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Fan over working and beach ball issue

U

urizen

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 9, 2013
14
0
I use a macbook pro 13'' early 2011 running OS X 10.9.5. My fans have been over working for no reason, no programs take up ram on the activity monitor. Beach balls and system freezes follow shortly after the fan starts running.
sometimes the mac overheats then the fans kick in followed by the beach balls, but there is no app running that would cause it to over heat, it seems to happen by itself.
I upgraded my ram from 4 gb to 8 gb, booted in safe mode, ran apple hardware tests, cleaned the caches with onyx and repaired disk permission but it still persists. any ideas on what this is and how to stop it?
 
You mentioned looking at RAM usage in Activity Monitor, but did you look at the CPU tab? Sort by CPU% and see if anything is chewing up CPU cycles there.
 
urizen said:
I use a macbook pro 13'' early 2011 running OS X 10.9.5. My fans have been over working for no reason, no programs take up ram on the activity monitor. Beach balls and system freezes follow shortly after the fan starts running.
sometimes the mac overheats then the fans kick in followed by the beach balls, but there is no app running that would cause it to over heat, it seems to happen by itself.
I upgraded my ram from 4 gb to 8 gb, booted in safe mode, ran apple hardware tests, cleaned the caches with onyx and repaired disk permission but it still persists. any ideas on what this is and how to stop it?
Click to expand...

I had a similar problem on my iMac with Mavericks. Fan would come on, then 'Beachball of Doom' several times a day - in simple tasks and more memory intensive usage. The only way out was a force reboot. When I started using Yosemite, all those problems went away. I'm not saying that is the answer, but it worked for me.
 
Alimar said:
I had a similar problem on my iMac with Mavericks. Fan would come on, then 'Beachball of Doom' several times a day - in simple tasks and more memory intensive usage. The only way out was a force reboot. When I started using Yosemite, all those problems went away. I'm not saying that is the answer, but it worked for me.
Click to expand...

how is yosemite? is it bearable? i'm hearing some bad things about it
 
Weaselboy said:
You mentioned looking at RAM usage in Activity Monitor, but did you look at the CPU tab? Sort by CPU% and see if anything is chewing up CPU cycles there.
Click to expand...

i took some screenshots of the cpu on activity moniter when the freezing starts and stops. pic 1 is when the fan starts, pic 2 is when the system freezes and pic 3 is when it goes back to normal

icn3hz.jpg


zt7m2f.jpg


oh38qw.png
 
is there anything I should look out for when I upgrade? any preferences I should change after upgrading?
 
urizen said:
i took some screenshots of the cpu on activity moniter when the freezing starts and stops. pic 1 is when the fan starts, pic 2 is when the system freezes and pic 3 is when it goes back to normal
Click to expand...

You need to sort in that next column over CPU% so we can see everything running.

I do see that Wondershare Player consistently using around 26%. I would start by deleting that.
 
i got rid of wondershare. I also erased the disk and did a clean install. the beach ball and fan issue stopped. when i did a software update [not to yosemite] the problem came back. I think i have to get yosemite
 
urizen said:
i got rid of wondershare. I also erased the disk and did a clean install. the beach ball and fan issue stopped. when i did a software update [not to yosemite] the problem came back. I think i have to get yosemite
Click to expand...

Yosemite is fine if you want it, but I doubt that will fix this. If you sort the column by CPU% you should be able to see what is going in there.
 
Weaselboy said:
Yosemite is fine if you want it, but I doubt that will fix this. If you sort the column by CPU% you should be able to see what is going in there.
Click to expand...

sorry for the late reply. here are the CPU% when it is before, during and after the freeze

52q9c.png


2s8fq03.png


s0vkh4.png
 
urizen said:
sorry for the late reply. here are the CPU% when it is before, during and after the freeze
Click to expand...

It looks like you have some sort go Flash game or something running there in Firefox. How are things if you quit Firefox and use Safari instead for a bit?
 
it's running a bit better when i use firefox. i did a clean install of mavericks and updated to yosemite, it's definitely 'quieter' in terms of some issues, but the system freezes do occur when i play a video file or use a program like photoshop.
 
I had that fan/beachball problem a couple times a day with my iMac running Mavericks. Safari would end up taking 7GB of RAM. Photoshop would crash. Time Machine always stalled. Since I've been on Yosemite, no more problems. I also designate external drive for scratch disks now (PS).
 
I had this problem on a 2011 MBA, starting after installing Mavericks. It was entirely a software problem on Apple's part. It took them about 6 months to issue a patch. Probably the patch for you is just baked into Yosemite. Update!
 
sorry for the mix up I meant safari which is running better than firefox. the way things are looking now i might have to wait for a few updates.
 
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