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0r30

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Aug 12, 2010
537
32
Texas
I have recently upgraded my macbook pro to Mavericks and have been getting split second beachballs. It happens a lot and its getting annoying. Has anyone else encountered this issue?
 
Yes.I see it frequently and others report the same issue. maybe fixed in 10.9.1

Ok. Just making sure I'm not the only one.

So far I have tried
-Verify Disk Permissions
-Verify Disk

and the problem still persists.
 
Ok. Just making sure I'm not the only one.

So far I have tried
-Verify Disk Permissions
-Verify Disk

and the problem still persists.

I don;t think the verify will show anything; I'm pretty sure it's entirely a software issue...I didn't have the issue until I upgraded to Mavericks, and it's on a 13" MBA 2013
 
Same issue here.

Taking a blind stab in the dark here, but I wonder if it has anything to do with non-10.9-optimized apps coming in and out of app nap?
 
Is your screen a retina screen?

Just curious... I have a 2013 MBA (obviously not retina) and do not have this issue... I'm wondering if it has something to do with the retina screen
 
Yes, there have been several threads on this. I have a 2011 17", affected me as well. Very annoying, but didn't seem to cause any issues. Went back to 10.8.5 for an unrelated software compatibility issue. Hope they get that fixed before I upgrade again.
 
Is your screen a retina screen?

Just curious... I have a 2013 MBA (obviously not retina) and do not have this issue... I'm wondering if it has something to do with the retina screen


yes retina screen. I really hope they come out with a update soon. I hate how the beach balls pop up ..its annoying.
 
I have the same thing. Even a few times its got stuck on the beachball. I can keep working, but my mousepointer never change back.
 
It started happening to me the day I installed Mavericks on my MB Air. Lasted for exactly a week and then the behavior stopped. Well a couple of weeks later I restarted my Air for an update and it started all over again. Hasn't stopped since. Quite frustrating. Other than that, I guess Mavericks is working fine.
 
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Same here on early 2013 15" rMBP. It usually happens if I hover over "Close/Minimize" button or after clicking one of the buttons. And I think it's only in Safari but wouldn't swear to it.
 
Personally, out of 3 machines (Early 2011 MBP w/ aftermarket SSD upgrade, Late 2012 Mac Mini running Server, and a full-custom mid-tower build), I have not experienced any persistent beach-balling with Mavericks. Granted, I also run pretty vanilla installations, with no 3rd party kernel extensions (exception being the custom-build, of course).

That being said, beach-balling like what is being described here could very well be due to I/O Blocking; a read or write system call must complete before a process can resume and if there is a delay you will see a spinning beach ball.

MacOS X has, for some time, shipped with a handful of tools which may shed some light on this issue: DTrace Scripts. They are found in /usr/bin, and typically have some descriptive name with a .d suffix. Some of the pertinent ones are:

iofile.d - Reports on I/O Wait Time by File and Process requesting access.
hotspot.d - Aggregates disk accesses by location, presenting a histogram output. This is useful for finding particular "hot-spots" that are frequently being accessed.
iosnoop - Reports in real-time all device-level I/O requests. Run this with the -o option to see the amount of time for each request to complete.
cpu_profiler.d - This is like the "Sample Process" option in Activity Monitor, but runs globally sampling all processes, including the kernel. By default, this will dump every stacktrace of every aggregate sample, which is a lot of data. You can restrict to the top N most frequent hits by passing the option "-c N".

If I were in the position of others and experiencing frequent spinning beachballs, I would run some of these scripts to catch one of these beachballs and check the output for some clues on any potential excessive I/O Waits.
 
Same thing here after installing mavericks on my 2012 mac mini thought it was a ram/SSD problem at first,Before I found this thread about others having the same issue.........
 
So far 10.9.1 developer preview is humming along here and I don't see beach balls. Looks like the general availability will be pretty soon and hopefully this issue is put to bed.
 
Not seeing this on my early 2011 MBP with an aftermarket SSD (250GB Samsung 840), but I am somewhat curios about this issue.

In what kinds of situations do these random beach balls occur? Do they occur when you open something like a go from one web page to anther, open a pulldown menu (i.e the ones at the top of the screen), move around in a finder window or open a new one? Do they appear when you're not doing anything?
 
Random Split second beachball

I am INCREDIBLY grateful to find this thread. I am having the exact same issue on a 2012 Macbook Air with 4gigs of RAM. It has been driving me nuts -- I reinstalled Mavericks three times and got rid of a bunch of third-party apps, after doing disk verify and disk repair a bunch of times.
Has anybody bothered going to the Genius Bar with this? Wondering if they might be of any help. Maybe we just wait until 10.9.1?
Incidentally, my issues seem to happen most when I am dealing with Mail or Safari, but there is not a ton of rhyme or reason to it.
Thanks for the thread. This is really disappointing. I've been getting Macs since 1993. Hope they are not making the laptops as disposable as the iPhones ....
 
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