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Snow Leopard Beach Balls 10-15 seconds
- Thread starter catachip
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hi Guys,
i got the same issue with SL on my macbook (late 2008), since i upgrade my macbook with a seagate 500G 7200rpm. At first, i thought the problem with SL, then i downgrade to Leopard as it comes with the original system. The issue was still the same. Beach ball then system hang up, forced to reboot.
I exchanged my seagate 500G hard drive for seagate 320G 7200rpm. Restore the system with the orinal DVD, then upgrade to SL. The system has been working fine from the last 2 weeks to now(no more beach ball or any big issue.)
I believe because your system might upgrade with any components which don't compatible with the OS then it's causing problem.
Now, i am happy with SL, i get some small issue such as photoshop crashed when exiting. Beside that, it's working fine.
i got the same issue with SL on my macbook (late 2008), since i upgrade my macbook with a seagate 500G 7200rpm. At first, i thought the problem with SL, then i downgrade to Leopard as it comes with the original system. The issue was still the same. Beach ball then system hang up, forced to reboot.
I exchanged my seagate 500G hard drive for seagate 320G 7200rpm. Restore the system with the orinal DVD, then upgrade to SL. The system has been working fine from the last 2 weeks to now(no more beach ball or any big issue.)
I believe because your system might upgrade with any components which don't compatible with the OS then it's causing problem.
Now, i am happy with SL, i get some small issue such as photoshop crashed when exiting. Beside that, it's working fine.
Hi everyone!
Well, after trying to get rid of beachballs and hangs in Snow Leopard, it seems to me that I have found a solution. I tried SL Cache Cleaner but it didn't work. Then I decided to create a new admin account. First I made a backup with Time Machine, created a new admin account, and transferred my personal files. I decided not to transfer my settings. Then I deleted the problem account. After one day of playing with SL under new account, I didn't have any beachballs. Everything seems to be working seamlessly... Try this, maybe it will help you!
Well, after trying to get rid of beachballs and hangs in Snow Leopard, it seems to me that I have found a solution. I tried SL Cache Cleaner but it didn't work. Then I decided to create a new admin account. First I made a backup with Time Machine, created a new admin account, and transferred my personal files. I decided not to transfer my settings. Then I deleted the problem account. After one day of playing with SL under new account, I didn't have any beachballs. Everything seems to be working seamlessly... Try this, maybe it will help you!
Not for me either actually. After a few days of no SVM, I still have experienced a few beach balls.... I do think it made the problem less frequent for whatever that's worth.
My experience...
I just wanted to pitch in that I also had the same extremely frustrating problem with a two-month-old 2.53 Macbook Pro that had been updated from Leopard 10.5 to Snow Leopard 10.6: long spinning beachball blocks on the order of 5-60+ seconds without any significant CPU activity. This was frustrating since there didn't seem to be any pattern to which applications were open--Terminal, Mail, Firefox, Safari, iTunes, didn't matter.
It did appear as if putting the system to sleep and then waking it again aggravated the frequency of blocks, but I have no real evidence of this.
I installed the recent Snow Leopard performance update 1.0 from Apple to no effect.
I tried the recommendations of several forum users:
- Uninstalled the Adobe Flash player
- Ran the Snow Leopard Cache Cleaner's scripts
- Turned off secure virtual memory
After a restart, the system appeared stable, but after a quick stress test -- opening a number of applications (MATLAB, Pages, XCode, Numbers, iTunes, Firefox, iCal, Adium, Times Reader, Mail), starting a Time Machine Backup, going to a number of different websites, and a few sleep/wake cycles -- we're back to square one with spinning beachball blocks on the order of a minute.
I'm currently trying to isolate the problem, which I suspect may have something to do with Time Machine. Since the recent Snow Leopard performance update was targeted towards performance issues with hard drives, I wonder if that might not still be the issue here.
I just wanted to pitch in that I also had the same extremely frustrating problem with a two-month-old 2.53 Macbook Pro that had been updated from Leopard 10.5 to Snow Leopard 10.6: long spinning beachball blocks on the order of 5-60+ seconds without any significant CPU activity. This was frustrating since there didn't seem to be any pattern to which applications were open--Terminal, Mail, Firefox, Safari, iTunes, didn't matter.
It did appear as if putting the system to sleep and then waking it again aggravated the frequency of blocks, but I have no real evidence of this.
I installed the recent Snow Leopard performance update 1.0 from Apple to no effect.
I tried the recommendations of several forum users:
- Uninstalled the Adobe Flash player
- Ran the Snow Leopard Cache Cleaner's scripts
- Turned off secure virtual memory
After a restart, the system appeared stable, but after a quick stress test -- opening a number of applications (MATLAB, Pages, XCode, Numbers, iTunes, Firefox, iCal, Adium, Times Reader, Mail), starting a Time Machine Backup, going to a number of different websites, and a few sleep/wake cycles -- we're back to square one with spinning beachball blocks on the order of a minute.
I'm currently trying to isolate the problem, which I suspect may have something to do with Time Machine. Since the recent Snow Leopard performance update was targeted towards performance issues with hard drives, I wonder if that might not still be the issue here.
there are only two main things causing the issues that i can see here:
1. there are some really bad virtual memory paging problems.
2. apple stuffed up somewhere in their coding.
however as it seems to not effect every machine, there is really no way to tell..
1. there are some really bad virtual memory paging problems.
2. apple stuffed up somewhere in their coding.
however as it seems to not effect every machine, there is really no way to tell..
Hopefully tomorrow 10.6.2 will be released and fix all of these issues. The most beach balls I have had are with Finder when trying to restart. It just hangs and I have to do a force shutdown for the system to recover. It seems 10.6.2 will be fixing this though. Also, keep in mind that, if it is a 3rd party application that you are having issues with, it might be that application not being ready for Snow Leopard, not Snow Leopard itself.
Update
Just an update on the previous situation.
I have since stopped using Firefox and gone back to Safari, and have left my external Time Machine backup unplugged. In addition to the steps I took in my previous post, the result was that the extremely long beachball blocks (60+ seconds) have ended.
I still have noticeable 1-3 second pauses when performing actions like scrolling in Mail/Safari/Preview or changing email views in Mail. These pauses were not present before the Snow Leopard update. This does make a world of difference, and will let me keep doing work until I have the time for a full clean install of Snow Leopard.
Just an update on the previous situation.
I have since stopped using Firefox and gone back to Safari, and have left my external Time Machine backup unplugged. In addition to the steps I took in my previous post, the result was that the extremely long beachball blocks (60+ seconds) have ended.
I still have noticeable 1-3 second pauses when performing actions like scrolling in Mail/Safari/Preview or changing email views in Mail. These pauses were not present before the Snow Leopard update. This does make a world of difference, and will let me keep doing work until I have the time for a full clean install of Snow Leopard.
Well, I hate to say it, but a clean install of Leopard is the only thing that seems to fix all my problems. Once I had the free time I formatted the hard drive, reinstalled Leopard, reinstalled all applications and updated everything and now the problem is gone--imagine that.
Snow Leopard is great, but do yourself a favor and clean install.
Snow Leopard is great, but do yourself a favor and clean install.
I know this is probably getting annoying, but for anyone else out there that is having similar troubles and a clean install of Snow Leopard didn't do it for them, I think this update will be a lifesaver.
As mentioned before, I clean installed Snow Leopard and the problem seemed to go away. Turns out it didn't. Just a few days later the problems returned, gradually growing worse and worse. It got to the point that doing just about any action at all had a wait time, sometimes on the order of a minute.
At the same time I was working on a large project and didn't have the downtime to put my computer in for repairs. It wasn't even 2 months old and started up just fine, so I thought that it was a software issue that would have to be resolved by an Apple technician since I couldn't track it down.
When the project finished, I took the new MacBook Pro into the local Apple store. We eventually checked out the SMART status of the hard drive and found that there were a large number of logged i/o errors. Turns out I had a bad hard drive that I hadn't thought to check in depth since the problems were directly triggered by my update to Snow Leopard and the computer was so new.
Here's how the technician explained it to me, take it for what it's worth. Apparently with a hard drive that is on the brink of failure, an extremely large file transfer--such as the kind you go through when you transfer all of your media and documents from one install to another--can put enough stress on the hard drive to make it go. All those read/write cycles in succession will trigger a failure in a drive that is not up to snuff. In my case it wasn't immediately catastrophic, but started the deterioration to the point where I couldn't do anything on the computer.
So if you are having similar troubles after an upgrade/clean install to Snow Leopard, I recommend finding a SMART status utility to check out your hard drive. It's important to note that the SMART report that I got from the Apple Menu --> About This Mac listed the drive as "verified," so a more detailed SMART utility is probably required. Even if the drive is new, apparently it is possible to get a lemon through Apple. For the record, I have the bad drive in hand; it is a Toshiba MK3255GSXF 250GB unit that was just over a month old when it started to go. The replacement is Hitachi-branded, so hopefully it'll last a bit longer.
Hope that helps someone, somewhere. Godspeed.
As mentioned before, I clean installed Snow Leopard and the problem seemed to go away. Turns out it didn't. Just a few days later the problems returned, gradually growing worse and worse. It got to the point that doing just about any action at all had a wait time, sometimes on the order of a minute.
At the same time I was working on a large project and didn't have the downtime to put my computer in for repairs. It wasn't even 2 months old and started up just fine, so I thought that it was a software issue that would have to be resolved by an Apple technician since I couldn't track it down.
When the project finished, I took the new MacBook Pro into the local Apple store. We eventually checked out the SMART status of the hard drive and found that there were a large number of logged i/o errors. Turns out I had a bad hard drive that I hadn't thought to check in depth since the problems were directly triggered by my update to Snow Leopard and the computer was so new.
Here's how the technician explained it to me, take it for what it's worth. Apparently with a hard drive that is on the brink of failure, an extremely large file transfer--such as the kind you go through when you transfer all of your media and documents from one install to another--can put enough stress on the hard drive to make it go. All those read/write cycles in succession will trigger a failure in a drive that is not up to snuff. In my case it wasn't immediately catastrophic, but started the deterioration to the point where I couldn't do anything on the computer.
So if you are having similar troubles after an upgrade/clean install to Snow Leopard, I recommend finding a SMART status utility to check out your hard drive. It's important to note that the SMART report that I got from the Apple Menu --> About This Mac listed the drive as "verified," so a more detailed SMART utility is probably required. Even if the drive is new, apparently it is possible to get a lemon through Apple. For the record, I have the bad drive in hand; it is a Toshiba MK3255GSXF 250GB unit that was just over a month old when it started to go. The replacement is Hitachi-branded, so hopefully it'll last a bit longer.
Hope that helps someone, somewhere. Godspeed.
so for what its worth, i have a brand new (refurbished) MBP 15" 2.8Ghz and i have been experiencing this same problem. the Activity Monitor shows nothing in the way of disk activity or CPU activity or memory hogging applications... i did notice that the Webkitplugin seemed to be partially correlated so i stopped using Safari and switched to Google Chrome - this *seemed* to help, but the problem still exists...
i have been copying large amounts of data over but haven't noticed a direct correlation with that either.
i checked the SMART status of the HD with DiskWarrior and it reports as fine.
my thoughts on this is that it is an OS bug... i noticed that i am running 10.6.0 so perhaps upgrading will help... hope so as it's pretty annoying.
cheers,
bennett
i have been copying large amounts of data over but haven't noticed a direct correlation with that either.
i checked the SMART status of the HD with DiskWarrior and it reports as fine.
my thoughts on this is that it is an OS bug... i noticed that i am running 10.6.0 so perhaps upgrading will help... hope so as it's pretty annoying.
cheers,
bennett
The 10.6.1 update included a fix to a software bug that allowed Snow Leopard to block when accessing a hard drive. Apple claimed it was rare, but this sounds like your problem--naturally there wouldn't be any disk I/O or CPU activity while beachballing because SL is currently blocked.
I'd definitely update all your software and see if that solves the problem.
I'd definitely update all your software and see if that solves the problem.