Seemingly Random but Brief Freezes

[Marble]

So I just upgraded to Mavericks and am getting brief freezes every 30 minutes or so. They usually go away if I mash the force-quit keyboard shortcut, whereupon the screen will rearrange with whatever keyboard commands I had put in beforehand. Is anyone else finding this odd behavior on their machine? I'm afraid it's some third party thing (i.e. I use SteerMouse, DropBox, GrowlVoice, and other services).

 

[eduk]

I have had a similar problem, however mine was freezing around every minute or so (I actually found your post whilst searching for a solution).

I tried upgrading/disabling/removing all the smaller vendor 3rd party software (such as Steermouse, Keyboard Maestro, etc) which did not seem to do it, however from a process of elimination found that Adobe Creative Cloud was the culprit! Low and behold, I went into Creative Cloud after killing the process and it offered me an update which has now made the machine stable for the first time today.

Hope this helps or that you find your offending application!

 

[halexists]

I'm getting these freezes (halts?) sometimes with a beachball, usually not. It happens typically if I'm opening or closing an application or document. Opening a tab in Safari occasionally causes this.

I don't have any Adobe CS software installed. I do use some 3rd party stuff and will play around with disabling it in the next day or so -- if I find a culprit I will report back.

 

[Quackers]

Is your ram shown as all used up when you get these beach balls/brief freezes?

 

[Marble]

It's not RAM related for me. If I have iTunes music playing, it will continue to play while "stuck," and I haven't yet had a freeze when animation or video is running (so I don't know how extensively the whole system is affected).

I don't have CC on my machine, but I'll make sure Adobe's other products (like Flash) are up to date. Thanks for the tip, eduk.

At the moment, I'm keeping an eye on Time Machine (backupd). It often hoards RAM and CPU on my machine for long periods of time.

 

[halexists]

Question for those of us with slowness/freezing -- has it resolved itself over time? Mine has. I had a lot of disk activity right after installation, and for some reason the setup assistant was active but showed no windows after my restart. I had to force quit it and then my system came online.

I found reference by someone in another comment section that "right after setup it notified me it was optimizing my system and performance would be temporarily hindered as it did whatever it was doing. During that period, it was, as they warned me, sluggish. But after that, no problems whatsoever."

I suspect this is a warning I never saw because of Setup Assistant's fail. But I have no more stuttering or slowness following the first few hours after install.

 

[Marble]

Mine seems mitigated as well. There is still some hesitation when switching apps that I think is related to App Nap, but the weird, random seizures have ceased.