Hi everyone,
I’m experiencing major performance issues with the Bitwarden desktop app on my MacBook Air M1 running the latest macOS 26.0.1. The app takes around 5 minutes to load both before and after signing in. Scrolling through items is painfully slow—almost unusable due to constant loading delays.
I’ve already tried uninstalling and reinstalling the app (downloaded from the Mac App Store) a few times, but the issue persists.
Has anyone else run into this? Any suggestions on how to fix or troubleshoot it?
Have you changed your encryption settings to values greater than Bitwarden’s default? If so, that will impact how long the decryption takes, which is one of the primary activities that happens during load time.
A helpful tip to clear the cache improved things significantly! thanks to @Nail1684!
However, the app is still quite slow after biometric login, taking around 45 seconds to unlock. My current KDF settings are:
KDF algorithm: Argon2id
Iterations: 4
Memory: 64 MB
Parallelism: 5
These settings work flawlessly and quickly on my mobile devices (iOS 26) and browser extensions on chrome, but the desktop app remains noticeably slower.
Has anyone else experienced this? Any tips for improving the speed on the desktop app?
@Keanen If I see it correctly, this PR would solve that (–> upgrades to electron version 36.9.3) and this one also (–> upgrades electron to version 37.7.0, as currently declared – BTW a bit hidden in “files changed” you can see that version), as those versions seem to be fine according to that site you linked:
@Keanen As I wrote before, it could be implemented… could also be the case, that that pull request was merged, but it will only be “activated” in one of the next releases.
