Finder Having (more) Issues lately

[bug]

Hi All -

So in the past couple of months (although it doesn't seem to be specifically tied to an update that I've noticed), the macs in our home - both intel and ppc - have started having finder just die every so often.

Ever since 10.2 I've been able to make finder die (permanently, force quit's restart does not help, kill in the terminal, even with -9, doesn't help - technically the process goes 'zombie' for those of you who care about the unix side of it). You can induce the problem by taking a large file on a wifi network and copy it to a remote smb share and simply walk with the laptop to the range limits of the network. 50% of the time, this will cause finder to unrecoverably die (in my experience with multiple ibooks and powerbooks with OS X versions 10.2 to current).

This is easy to avoid - I just don't copy large files when near the range limits of a network, but now it happens on my Powermac and our home's new core2 duo iMac even when just doing local file operations. It seems to impact me the most when doing file operations with an external USB drive. It implies to me that when there is a read failure, OS X never times out the operation and cannot recover from the failure. Please note that it is not exclusive to the use of a USB drive, it just comes up there more often. Also note that when I say I'm doing large file operations, I mean I may be copying 30 gigs of files that are up to 4 gigs each.

The rest of the system continues to work, and if I need to I can actually delay having to reboot by using Gnome or terminal to do file operations - but I never get finder back.

This has led to me having to reboot my Powermac more times in the past 2 months than in my entire time owning the computer.

Does anyone else have this issue or have any suggestions on how to fix it?

 

[Super Macho Man]

The Finder has big problems with networked shares. The same thing happens if you mount a remote share and turn off the computer sharing it - the Finder is not multithreaded and will sit there waiting for like 5 minutes for it to respond, all the while completely unresponsive. SMB, AFP, WebDAV are all affected. I do believe the Finder will recover and present a dialog telling you the share is no longer available or something after a few minutes - it shouldn't be permanently hung.

As for it happening to local volumes, I've never experienced that. I copy 15GB files between a firewire HD and the internal HD all the time. There should not be any significant read failures from a hard drive - if there are, then the HD is probably damaged or contains corrupt data (i.e. due to damage).

 

[bug]

...yeah...

I've left it sit and spin over night at times hoping for it to recover. At the moment my "empty trash" operation has been going for about 2 hours now. I agree local drives should not have read errors if the drive is ok. Even if the drives are all dying (which is unlikely, as there are a number of them and they are newish and spanned over multiple computers), you'd still think finder would be able to recover. Explorer on XP (just for example, not trying to be a smart ass) will eventually let you know that read errors are happening on a drive instead of just hanging indefinitely.

I also happen to have these drives hooked up through 2 USB hubs in series, so that might not be helping, but even so - it does happen with other drives (and other computers as well) so that would merely explain why it happens on that drive more often.

Its too bad because I end up rebooting my Macs more than my linux or XP boxes just because of this one error - but the rest of the OS is unaffected, but there's only so long you can stand not having finder respond! If this one issue was fixed I'd likely never reboot my OS X machines.

anyway - sounds like there is nothing I can do but hope that 10.5 finally fixes finder.

 

[Nermal]

anyway - sounds like there is nothing I can do but hope that 10.5 finally fixes finder.

The latest 10.5 release notes mention that it's been fixed, but it won't be the first time that Apple's said that.

 

[bug]

The latest 10.5 release notes mention that it's been fixed, but it won't be the first time that Apple's said that.

Yeah - I've heard that before. Gotta keep the hope though! I used to have the problem where my PB wouldn't wake up from sleep all the time (well, it would wake up in that I could ssh into it, but the backlight on the screen stayed off) - they claimed to have fixed that like 3 times, but eventually it was honestly fixed and that solved maybe 50% of my reboots. This would be the other 50%!

 

[bug]

...any tips for recovery?

So since it seems that I'll just be dealing with this at least until 10.5 comes out, does anyone have any tips on restarting finder?

In my cases, leaving the finder to timeout doesn't do anything - the problem persists forever.

Obviously I know about using the force quit's restart option, but that never works in this situation. Next I try using kill in various ways in the terminal. This also does not really accomplish anything, even kill -9 (yeah, I know that it should not be used generally) is not able to kill the process.

Is there some trick I'm missing out on? Is there some associated process I have to terminate first, or something like that?

...man its annoying. By far my biggest gripe with OS X. Possibly my only gripe these days, but its a big one!