Help me understand "rules matched" loading...

[sourcecodemage]

Help me understand "rules matched" loading... and slow "preview rule" responsiveness.

A few things I've notices since relocating rules ( and files ) to my downloads folder -
- Every time I look at my ~/Downloads folder "rule status", the "rules matched" status always says "loading...".
- Every time I preview an enabled rule on a file it should process, the first condition matches immediately and the others ( usually 4 others ) take a minute or 2 to match.
- Despite rules that move files matching, I have days-old files that have not been moved.

HELP
Environment
- I'm on M4 Macbook Pro running macOS 26.6
- Hazel is 6.1.2
- Source and destination storage for files is internal 1TB SSD

Any clues on what could be slowing down rules matching and previews? I removed files > 1GB from the folder in case parsing them was the culprit. I've paused rules in folders other than Downloads to eliminate them as issue.

If I search Hazel logs for Downloads, it looks like the rules are processing:

"2026-08-07 07:31:21.676 hazelworker[90894] Processing folder Downloads
2026-08-07 07:32:51.624 hazelworker[91360] Processing folder Downloads
2026-08-07 07:32:53.724 hazelworker[91360] Done processing folder Downloads"

[Mr_Noodle]

What does your rule look like? What conditions do you have after that first one?

[sourcecodemage]

Hazel rules are working and responsive now. I think Hazel must have had a full buffer or something that took hours to clear

What I did was decide to re-organize my documents , which entailed

• Relocated my Hazel "Inbox" from icloud drive/Hazel/Watched to ~/Downloads
• Relocated destination folders and files as well to a new "PARA" folder structure.
• Moved the rules to the new Inbox folder.
• I deactivated the relocated rules because practically all of them had error indicators next to their name because their destinations folders no longer existed.

After that, I noticed:

• the perpetual "rules loading" issue and very sluggish behavior of Hazel when creating and previewing rules.
• Errors in the Hazel log for the deactivated rules. Even though they were deactivated, Hazel was still evaluating them for some reason.

To get rid of the errors, I created a folder called "dummy" and replaced all of the folders in the deactivated rules with it.

That cleared the little error icons next to each rule, but Hazel was still unresponsive. So I posted here to get help and closed my Macbook since I was done for the day. The next morning, I checked Hazel. The loading rules and sluggishness were both gone.

Rule previews and filing of ... files was responsive.

The only thing I would consider a bug was that disabled rules were still evaluated and showed errors in the Hazel log.

I'm still sorting through errors , one is the known Onedrive .Trash folder error. I think the others are problems I caused by moving and renaming folders, which I'm investigating now.