What should I do when the UI becomes unresponsive ?

[AntoineLec]

I was in this situation earlier today. I'm using a Mac Mini late 2014.
At some point, I noticed the fan was running at high speed, although the Mac itself was not hot. Also the UI was really unresponsive.

I tried to save the running process list with a $ ps aux > ps.txt

I took several several dozens of seconds to return, then I shut down the Mac with the physical button. I could not find the file after rebooting, neither could I find the command in the history.

So now I am wondering what else I could have done in this situation to go back to a normal state without force shutting down the computer.

After rebooting, I tried to figure out with fs_usage which process was eating all the CPU time and I found an updater/installer for Adobe Creative Cloud that looked like a bad citizen. I can't say that this particular process is responsible for those problems..

So I'm looking for a way to easily track those kind of problems

 

[JohnDS]

Leave Activity Monitor open with it sorted by CPU usage and note what process is hogging the CPU when this happens.

 

[Weaselboy]

Your ps.txt file should be in your user folder.

Click the desktop then hit shift-command-g (all three at once) then copy in the line below and return. You should see the ps.txt file in the Finder window.

~/

 

[Gregg2]

Delete com.apple.systemuiserver.plist ?