Beachballitis

John Ferman wrote:
> I quite frequently run into situations where the beachball spins and
> spins and spins and ....... This comes about upon clicking on
> something like a drive icon or a file name or an application or a menu
> item - the starters vary a whole lot. Now it seems to me that the OS
> must be consulting some sort of file to complete the 'click order.' In
> the old days I had heard about a file the geeky guys called 'the heap'
> which was said to be a place for the OS to store command short cuts
> for the OS. So in the OS X, is there a similar file where the OS
> stores stuff useful to the OS, as in shortcuts or whatnot and when
> after months of doing stuff that file becomes 'bloated' which might
> cause beachballitis. If so, how does one go about unbloating it. I
> have searched Preferences for hints and the Tiger/Leopard reference
> books for ideas, but all are not forthcoming. So my plea is 'Ideas
> Please.' Thanks.
>
> John Ferman
> jwfermanties2.net
>
> {For starters, what version of Mac OS X are you running? Do you often
> have removable media or file servers mounted? -Andrew ]

It sounds like you're running with too little memory for what you're doing. Which means that in general the situation you're describing IS happening but not to things you can deal with but with the Virtual Memory system. What you describe can happen when the memory system is constantly having to unload from and load into memory from the disk drive.

Have you run Activity Monitor from the Utilities folder? And have you watched the value for Free when the System Memory tab (at the bottom) is selected. From what I've seen when this number gets below 50MB the system will start to slow down. When it gets down to 20MB or 10MB you get what you call Beachballitis.

They only real cure is to run fewer programs or buy more memory.

Now if you're leaving your system running for days at a time and also not quiting programs you might be running into a situation where one or more of the common programs you use "leaks" memory. This means it doesn't release memory when done with it and over time will consume more and more memory. Which can lead to the shortage noted above. And the only cure is to quit the program and at times restart the computer to get things back to a decent state.

David Ross

On 11/02/2008 6:59 PM, "John Ferman" <jwfermanties2.net> spake thus:

> In the old days I had heard about a file the geeky guys called 'the heap'
> which was said to be a place for the OS to store command short cuts
> for the OS.

No, that's definitely not what the heap was. In fact it wasn't even a file
but rather the main chunk of memory within each application (the other was
the stack), which was used to store pretty much most things related to the
normal operation of the app. "Heap" vs. "stack" more or less refers to the
internal organisation of the different chunks of memory. With the advent of
Intel-based Macs, I'm not sure if that distinction even exists any more
(it's been a very long time since I did any Mac programming).

Anyway, it's irrelevant to what you're seeing. The sorts of problems you're
getting are usually caused by either lack of system memory or by network
hangups. The former seems more likely given your symptoms.

--
Nigel Stanger, Dunedin, NEW ZEALAND.
http://xri.net/=nigel.stanger

On Feb 12, 2008, at 1:55 AM, Nigel Stanger wrote:

> Anyway, it's irrelevant to what you're seeing. The sorts of problems
> you're
> getting are usually caused by either lack of system memory or by
> network
> hangups. The former seems more likely given your symptoms.


I was having a horrible case of Beachballitis. Switching in to Safari
or Firefox would cause a 45 second case. Switching to Parallels an
even longer one.

Two things solved it for me. Going from 2 -4 gigs of ram and freeing
some disk space ( I was down to 2-3 gigs free on my 200 gig drive).

Now I never see the ol' beach ball for more than a second.

Yours

Chris Balay
http://www.whiteplume.net
chris.balaygawpus.com
IM: chrisbalayaol.com

Running OS 10.5.1 on an iMac G5 with 1.25 GB RAM. No file servers at
all; mounted CDs only when needed. Activity monitor showed about 585
MB in active use, about 250 MB free, about 1.01 GB in use. I generally
try to avoid having many applications open. There seems to be no
relationship with open applications in that beachballitis is often
right after a restart.

On Tue, 12 Feb 2008, John Ferman wrote:

> Running OS 10.5.1 on an iMac G5 with 1.25 GB RAM. No file servers at
> all; mounted CDs only when needed. Activity monitor showed about 585
> MB in active use, about 250 MB free, about 1.01 GB in use. I generally
> try to avoid having many applications open. There seems to be no
> relationship with open applications in that beachballitis is often
> right after a restart.

Step back for a second.

The spinning beachball essentially means that the application the mouse
cursor is currently pointing at is too busy to respond to user input, as
it's currently blocked waiting for some resource (memory, CPU, disk, or
network activity being the obvious candidates).

If you just get it with one program, then that program is where to
focus; maybe restart it, reset caches & preferences, etc.

If you're getting it everywhere, then you're locking up at the system
level, and again the main system resources are the place to focus:
memory, CPU, disk, or network. (It could be other things, but that's
less likely --

Activity Monitor is a decent place to start looking. The bottom of the
main window has buttons for CPU, Memory, Disk Activity, Disk Usage, and
Network.

 * If CPU is persistently hovering at or near 100%, you either simply
need a faster computer, or (more likely) some background process is
hogging all the CPU time. Have the main table show you "All Processes"
and sort on the "%CPU" column to see which one(s) are the hogs; forcing
them to quite could help, unless it's a critical system process, in
which case if you're allowed to proceed, the machine will crash in some
obvious or subtle way. One way to find out! :-)

 * If "System Memory" has a teeny sliver of green Free memory on the pie
chart, you're starved for RAM and should consider upgrading. From what
you've said, this isn't likely to be it, but it's common which is why
the other respondants have latched on to it as a candidate.

 * The "Disk Activity" tab is a bit subtle to interpret, but if you
click the radio button for either IO or Data, and find that it's spiking
frequently, there may be a disk issue. Maybe. Personally I think there
are better tests for disk problems, including software like Disk Utility
or Disk Warrior, and scanning /var/log/system.log (in either Console or
from the command line in Terminal) for phrases such as "I/O error" or
"kernel[0]: disk0s2: 0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED)". If you see anything like
that, you have a hard drive problem that an erase & install of Leopard
*might* fix, but you may end up needing to replace the hard drive.

 * The "Disk Usage" tab can let you see how much space is free on your
boot drive. The rule of thumb is that it should be at least 10% - 20%
free to keep things running smoothly; if the hard drive fills up, the
system will quickly grind to a halt, in which case the solution is
simply to start looking for things to delete, offload to an external
hard drive, or burn to CD/DVD. Disk Inventory X is a simple GUI tool for
this, but so is the Finder's "list" view: open a window at the top of
the hard drive, go to Menu > View > Show View Options, and at the bottom
check off "Calculate all sizes", then just sort by the Size column. Both
Finder & DIX take a few minutes, but will eventually give you a simple
report of what is consuming space. For most people, music, pictures, and
videos are the big ones here, but the only way to know is to check.

My hunch is that if you're suddenly seeing constant beachballs, and you
don't seem to be starved for RAM, and your hard drive didn't recently
fill up, then you have the beginnings of a bad hard drive. Back up now
while you still can, and make arrangements to have the drive replaced.

If you're out of warranty, a new SATA drive for an original iMac G5 is
simple to install and cheap to buy, though for the later iSight version
it's still cheap but it's much more work to install.


--
Chris

I've found the two big causes of BeachBallitis for me have been that it's dwindling free space on my startup drive, which doesn't sound like a problem in your case, or, a few times, it was a disguised case of TooManyFontitis.

How many fonts do you have installed? I had hundreds installed and couldn't figure out why my machine was running so slow; disabling all but the essential fonts solved my problem.

A responder mentioned too many fonts. I once heard that it is courting
disaster to fiddle-faddle with the fonts, like trashing them. My fonts
folder is huge because most applications nowadays load their own
faves. So my main question is "Is there any solid guidance out there
on how to safely dump fonts."

Before OS X, the Mac OSs always wanted
just a few fonts for its own use: charcoal, chicago, monaco, geneva,
and one other I have forgotten. In those days, I forced my self to get
along with one serif, one san serif, symbols, and one wing-ding -
those served me well and they are the fonts I always use in spite of
the hundreds in that font folder now. My back is breaking and I am
groaning from the burden of knowing they are there.

Is there any help
for souls like me.

Thanks, rant over.



John Ferman
jwfermanties2.net

Wow, that was impressive. I just came back from a couple of preliminary
classes to discover my iMac running like a dog and beachballing all over the
place. I'd left System Preferences open and it was using 1.5GB of *real* RAM
(out of a total of 2), which makes me think that there's a memory leak in
there somewhere. It had only been running for about an hour and a half. Hmm,
with it sitting open now, I can see the RSIZE occasionally ticking upwards
in Activity Monitor. Something to remember in future.

--
Nigel Stanger, Dunedin, NEW ZEALAND.
http://xri.net/=nigel.stanger

>A responder mentioned too many fonts. I once heard that it is courting
>disaster to fiddle-faddle with the fonts, like trashing them. My fonts
>folder is huge because most applications nowadays load their own
>faves. So my main question is "Is there any solid guidance out there
>on how to safely dump fonts."

You mean like Sharon Zardetto's comprehensive books on the topic,
which cover this topic exactly and in great detail? :-)

Take Control of Fonts in Mac OS X: Tiger Edition
<http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/fonts-macosx.html>

Take Control of Font Problems in Mac OS X: Tiger Edition
<http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/font-problems-macosx.html>

Take Control of Fonts in Leopard
<http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/leopard-fonts.html>

cheers... -Adam

On 2/21/08 6:38 PM, "John Ferman" <jwfermanties2.net> wrote:

> A responder mentioned too many fonts. I once heard that it is courting
> disaster to fiddle-faddle with the fonts, like trashing them. My fonts
> folder is huge because most applications nowadays load their own
> faves. So my main question is "Is there any solid guidance out there
> on how to safely dump fonts."

I'd advise getting a copy of "Take Control of Fonts in Leopard" from Take
Control books. Too much to put into an e-mail message!

The only really irritating "beachballitis" I get is when playing a DVD movie which encounters a scratch or other impediment which it cannot resolve. Most often, after a few minutes it gives up and gives me a choice to Quit. However, upon occasion, that never happens and a hardware restart is the only choice I have discovered. Any thoughts on other solutions?

(OS 10.4.11 on MAC PRO)

On Sat, 23 Feb 2008, jon338 wrote:

> The only really irritating "beachballitis" I get is when playing a DVD
> movie which encounters a scratch or other impediment which it cannot
> resolve. [...] Any thoughts on other solutions?
>
> (OS 10.4.11 on MAC PRO)

Upgrade to Leopard?

My understanding is that the multi-threaded AutoFS support it introduces
is supposed to minimize this behavior -- if one volume is locked up,
whether that be a local drive or a remote file server, it shouldn't be
able to lock up the whole system.


--
Chris Devers

On 25/02/2008 2:12 PM, "Chris Devers" <cdeverspobox.com> spake thus:

> My understanding is that the multi-threaded AutoFS support it introduces
> is supposed to minimize this behavior -- if one volume is locked up,
> whether that be a local drive or a remote file server, it shouldn't be
> able to lock up the whole system.

I think I've seen that already --- I've certainly had a situation where one
window in Path Finder had locked up, but the rest were fine. It was very
weird :)

--
Nigel Stanger, Dunedin, NEW ZEALAND.
http://xri.net/=nigel.stanger

On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 7:45 AM, Nigel Stanger
<nstangerinfoscience.otago.ac.nz> wrote:
> I think I've seen that already --- I've certainly had a situation where one
> window in Path Finder had locked up, but the rest were fine. It was very
> weird :)

Funny that you mentioned Path Finder. I've been having the same problem with it.

Ever since I upgraded to Leopard, I've had to force quit Path Finder
several times.

____________________
Ryoichi Morita
Coarsegold, CA
http://www.rjmorita.com