Excessive Spinning Beach Ball

[MonkeyET]

I have an early 2009 20" 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo iMac which has recently been upgraded to a 1 TB Green Caviar Western Digital Drive and 8 GB RAM. I did a clean install of Mountain Lion on the new hard drive and restored the users via Time Machine. The hard drive is less than 2/3 full.

What I am running into is the spinning beach ball when I click on my login before I even get to type my password. It is always of a different length so I can't find a correlation. I also get it randomly when using different programs. The only one I have noticed from Activity Monitor is that Flash usually tops out my CPU performance. That would be fine if it was the only time it happened but it isn't.

I have very little third party software on here but I am looking if anyone has any brilliant suggestions to help overcome this. Someone had suggested I remove the password for my user, then add it back due to some issues with the keychain, but I couldn't find specifics on how to accomplish this to see if it would actually work.

 

[GGJstudios]

What I am running into is the spinning beach ball when I click on my login before I even get to type my password. It is always of a different length so I can't find a correlation. I also get it randomly when using different programs. The only one I have noticed from Activity Monitor is that Flash usually tops out my CPU performance. That would be fine if it was the only time it happened but it isn't.

Check the following locations for apps that automatically launch on startup and delete any you don't need/want:

• System Preferences > Accounts > yourusername > Login Items
  (Lion and ML users: System Preferences > Users & Groups > yourusername > Login Items)
  
  
• /Library/LaunchAgents/
  (Lion and ML users: In Finder, click Go > Go to Folder > then enter the path above)
  
  
• ~/Library/LaunchAgents/
  (Lion and ML users: In Finder, click Go > Go to Folder > then enter the path above)
  
  
• /Library/StartupItems/
  (Lion and ML users: In Finder, click Go > Go to Folder > then enter the path above)

Follow every step of the following instructions precisely. Do not skip any steps.

1. Launch Activity Monitor
2. Change "My Processes" at the top to "All Processes"
3. Click on the "% CPU" column heading once or twice, so the arrow points downward (highest values on top).
   (If that column isn't visible, right-click on the column headings and check it, NOT "CPU Time")
4. Click on the System Memory tab at the bottom.
5. Take a screen shot of the entire Activity Monitor window, then scroll down to see the rest of the list, take another screen shot
6. Post your screenshots.

If you're having performance issues, this may help:

Performance Tips For Mac OS X​

 

[MonkeyET]

Thanks for the recommendations. There were several old items in the first two of the LaunchAgent folders you described, but nothing in the third. I deleted everything since from the description it was of old software that has since been updated. I did delete a startup item that said something about iTunes so it would open when a device was connected. Here are the screen shots from Activity Monitor. Not sure how it worked so far but we will see.

 

[GGJstudios]

Here are the screen shots from Activity Monitor. Not sure how it worked so far but we will see.

Nothing there stands out as being a resource hog at the time of the screen shots. I don't know if you get beachballs when surfing the web, but generally speaking, Flash is notorious for consuming system resources, raising temps and decreasing battery life. For Flash-related issues:

• Find your Flash version and make sure it's the latest version available. Never install or update Flash from a pop-up on a website. Always go to Adobe's site to get Flash or updates.
• Install ClickToFlash (Safari), Flashblock (Firefox) or FlashBlock (Chrome) to control which Flash content plays on websites.
• Install ClickToPlugin (Safari) to prevent Safari from launching plug-ins automatically, resulting in faster browsing, reduced fan usage, and increased battery life. It can also replace many plug-in-based media players with Safari’s native HTML5 media player.
• Try using the YouTube HTML5 Video Player to watch YouTube videos, when available. (May impact fullscreen viewing. See link for details.) Some have reported better performance with HTML5, while some have reported worse. Try it and find out what works best for you.