So far random beach balls have decreased by 90-ish percent. My 2012 MacBook Pro is back to pre-Mavericks levels. 
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Will Beach Balls Vanish with 10.9.1?
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With the 10.9.2 beta to developers, I have an account; the beach balling has stopped. I know graphic drivers were addressed in this release.
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I'm not an IOS/OSX engineer, but I know quite a bit about OS internals. Small bits of lag like this are usually due to memory issues. If I had to guess about the cause here, I'd say it's the memory compression. It seems the bulk of the complaints I read are about when people try to do something else... "I was browsing, then I moused over the minimize" or "I tried to command-tab to Chrome", etc.
It looks like it's possible to disable compressed memory by bringing up a terminal and typing:
Code:
$ sudo nvram boot-args="vm_compressor_mode=1"I'm plagued by the Finder Beach Ball to the extent that using my computer is a miserable experience. I'd like to try the terminal command to see if it does fix the problem.
Presumably, running the following command and rebooting will reverse it?
Code:
$ sudo nvram boot-args="vm_compressor_mode=0"Can some one confirm this?
Mine is set to 4 no messing with the defaults done here.
Code:
MacUser2525:~$ sysctl -a | grep vm.compressor_mode
vm.compressor_mode: 40 is not a valid mode. Since vm_compressor_mode isn't the correct variable anyway (see below), you won't break anything. You can view your current VM compression mode with this command:
Code:
$ sysctl -a vm.compressor_modeI just spun up a test Mavericks install on an external drive, and for me this outputs 4, which corresponds to VM_PAGER_COMPRESSOR_WITH_SWAP in the kernel.
After digging through the kernel source, I found the actual variable is vm_compressor:
Code:
$ sudo nvram boot-args="vm_compressor=1"I've verified this actually changes the sysctl after reboot. I'll use Mavericks for a bit to see if I see an inordinate number of beachballs.
my experience in this regard.
I was happy with Mavericks at first because it seemed to fix teh directory perms problems I was running into. But then I started seeing beach balls when I had just a browser and one or two excel spreadsheets open.
On 16gb of ram!
Then I started noticing that all available ram would be used up whenever this was happening. Suspecting Firefox I went back over to Chrome for a while and Safari. No change.
So I went back to my Lion era habit of running sudo purge in the terminal to clean up the memory.
This staves off the beachballing for a while.
It seems that it comes screaming right back if you hibernate your mac though. 10.9.1 seems to have addressed this.
I was happy with Mavericks at first because it seemed to fix teh directory perms problems I was running into. But then I started seeing beach balls when I had just a browser and one or two excel spreadsheets open.
On 16gb of ram!
Then I started noticing that all available ram would be used up whenever this was happening. Suspecting Firefox I went back over to Chrome for a while and Safari. No change.
So I went back to my Lion era habit of running sudo purge in the terminal to clean up the memory.
This staves off the beachballing for a while.
It seems that it comes screaming right back if you hibernate your mac though. 10.9.1 seems to have addressed this.
If the beachballing has been eliminated by 10.9.2, I doubt Apple would list the resolved issue in the App Store update notes. They don't ever list ALL bugs - it's probably going to be under the umbrella "as well as fixes various system issues/enhances performance" something-or-other footnote.
Apple's too proud, that is.
Would be surprised if I'm wrong.
Apple's too proud, that is.
Would be surprised if I'm wrong.
what causes your mac to beach ball?
Mine is when i close lightroom, open a pdf with lots of information(sort of like excel with many rows and column) , occasionally safari when playing flash videos , microsoft office occasionally here and there and the random beach ball appearing out of nowhere.
Well, flash, steam (games) pretty much anything. Not a problem anymore thank goodness.
