Due to some cosmic craziness, the Address Book on my Mac Book Pro had swelled to over 140,000 contacts! 141,674 to be exact. There were actually even more but I was successful in killing a few off.
I have no idea what caused the duplication bug to occur, but it was way too much for the system to handle and I needed to take a fresh crack at things. There were simply too many to select all and delete or even run the built-in duplicate finder.
~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook in case you are wondering where to find the source data. I trashed the whole folder.
Phew! You certainly have a lot of contacts 😉
Glad things are back to smooth again.
I “only” have around 2500 … not sure what the heck happened here. Good thing my work exchange account is current for the export / import loop
Euh, there is a ‘remove duplicates’ menu item…
Charlie – address book crashed when running that as well as select all (or a lot) and delete