Nasty Lion Freeze

[Rob.G]

First time this has happened. I was working on a website last night, popping around to various desktops as I do, when suddenly the machine froze. The pointer still moved, but NOTHING responded.

I ssh'd in remotely from my iPad, and nothing was sucking up CPU time. I tried to killall Dock and killall Finder, but it did no good. Finally, I gave it a shutdown -r now.. that too did nothing other than log me out and not let me back in. The display never changed.

Finally I just held down the power button til it shut off. It rebooted just fine though, but there was no error dump or anything. Nothing in the logs about it at all.

It had been about a week and a half since I rebooted. I tend to run a lot of stuff at once, and had been playing Civ V off and on for the last week too. I guess something pissed it off.

Anybody else ever see a freeze like this?

Rob

 

[jameslmoser]

We have seen this with a brand new imac that came with 10.7.2 preinstalled. We finally noticed every time the machine did this Time Machine was running. Since disabling it it hasn't locked up once. Of course this did nothing for all the other Lion issues...

 

[Rob.G]

FWIW, I didn't have Time Machine running at the time. It's enabled, but my backup drive wasn't connected.

Rob

 

[jameslmoser]

Why the hell was I voted down? I was stating a simple fact. When time machine is on, the machine locks up 4 or 5 times a day and becomes completely unresponsive. It doesn't ever recover, just sits there spinning the beach ball of death.

Hey Apple fan boi/girl who voted me down.. get a life!

 

[Damers]

This almost exact same thing happened to me last night. I had four desktops open and was running Chrome, mail, terminal, and two programs installed through macports; gnuplot and stellarium. It froze completely while I was using stellarium and attributed it to that. Force quit didn't work, completely unresponsive. I had to hard reboot and everything was fine. Hasn't happened since, but I think stellarium uses open GL for rendering so maybe...? I also wasn't using time machine when it froze.