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Beach Ball!!!

N

ncc1701d

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Mar 30, 2008
437
70
OK... I have the 2.93 '09 Mac Pro with 8GB of Ram, 4x1TB in raid 0.

I still get beach balls when doing the basic of things. For example, it sometimes takes 10 seconds for the dictionary to come up after right clicking a word and selecting "look up dictionary". Then again, sometimes it is instant. Similar things happen when looking at a document that is a .pdf, for example, and I want to save as a jpeg. Whether I go to "save as" or through the "print" and then selecting "save as a pdf", it can beach ball for 8-10 seconds.

I thought it may have been a ram problem and from another thread I discovered the "activity monitor" and have that running constantly in the dock showing me "System Memory" and for the stuff I'm doing, it hardly ever gets close to half the pie chart.

Should I be monitoring CPU instead? Any thoughts?
 
ncc1701d said:
OK... I have the 2.93 '09 Mac Pro with 8GB of Ram, 4x1TB in raid 0.

I still get beach balls when doing the basic of things. For example, it sometimes takes 10 seconds for the dictionary to come up after right clicking a word and selecting "look up dictionary". Then again, sometimes it is instant. Similar things happen when looking at a document that is a .pdf, for example, and I want to save as a jpeg. Whether I go to "save as" or through the "print" and then selecting "save as a pdf", it can beach ball for 8-10 seconds.

I thought it may have been a ram problem and from another thread I discovered the "activity monitor" and have that running constantly in the dock showing me "System Memory" and for the stuff I'm doing, it hardly ever gets close to half the pie chart.

Should I be monitoring CPU instead? Any thoughts?
Click to expand...

I had similar issues and realized it was my hard disks going to sleep even though the box was unchecked in energy saver. The hard disks waking up would cause the beach ball for 10-15secs. An SMC reset and PRAM reset solves the problem, but every time I boot into Windows 7, the same thing happens again when I return to OSX. The only solution I have found so far is to do the resets when finished working in Windows.
 
It's your disks waking up or in some cases, accessing distant parts. Even a striped RAID can't help this - there is only one, expensive cure: an SSD for your boot/apps disk.
 
Thanks for the replies. I'll check out the first option - it would make sense considering the occasional boot in vista. Second option... It's not the money, it's the lack of slots. I have the 4 x 1tb's raid 0, one SuperDrive and vista is on a 5th drive iso the second SuperDrive slot.

I'll do some research on the resets you suggest - thank you!!
 
Look around on the forum...a lot of enterprising members have found places to cram an SSD in where you wouldn't expect. Though if it's another SATA port you need, you might need a new PCIe card to add it, which would be added expense.

On the other hand, the performance increase might justify removing one of your HDDs.
 
TheStrudel said:
Look around on the forum...a lot of enterprising members have found places to cram an SSD in where you wouldn't expect. Though if it's another SATA port you need, you might need a new PCIe card to add it, which would be added expense.

On the other hand, the performance increase might justify removing one of your HDDs.
Click to expand...

Thanks Strudel, I'll look around as you suggest and see about the PCIe card too. Could be ... fun :)
 
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