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system lag and beachballs

chibianh

chibianh

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Nov 6, 2001
783
1
Colorado
I have never had my system running for 2 weeks.. I've always had to reboot it before it ever reaches 2 weeks of uptime. Reason..

After a while. when I try to launch a program, it launches, then stalls... beachball for about a minute or two. it's the same for any application i launch. At quit, same thing.. beachball for a minute or two, then it quits.

Any suggestions as to what I should do to fix this? or prevent this? Thanks.

Anh
 
Try...

...
1) running macjanitor
2) looking at top (open terminal, type top), and see what's using resources
3) use tinkertool/force quit to quit and relaunch the finder

I don't know whether these will help, but it's worth trying.
 
it could be RAM

It could be that your RAM is fragmented and the OS is having a hard time finding large chunks of RAM to use. OS X is supossed to take care of that kind of stuff but I dont know. My uptime is longer than 3 weeks right now but I do have 1.2GB of RAM and a 2GB dedicated Swap partition on a drive separate from my boot disk. I wonder if OS X server takes care of RAM fragmentation better than OS X desktop.

There is not much you can do about it I dont think exept get more RAM, use a bigger Swap, or maybe find a util that clears out swap, RAM, and Cash while the OS is still running and de-frags your RAM. There are such things for UNIX and probably could be proted over to OS X by compiling the sorce.


-evildead
 
You didn't list any system spec's to let us know what system you are running OS X on... Where did you get your RAM, is it all from Apple or did you get it from a third party??? We really do need that system info in order to provide better help. I would suggest the logging out/in thing as suggested by alex, or you could just shut down as I do when I am done for the day. We sometimes have power failures, so I would prefer to have the computer off when that happens to avoid any kind of power splike damage from it coming back on. Spikes when power is restored is NOT uncommon.
 
all Macjanitor does is provide a GUI for the unix commands "sudo sh /etc/daily", "blah.../etc/weekly" and ".../monthly" so you can do that in the terminal providing you have root enabled...on another note, evildead, you do realise that that ridiculous amount of space for your swap partition is most likely all being wasted?
 
Originally posted by mmmdreg
on another note, evildead, you do realise that that ridiculous amount of space for your swap partition is most likely all being wasted?
Click to expand...
Yeah 2 gig is a huge swap partition. I used to have a 500 meg partition (back when it actually helped, ie before 10.1) and I only ever used less than 80 meg.
 
Originally posted by AlphaTech
You didn't list any system spec's to let us know what system you are running OS X on... Where did you get your RAM, is it all from Apple or did you get it from a third party??? We really do need that system info in order to provide better help. I would suggest the logging out/in thing as suggested by alex, or you could just shut down as I do when I am done for the day. We sometimes have power failures, so I would prefer to have the computer off when that happens to avoid any kind of power splike damage from it coming back on. Spikes when power is restored is NOT uncommon.
Click to expand...

Powerbook G4 800mhz w/ 512mb ram.

RAM came with the machine. Logging out/in doesn't work. I try to log out and the Finder hangs. Thanks for the suggestion about shutting down at the end of the day. I will think about it.

Anh
 
Re: system lag and beachballs

Originally posted by chibianh
I have never had my system running for 2 weeks.. I've always had to reboot it before it ever reaches 2 weeks of uptime. Reason..

After a while. when I try to launch a program, it launches, then stalls... beachball for about a minute or two. it's the same for any application i launch. At quit, same thing.. beachball for a minute or two, then it quits.

Any suggestions as to what I should do to fix this? or prevent this? Thanks.

Anh
Click to expand...

Reboot once a week

(this is akin to telling the doctor "it hurts when i do this" and she says, "Stop doing that")

But seriously, I have noticed i get longer uptime when I "push" my system less. Hey, 2 wks is better than twice a day.
 
i had the same slow down problems when i first got my 667 TiBook. i think i could only use it for about 3 days and then everything was reeeeaaalllyy ssslllooooooooww. i tried logging out and then back in and that didn't really help much. i just shut down every night now. i wish i could just put it in sleep every night, it sort of annoys me having to sit down and watch it boot up every morning.
BTW, i've only got 256MB RAM, could this have anything to do with the slow down? is it true about it being hard to find large chunks of RAM to use?
 
Originally posted by cb911

BTW, i've only got 256MB RAM, could this have anything to do with the slow down? is it true about it being hard to find large chunks of RAM to use?
Click to expand...
I would have thought it could well be part of the problem, OS X is very memory hungry and 256Mb isn't really much these days, I would say stick in another 256Mb atleast asap, you should get better performence.
 
I had major problems with OS 10, after once IE unexpectadly quitted. As amazing and impossible as it seems, I think IE managed to corrupt the carbon framework. EVERY carbon app, would not quit, and get stuck with a beachball, if it did manage to open (in some cases it managed to not open, and bounce forever).

If you notice, once a disk gets fragmented with OS 10 (installing, swapfiles, etc.) there is really no way of getting it back to the speed it once was. This is because defragmenting utilities like Norton Speed disk, rate important system files as "other" and unimportant, and it sees no connection between the them, and as a result it puts them in any order near the end of the drive. This can cause OS 10 to be EVEN SLOWER, than it once was.

My advice is to reboot, log into root (via the GUI way) and destroy all the swap files (by putting them into the trash, restarting, logging into root again and deleting them). You have to use tinkertool to make the hidden folders and swapfiles seeable.

So I reinstalled OS 10, and now everything works randy dandy. This time I didn't install OS 9, so this is my first machine without that. It's been 5 days now without classic, we will see how longer I last!
 
Originally posted by dantec
If you notice, once a disk gets fragmented with OS 10 (installing, swapfiles, etc.) there is really no way of getting it back to the speed it once was. This is because defragmenting utilities like Norton Speed disk, rate important system files as "other" and unimportant, and it sees no connection between the them, and as a result it puts them in any order near the end of the drive. This can cause OS 10 to be EVEN SLOWER, than it once was.
Click to expand...

Way not true dog-breath... I actually ran Norton last night and the result, if anything, is a faster system, along with less issues. I ran it after running Diskwarrior 2 and TechTool Pro 3 on the system (booting off my utility cd that I created). All the utilities found things wrong, and fixed them (damaged directories and such).

As for placement of items on the drive, it really doesn't matter too much where in the graphic the items reside. As long as they are not fragmented, and stay as continous files.:p
 
Firstly, i don't have dog-breath.

Secondly, I wasn't talking about utilites like Norton Disc Doctor, I was specifically talking about speed disk. yes it does matter for placement. The OS 10 system files are marked as "Other" and no resemblance is seen between them. This can cause everything to be slower.

Opening files (big projects) and apps might actually be faster, that you are right, but the core system gets slower.
 
Originally posted by dantec
Firstly, i don't have dog-breath.

Secondly, I wasn't talking about utilites like Norton Disc Doctor, I was specifically talking about speed disk. yes it does matter for placement. The OS 10 system files are marked as "Other" and no resemblance is seen between them. This can cause everything to be slower.

Opening files (big projects) and apps might actually be faster, that you are right, but the core system gets slower.
Click to expand...

Wrong again Bubba.... :p I USED Speed Disk last night (the last utility part that I run) and everything is just fine. I don't open up large files and such, so I am talking about system performance. If anything, it has become faster AND more stable. Hell, it might have even fixed the issue I was having with the airport card. Apple is still shipping me a replacement, which I will install tomorrow and return the original one.

Ask eyelikeart about his system performance after he ran Norton on his TiBook (Speed Disk IS part of that :rolleyes: ).
 
Ok... i'll shut up now...

After being flamed twice, I won't try to prove my point any furthur... I know it is slower, I have seen it on 3 machines, but it doesn't matter anymore!
 
Hey Dantec

Alpha upgraded you fron "dog-breath" to "Bubba". Being from the deep south myself, I can tell you that that is a big improvement. You have nearly won Alpha over! Don't quit now!

BTW, I use Norton speed disk and it make a big difference. Less time at the beach.
 
Re: Hey Dantec

Originally posted by sjs
Alpha upgraded you fron "dog-breath" to "Bubba". Being from the deep south myself, I can tell you that that is a big improvement. You have nearly won Alpha over! Don't quit now!

BTW, I use Norton speed disk and it make a big difference. Less time at the beach.
Click to expand...

Huh bubba? ;) ;) ;) (joking) ;) ;) ;)
 
Re: Hey Dantec

Originally posted by sjs
Alpha upgraded you fron "dog-breath" to "Bubba". Being from the deep south myself, I can tell you that that is a big improvement. You have nearly won Alpha over! Don't quit now!

BTW, I use Norton speed disk and it make a big difference. Less time at the beach.
Click to expand...

Actually, I didn't want to offend the dogs out there. :D I know how the Bubba's (with the protruding brows) are rather difficult to offend, which made for a safer taunt.

Yet another happy customer for NUM... well, that more then beats your three systems there dantec.
 
Re: Re: Hey Dantec

Originally posted by AlphaTech


Actually, I didn't want to offend the dogs out there. :D I know how the Bubba's (with the protruding brows) are rather difficult to offend, which made for a safer taunt.

Yet another happy customer for NUM... well, that more then beats your three systems there dantec.
Click to expand...

So you are saying that you are offending dogs by comparing them to me. Thanks I appreciated that.

Actually I never said I wasn't a happy customer with NUM. It actually does a great job optimizing my games. And norton disc doctor I think is great. It just makes me unhappy that the Carbonized version doesn't have an optimizer for X.
 
What gets me about this thread...

...is the certainty with which the people assert themselves. :rolleyes:

As many tech support people will tell you, computers are not all that predictable. A problem that exists on one system might not exist on another. To say, "You're an idoit!! It works fine for me, therefore you have no idea what you're talking about." ...to say that, well, thats just obnoxious.



I work for a company that has computers hooked up to a single network printer. A guy just called up and told me that his computer wasn't printing correctly. I told him that he should stop calling me and wasting my time because everyone else's computer was working fine. Since everyone else has no problems, I can only assume that his computer must be working fine too. Right???

:rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:

Taft
 
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