Beach Ball Of Death!

B

boyfarrell

Registered
Hello everybody,

Why do you sometimes get the beach ball of death and other times get a black and white 'radiation' sign swirly thing? :confused:

Dan
 
That means it is taking time for something to work. This is caused by one of several things. Your program maybe be malfunctioning, your computer maybe to slow for a program or you have to little memory for the program and lastly you may have a hardware problem.

First of all you need to keep your Mac it tip top shape. Once around every two weeks go /Applications/Utilities/ and launch Disk Utility and Repair Permissions on your startup drive. Also download something like Onyx and run the Maintenance routines.
 
I agree with Satcomer: maintenance is very important.

I personally recommend repairing disk permissions, cleaning out log files with MacJanitor, and - if you are comfortable using UNIX - running a file system check every week or so. (I can type up a how-to, if you wish; else it should be easy to find documentation online. Beware though: UNIX is very powerful, and commands have to be typed correctly. Another OS X/UNIX tool I can recommend is Applejack - can be found on versiontracker.com, including instructions on how to use it.)

OnyX has helped me in a few situations when things weren't working 100 %, but some people think that some of the tasks it can carry out go way beyond preventive maintenance. (Those tasks, btw, can be totally customized - so is definitely worth reading some info before using the application.)

You might also have too little RAM. Go to --> Applications --> Utilities --> and open Activity Monitor. Near the bottom of the window you can click on "System Memory", and the info below that window changes. Check out the stats for "Page ins/outs": ideally it should be some number, followed by a /, followed by zero (e.g. 23689/0) - if the number is e.g. 23689/11548, it means that your computer has to "work too hard", and that either you don't have enough RAM, or possibly your harddrive contains too much data. (You should always have a minimum of 10 % of your harddrive's capacity free for your Mac to operate properly; I try to keep 20 % free.)

patrice
http://www.patriceschneider.com/apple-osx/blog/
 
It seems that the question boyfarrell posed is what's the difference between the beach ball and the older-school black and white pizza. Or "radiation" pizza.

Good question. I actually don't have any idea. I know that BBEdit gives me the black and white pizza, and I've always assumed that it's a legacy UI widget, i.e., that if the app were fully integrated into the OS it'd use the OS-specified "please wait" mouse cursor, which is now the full-color beach ball.

Hmm. Anyone?
 
i have a gb of ram. my page-in/out is currently 998665/1098442. do i need more ram then?

black+white is "jus' a sec, i'm just doing something", whearas beachball is "wow, that's painful, be done in a sec though"
 
I agree with the most of the maintenence remarks above, but have somethign to add...

The black and white beachball usually appears in old-fashioned Carbon apps (OS 9 and OS X compatible) that haven't been updated since before Jesus was born. I used to get this while using Internext Explorer. boyfarrell, it sounds like you are using Internet Explorer as your browser, eh?
 
adambyte said:
I agree with the most of the maintenence remarks above, but have somethign to add...

The black and white beachball usually appears in old-fashioned Carbon apps (OS 9 and OS X compatible) that haven't been updated since before Jesus was born. I used to get this while using Internext Explorer. boyfarrell, it sounds like you are using Internet Explorer as your browser, eh?
Click to expand...

I was under the impression the Black/White beachball was for Carbon Apps.
 
batnab1995 said:
Its on my imac os x version 10.4.11 how do i get rid of it and i dont have the startup disk
Click to expand...

First place that I would start would be by doing all of the relevant routine maintenance suggested here:

http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html

If that doesn't help I would check to see that my hard drive wasn't 80% or more full. If it is, then you probably need a new external hard drive and you need to clear off some working space from your old internal drive.

If that isn't the problem, you should open Activity Monitor (in your Applications/Utilities folder), and
click on the "%CPU" header, and then click on the triangle in the %CPU
header so that things are ordered in that column from largest to
least. See what is running that is using the most CPU time. If it
has a really high number, this is likely to be what is causing your
slowdown.

Leave Activity Monitor open while you work, and during one of the
times when your Mac has slowed to a crawl switch to Activity Monitor
and see if something is using up all of your processor's time.
Let me know what you find.

Likely candidates are a corrupted
Spotlight database, a corrupted Safari database, a bad stay-resident/
startup utility, etc. I can help you clear any of these problems
once we narrow it down. Whatever it is, it should be fairly easy to
fix.

___________________________________________

Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)

Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance
http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html
___________________________________________
 
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