2021-10-21T12:17:12Z")

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There have been various reports with similar problems. One possible solution: try to switch over to the new Pkg server infrastructure as recommended here:

> [@Status of Pkg speed improvements outside US in v1.5](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/status-of-pkg-speed-improvements-outside-us-in-v1-5/46395/4):
>
> I don’t think it has changed a lot in the EU, it has always been fast for me, and still is. For example, here is an add of Pluto, with downloading all it’s dependencies and updating the registry: julia\> @time Pkg.add("Pluto") Updating registry at `/tmp/tmp.Y7GcP6DpXb/registries/General` Resolving package versions... Installed MbedTLS\_jll ─ v2.16.8+0 Installed MsgPack ───── v1.1.0 Installed IniFile ───── v0.5.0 Installed MbedTLS ───── v1.0.2 Installed HTTP ──────── v0.8.17 Inst…

There also have been various reports that virus checkers slow down registry updates. Excluding `.julia/registries` from the monitored directories appears to help sometimes. (I did not in my case [MacOS], but things got a lot faster in v1.6 for me).

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**Author:** ![CameronBieganek](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/cameronbieganek/32/6915_2.png) [@CameronBieganek](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/CameronBieganek)\
**Post date:** [October 21, 2021, 4:36pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/extremely-long-times-fetching-julia-general-registry-on-macos/70123/3 "2021-10-21T16:36:50Z")

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> [@hendri54](#):
>
> One possible solution: try to switch over to the new Pkg server infrastructure

This did the trick. For future reference, all I did was delete the `.julia` directory and then add a new package, which had the effect of deleting the old git-cloned General registry and installing a new version of the registry from the Pkg server.

I suppose I probably could have been less disruptive and only removed the registry instead of the whole `.julia` directory, with something like `pkg> registry rm General`.

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**Author:** ![brucala](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/brucala/32/14229_2.png) [@brucala](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/brucala)\
**Post date:** [October 24, 2021, 9:38am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/extremely-long-times-fetching-julia-general-registry-on-macos/70123/4 "2021-10-24T09:38:46Z")

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I was having this issue on my old Linux laptop. `pkg> registry rm General` followed by `pkg> registry add General` did the trick, fetching is fast again!