Beach balling for no reason?

[splitpea]

Help! My Mac has been beach balling on almost every context switch, and I can't see any good reason for it, since it's got plenty of free resources:

- CPU usage under 5%
- 4gb free memory
- 175 gb free disk space

I've been running activity monitor to try to track down the problem, but I'm not seeing CPU spikes or even I/O spikes associated with the freezes. The problem seems to be worst for about half an hour immediately after boot (even after all startup programs seem to have loaded) or wake from sleep/hibernation.

Early 2010 MBP running Snow Leopard.

Any suggestions?

 

[flopticalcube]

Could be a dying hard drive. Won't necessarily show up as a spike but can increase latency tremendously.

 

[splitpea]

Could be a dying hard drive. Won't necessarily show up as a spike but can increase latency tremendously.

Ugh. That'd suck. Good thing I have backups. Does it matter that disk utility shows the SMART status as verified?

 

[flopticalcube]

Ugh. That'd suck. Good thing I have backups. Does it matter that disk utility shows the SMART status as verified?

I have not found SMART to be helpful until the last few days or maybe even hours. If you have a comparable spare disk handy, you could try swapping it out.

 

[splitpea]

I have not found SMART to be helpful until the last few days or maybe even hours. If you have a comparable spare disk handy, you could try swapping it out.

Hm, I could probably try that tomorrow. Thanks.

 

[splitpea]

So, figuring I had nothing to lose, and since I've been doing a LOT of disk writes lately (developing and testing a script to migrate a large database) I decided to try defragging my hard drive. I also uninstalled a couple of startup items (a really obnoxiously unnecessary Belkin utility, for instance).

I know that OS X defrags smaller files automatically, but I've got a lot of large files, and a large quantity in places the system may not fiddle with by default (e.g. MySQL databases). This seems to have been a good move. The defragging utility indicated that my Mail.app envelope index, for instance -- one of my most frequently read and written files -- was in almost 20,000 fragments.

The results are brilliant. The system is still slower than I'd like it to be or when I first got it, and still beach balls on some operations immediately after boot, but it's no longer completely freezing on those operations. The problems with context switching seem to have gone away, and boot time (including startup item load after login) dropped by about 75%.

Of course, that doesn't mean the drive isn't dying. I'll keep taking frequent backups, naturally.

Thank you for your help!

 

[flopticalcube]

Good to hear.