Mavericks and the spinning beach ball issue.

[Lankyman]

I'm positive this issue has been aired before, not just on this forum but many others. The issue - spinning beach ball with Mavericks.

I have a mid-2011 base 21.5" iMac, the only mod being I took the memory up to 8 gig when first purchased.

I don't drive it hard and having used computers from the early days I am in the habit of rarely having more than one programme open at a time. Even when surfing the net I don't tend to have more than a couple of tabs open at once.

Up until I installed Mavericks I had never seen the spinning beach ball on my iMac even when running Windows in Parallels.

Since I installed Mavericks I get the spinning beach ball often, along with bouncing dock icons and system hangs when the beach ball appears.

I have spoken to Apple support and after they had me carry out numerous tests have given the Mac a clean bill of health. Rather curiously though they did say that if I could hang on until Yosemite then I should see an improvement.

All this leads me to the conclusion that Apple have some issues with Mavericks which as per usual they are keeping tight lipped about. To be honest I wish I had never installed Mavericks and wish I could go back to ML.

I've also notice the iMac running hotter since Mavericks too.

 

[hologram]

All this leads me to the conclusion that Apple have some issues with Mavericks which as per usual they are keeping tight lipped about.

I'm afraid you're wrong. How could they possibly keep tight-lipped about something if millions of people were having the same problem? Do you see these forums swamped with complaints about beachballs? Apple doesn't control what gets posted here.

Sorry you're having problems, but I had the exact opposite experience. I had a lot of beachballs under Mountain Lion, but hardly ever see one with Mavericks. It must be something with your setup.

Do you have the same slowness if you boot into Safe Mode?

 

[Lankyman]

I'm afraid you're wrong. How could they possibly keep tight-lipped about something if millions of people were having the same problem? Do you see these forums swamped with complaints about beachballs? Apple doesn't control what gets posted here.

Sorry you're having problems, but I had the exact opposite experience. I had a lot of beachballs under Mountain Lion, but hardly ever see one with Mavericks. It must be something with your setup.

Do you have the same slowness if you boot into Safe Mode?

Ah I see! you are having no issues so I must be wrong - love the logic. Try doing some searches on Google and you will see plenty of similar posts to mine. Apple support couldn't fault my setup yet without seeing it you are able to make this sweeping statement.

 

[hologram]

Apple support couldn't fault my setup yet without seeing it you are able to make this sweeping statement.

Yes, I can. It should be obvious that if it were a general problem with Mavericks, as you suggest, this forum, the Apple support forum, and all the others would be swamped with complaints.

So you found a few similar complaints by Googling, and from that you make the sweeping statement that Apple is covering up an issue that obviously not everyone has?

Did you even bother trying Safe mode, as I suggested, or are you just upset that I questioned your sweeping statement?

 

[triptolemus]

I'm afraid you're wrong. How could they possibly keep tight-lipped about something if millions of people were having the same problem? Do you see these forums swamped with complaints about beachballs? Apple doesn't control what gets posted here.

Sorry you're having problems, but I had the exact opposite experience. I had a lot of beachballs under Mountain Lion, but hardly ever see one with Mavericks. It must be something with your setup.

Do you have the same slowness if you boot into Safe Mode?

So, you pick apart a single (okay, maybe a little misguided) comment from the OP and ignore the crux of the post?

I'm also having beach ball issues with Mavericks after doing a clean install about 4 months ago, primarily in Safari, but Mail and Preview are good for a game of ball, too. I've read all the beach-ball posts, tried some of the solutions, none have worked for me... I'm always interested in reading a beach ball thread where someone might post something insightful, rather than just tossing out an arrogant comment like you did. Worthless.

It may not be a widespread problem, and there may be a particular set of configurations more susceptible to the beach balling than others, but you cannot simply deny the beach-balling as a figment of someone's imagination. The symptoms of the problem, whatever their size and scope, are well documented.

 

[Weaselboy]

Lanky> Your system is plenty powerful enough to run Mavs smoothly, and there have not been widespread reports of any specific issue with the iMac model you have. Just my experience here in the forums these Mavericks issues almost always are one of two things. The first, and most common, is a conflict with some software (usually a utility) you have installed, and secondly, a hardware problem like a failing hard drive.

If you like we can try out a couple things to try and narrow this down?

Try the safe mode boot like hologram mentioned. What that does is run a fsck disk check at startup then also bypasses any startup/login items you have running, so it eliminates those as the problem. It also flushes out any system file caches. If the problem goes away with a safe mode boot, you know to start dumping startup and login items to pinpoint the problem.

Also, the next time this happens open Activity Monitor and look in the CPU tab and sort by CPU% and see if you have something there chewing up CPU cycles.

Another thing to try is make a new temp admin account and login to that account and see if the problem exists there. That will tell us if the issue is something specific to your account.

Give these things a try then come back and tell us how it went.

 

[LCD]

Apple… say(s) that if I could hang on until Yosemite then I should see an improvement.

With a 256GB SSD, my 2012 Mac Mini's constantly spinning beach balls stopped after the 10.9.2 update. This forum has many posts from knowlegeable users saying Mavericks is optimized for use with SSDs. Your post is the first I've read to confirm better compatibility in Yosemite for Macs without one, if that's your case.

 

[hologram]

So, you pick apart a single (okay, maybe a little misguided) comment from the OP and ignore the crux of the post?... but you cannot simply deny the beach-balling as a figment of someone's imagination.

I never said it was a figment of someone's imagination. Where did you read that? I said some people were having a problem but it wasn't a general issue with Mavericks.

And I didn't ignore the problem, either. I suggested that he try it in Safe mode, but I don't think he did. Relax!

 

[Weaselboy]

Apple… say(s) that if I could hang on until Yosemite then I should see an improvement.

With a 256GB SSD, my 2012 Mac Mini's constantly spinning beach balls stopped after the 10.9.2 update. This forum has many posts from knowlegeable users saying Mavericks is optimized for use with SSDs. Your post is the first I've read to confirm better compatibility in Yosemite for Macs without one, if that's your case.

Heck everything works better with an SSD.

Where I strongly disagree with some of the posters you mentioned is when I see people saying Mavericks does not work well/properly with a hard drive and just across the board telling people to buy an SSD if they have trouble with Mavericks. I realize you were not saying that, but just did not want the OP thinking a new SSD is his only solution.

 

[LCD]

Heck everything works better with an SSD.

Where I strongly disagree with some of the posters you mentioned is when I see people saying Mavericks does not work well/properly with a hard drive and just across the board telling people to buy an SSD if they have trouble with Mavericks. I realize you were not saying that, but just did not want the OP thinking a new SSD is his only solution.

It might be WB

 

[Lankyman]

Hologram, if you re-read my original post you will see that I said Apple had me carry out numerous tests. One of these tests was safe mode start up. One prog I know causes issues of beach ball spinning is MS office 2011. It has been like this since Mavericks install but support could not find any issue with it.

 

[crjackson2134]

Heck everything works better with an SSD.

Where I strongly disagree with some of the posters you mentioned is when I see people saying Mavericks does not work well/properly with a hard drive and just across the board telling people to buy an SSD if they have trouble with Mavericks. I realize you were not saying that, but just did not want the OP thinking a new SSD is his only solution.

I have to agree STRONGLY. I only recently installed my SSD, and Mavericks has been very fast on a spinner drive for me. I don't feel it's optimized for an SSD at all. If that were the case we likely wouldn't need things like Trim Enabler, and tweaks like NOATIME etc... to get the best performance out of non-Apple SSDs.

 

[Lankyman]

My phone rang this morning just before I set off for the office - it was a guy from Apple support. I wasn't expecting them to call back as I thought they had simply closed the ticket.

The tech guy gets me to put the iMac back into 'safe boot' and then asks me to start deleting a number of plists - don't ask me which ones as I was to busy following his instructions. Anyway the upshot of this call is that the Mac is now starting up much quicker and most apps in the dock are starting after only one or two bounces, plus not seen the spinning beach ball as yet. Fingers crossed this might just have done the trick, though I wish I had payed more attention to the fix.

Good of CS to ring me back like this.

 

[einmusiker]

I had the same issue. lost everything on my mac and had to start again with a fresh install.

 

[romesk90]

Apple… say(s) that if I could hang on until Yosemite then I should see an improvement.

With a 256GB SSD, my 2012 Mac Mini's constantly spinning beach balls stopped after the 10.9.2 update. This forum has many posts from knowlegeable users saying Mavericks is optimized for use with SSDs. Your post is the first I've read to confirm better compatibility in Yosemite for Macs without one, if that's your case.

Where/why do people say Mavericks is optimized for SSDs? I am curious to know what this means or how the conclusion is reached.
I too get spinning beach ball issues on my Mac, I have a mechanical HDD

 

[LCD]

Where/why do people say Mavericks is optimized for SSDs?HDD

Sorry. I thought I read that but I can't find any reference to it here or on any other site.

 

[aggri1]

I've had a horrid experience with Mavericks too, on a 2011 MacBook Pro. Between five and eight bounces to launch Safari is ridiculous! And on top of that, the bounces STUTTER! It can't even animate the bounces smoothly. Frequent freezes in VLC, beachballs all over the place. Switching Safari tabs takes numerous seconds. Totally absurd, way slower than Snow Leopard ever was.

Sometimes a restart temporarily alleviates this idiocy. A restart, that classic Windows "first-of-all" troubleshooting strategy.

I'll be doing a re-install soon, with consideration of advice in threads such as these, so thanks to those of you who've posted advice.

 

[j0ester]

Did you guys go to Disk Utility and Verify/Repair Disk Permissions? I had 3 Users with a Mid 2012 and Mid 2011 iMacs, and had the same issue. Repair Disk Permissions and reinstall Sophos Antivirus fixed the issue.

 

[romesk90]

Did you guys go to Disk Utility and Verify/Repair Disk Permissions? I had 3 Users with a Mid 2012 and Mid 2011 iMacs, and had the same issue. Repair Disk Permissions and reinstall Sophos Antivirus fixed the issue.

tried it. typically there are almost no real issues. It makes no difference to performance.

It seems so hit and miss. A lot of my issues seem to revolve around indexing, spotlight, and time machine.
Disabling local snapshots improved performance greatly for me.

 

[yjchua95]

Long story short......best solution - get an SSD.

 

[hanshoff22]

Spinning beach ball a real problem on Mavericks

I'm in total agreement with Lankyman, ever since I installed Mavericks, I have had to wait for many, many, many spinning beach balls. Having used OS X from from way back in the beginning in 2001, I can honestly say that I have experienced such a severe case of spinning beach balls as I have with Mavericks. Too bad Lankyman couldn't post which plists he was told to delete. Alas, not sure if these will be corrected in Yosemite. Will be trying out Yosemite imminently.

 

[celticsfan]

spinning beach ball

I suffer from this same problem: the spinning beach ball. I am not sure.... I think that it started a month or so ago, after a Yosemite update.

Within an applicatioin, or when switching from one application to one another, the beach ball starts spinning and spinning. I wait and wait.... And I wait.

I have tried various things, e.g., zapping the pram. Etc.

Nothing seems to help.

From my searching on the Internet, I have learned that many others have this same problem.

Not to be dramatic, but it is very bad. It makes the computer almost unusable.

I wish there was some way to convey this message to Apple--to someone who could solve this problem, which, again, affects a lot of people.