Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

MBP has started beach balling ....

Y

yuanmoons

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Aug 7, 2008
283
0
Ive seen some threads about 'random' beach balling and ive had my mbp 15" for 3-4 months but i only in the last week ive noticed obvious 5-10 second gaps when the OS just beach balls. And its happening more frequently - maybe 5+ times today. When it comes back it all seems fine.

When it happens I can see the istats menu's cpu monitor drop to zero and nothing works until it comes back - although radio streaming continues. Usually notice it with Safari and today watching a Quicktime video.

Has there been a resolution to this problem?
Is there a way to log this fault to apple?

I dont feel ive changed or installed anything that i can think of that would be linked to this issue..... strange.

Anyone?
 
having the same exact issues on my uMBP 17"
wondering if its something with snow leopard? perhaps an apps goin crazy or something. im tempted to to a clean install of everything and add stuff, bit by bit and see how that goes..
 
i had this problem too. I went to my local apple store the other day and i told him i had done a clean install and everything (im a student and didn't want to deal with going back and forth, i just wanted a new hard drive). However he did manage to fix it. Here's what he did.

He booted my mac holding down the command and "s" key i believe
and when the black screen with word on it he typed in the command

fsck -fy

Now i can't guarantee it will work cuz i vaguely remember him doing it. However if you do some research on google about it you may find some concrete way to do it.

Sorry for being so vague lol, but it did work

also when he was done he typed "reboot" and hit enter to reboot the machine

Hope this helps!
 
yuanmoons said:
Ive seen some threads about 'random' beach balling and ive had my mbp 15" for 3-4 months but i only in the last week ive noticed obvious 5-10 second gaps when the OS just beach balls. And its happening more frequently - maybe 5+ times today. When it comes back it all seems fine.

When it happens I can see the istats menu's cpu monitor drop to zero and nothing works until it comes back - although radio streaming continues. Usually notice it with Safari and today watching a Quicktime video.

Has there been a resolution to this problem?
Is there a way to log this fault to apple?

I dont feel ive changed or installed anything that i can think of that would be linked to this issue..... strange.

Anyone?
Click to expand...

I need to ask. Can you post a current Screen Cap of your Activity Monitor with the Memory Consumption tab selected.

I need to see Page-Ins and Page-Outs.
 
This happens to my MBP 13 with 10.5.8, as well...I thought it was 'normal' but my last Macbook never had this happen in 3 years.
 
jav6454 said:
I need to ask. Can you post a current Screen Cap of your Activity Monitor with the Memory Consumption tab selected.

I need to see Page-Ins and Page-Outs.
Click to expand...

screen1.jpg


here ya go. not during a beachball time.. but still
 
Jurwin said:
Why is activity monitor showing that you have 3.75 gig of ram?
Click to expand...

its because were using the 9400M is active. It 'steals' 256 of your RAM. If I switched to the 9600 id get it back since it has its own dedicated RAM :)

Im going to do a fresh install sometime tonight and see if that helps any. Right now I can only guess I have something thats either not quite compatible with 10.6 or somethings got a huge mem leak? *sigh*
 
Happens to me too, particularly with iTunes open.

It shows that I have 3.75GB Ram also in the Activity Monitor.
 
No worries. OS X likes to sleep those hard drives too often for me. They take a few seconds to access data once they are awaking. This might be what you guys are seeing.
 
The following tip fixed the issue for me. YMMV.

Go to User > Library > Cache and delete everything in that folder, but don't delete the Cache folder itself.

Empty the trash and reboot
 
The screen shots I've seen are fine. No Page outs and you pretty much have like 1.8GB of RAM free, so it's not from low memory that you get the Beach Ball.

I think it's the hard drive choking down the multitasks... remember, in all our computers, the only part the doesn't like to place nice with our multitasking is our HDDs.
 
as requested.

also noticed that although safari is 64bit the "flash player (safari internet plug-in)" is not 64bit - this is an unhealthy combination? Could this play a part?
 

Attachments

  • Activity Monitor.png
    Activity Monitor.png
    30 KB · Views: 67
jav6454 said:
The screen shots I've seen are fine. No Page outs and you pretty much have like 1.8GB of RAM free, so it's not from low memory that you get the Beach Ball.

I think it's the hard drive choking down the multitasks... remember, in all our computers, the only part the doesn't like to place nice with our multitasking is our HDDs.
Click to expand...

Hmm, speak for yourself, my Samsung SSD isn't the slowest part anymore, it's the $%^&*( SataI on my MBP13" :D

But serious a lot of people here have beachballing as well. seems to have to do with SATA II and SATA II HDD.
 
i have had the beachball since new!

i thought it was the norm since i was new to mac! since i am not near any mac store will they help me over the phone?
 
Pau.c said:
i have had the beachball since new!

i thought it was the norm since i was new to mac! since i am not near any mac store will they help me over the phone?
Click to expand...

You'll get beach ball if you are maxing out the ram or heavy multi-tasking but generally it shouldnt be a consistent pattern - like what has been mentioned here, 10+ seconds of beach-balling without an obvious cause where the laptop is unresponsive.

Yes, phone support will be able to offer you support - may help if you stumble across a real good experienced trouble shooter.... otherwise some novice following recommendations from a support database of HOW TO trouble-shoot problems..... will prob end up calling your laptop in for repair.. and they will find nothing and/or replace the whole thing and youll end up getting the same problem.

Hope this is in some way escalated so apple give it a real fix.
 
i always make sure i dont have more than 2 apps open at once an i always get the beachball when using safari!

i take it thats definitely not the norm!
 
CalMin said:
The following tip fixed the issue for me. YMMV.

Go to User > Library > Cache and delete everything in that folder, but don't delete the Cache folder itself.

Empty the trash and reboot
Click to expand...

I have a "caches" folder -- not Cache

Is this the same thing? Just the delete the contents of this folder, not the folder itself?
 

Attachments

  • Screen shot 2009-10-15 at 2.03.49 PM.png
    Screen shot 2009-10-15 at 2.03.49 PM.png
    53.7 KB · Views: 54
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back