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Beachball when Multitasking with iTunes

I

indigotheory

macrumors regular
Original poster
May 1, 2009
153
36
Ok, ive had one of the 2.0ghz aluminium macbooks, clean install of snow leopard and etc......

Ive noticed whenever i have music playing in itunes, when im browsing the net, or the app store or anything else, things seem to slow and i ALWAYS get the spinning beachball, music seems to either stop or skip and it feels like like its always trying to catch up with itself.

What is this all about?

After what everyone says about the macs and their reputation and etc, it is seeming like it struggles when doing these simple tasks! As in just purely listening to music (having itunes running) and browsing the net (having safari running)

Does anyone have any suggestions?
 
Check your RAM usage with Activity Monitor. If there's only very small amount of free RAM, you might want to buy more
 
indigotheory said:
Ok, ive had one of the 2.0ghz aluminium macbooks, clean install of snow leopard and etc......

Ive noticed whenever i have music playing in itunes, when im browsing the net, or the app store or anything else, things seem to slow and i ALWAYS get the spinning beachball, music seems to either stop or skip and it feels like like its always trying to catch up with itself.

What is this all about?

After what everyone says about the macs and their reputation and etc, it is seeming like it struggles when doing these simple tasks! As in just purely listening to music (having itunes running) and browsing the net (having safari running)

Does anyone have any suggestions?
Click to expand...

Remember iTunes loves to read a lot from the HDD. Therefore, it is inevitable that at one point your HDD will clog or slow down due to high iTunes demand. Remember, it has to read the many songs all over the platter.
 
thanks for the replies,

I have the stock 2ghz of ddr3 ram and i did upgrade my harddrive to a western digital scorpio blue which is 500gb,
i have 305gb free and my itunes library is 65gb

would this make any other differences?
 
I'd upgrade to the full 4GB if you can afford it.
I've heard that the alu MBs can support more RAM but I'm not entirely sure
 
upgrading to 4 GB should help, but also check out the main page of this forum to download the update that addresses this type of issue. For me it seemed like every once in a while I would beachball when multitasking but I haven't experienced it yet since updating.

the aluminum macbooks can take 4 GB at max, unlike the revised macbook pros which support up to 8.

more info at the performance update here:
http://support.apple.com/kb/DL947
 
I have the same problem, and when I try to eject my ipod I get a 5-7sec beachball also.

OS X 10.6.1
iTunes 9
2.4GHz C2D
4GB DDR3
7200 320GB HDD

No matter what I do 10.6 will give me more beach balls then 10.5, and iTunes makes the problem worse. The new Performance Update 1.0 made things a LITTLE better with OS X, but not with iTunes.
 
Had similar issues with vmware, itunes, and other apps. Yesterday Apple released a performance update that (knock on wood) resolved the issue for me, much better performance. This update addresses hard drive performance, etc.

Here is the info - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3901.

It should show up for you in Software Update.
 
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