Help, please help!! My mac is unusable!!

solrac

solrac

Mac Ninja
Ever since last night, my mac has become unusable! Every action takes 30 seconds. Clicking close on a window. Resizing a window. Clicking to another window. Clicking on a menu. Every action takes 30 seconds and makes the spinning ball show up!

I opened process viewer and saw that SystemUIServer is taking 95% of my processor! (This took 5 minutes to do.)

Even after a fresh restart, it's the same thing!! What do I do?????? (This is also a fresh clean install of Jaguar!!)
 
I bet Chimera did it! :p

If its a clean install, why not just try reinstalling? Perhaps something went wrong during the install process.

You could always try rebooting into single user mode and running "fsck" to see if any errors show up.

You didn't reinstall with a UFS partition did you? That would be bad, mmmmmkay?
 
You might also try the Apple Hardware Test CD-ROM to check if maybe something's wrong there. Or boot into Mac OS 9 to see whether that works okay. (To nail it down to 1. the Mac OS X installation or 2. the hardware.)
 
where's the hardware test CD-ROM? Did it come with Jaguar?? I never seen it :confused:

I did not install with UFS :rolleyes:

I doubt fsck will fix anything, maybe I'll try a reinstall (sigh)

(But the fresh install I did has been working just fine for a week.)
 
Open up your Disk Utility in your Utilities folder, and when it opens, go ahead and click your OS X drive, go to the first aid tab (I think that's what it is, but I'm not in front of my Mac right now to get accurate info...), and click "Repair Disk Permissions." This will fix all the file permissions that your OS has to work around, in your case I would guess that tons of file permissions are messed up.

This check could take upwards of an hour, so you might want to put on a movie or watch some TV or something. :D
 
repair permissions aren't the problem...

I temporarily solved my problem by going to the terminal and typing

----
su root
(put in my password)

renice +20 422
----

422 was the SystemUIServer pid. That forces that process to never use processor time unless it needs to, and everything else gets priority.

It worked! I got my computer back!!!! YAY!!!!

But everytime I restart it will be slow as hell until I redo that command again, I suppose, so I need to probably reinstall anyway.
 
I was going to ask if you "reniced" Mac OS X in some way with a third party program but it seems you found a useable workaround. What you might want to do, aside from a complete reinstall, is make an apple script to open terminal and renice for you automatically. The trick is to get correct PID every time. I don't know if this can be done easily, but it's a start in the right direction.
 
What system do you have? Perhaps Jag's routines for creating the UI get messed up on your system.

It's easy to do this every time the system boots and get the correct PID. I'm not entirely sure where to add it though (/etc/rc, /etc/rc.common, /etc/rc.boot), or how to make it a standalone script. It is quite explicit in /etc/rc that startup routines should be added to "the startup directory" (presumably /Library/StartupItems/) but I don't know how to call them (if I need to add line items in /etc/rc or not, can anyone elaborate?)

A cheap way of doing it is to put it in your ~/.login file so that it executes when you open the terminal, but that is a really cheap alternative.

Anyway this is the simple one-liner:
#!/bin/sh
# Dumb down SystemUIServer's process
renice +20 `ps -aux | grep "SystemUIServer" | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'`


Sidenote: has anyone ever looked at the /etc/rc* files? Wilfredo put some funny comments in there:
##
# Set shell to ignore Control-C, etc.
# Prevent lusers from shooting themselves in the foot.
##
 
The main function of SystemUIServer is to display the menubar. Do you have any menu extras running? Try getting rid of them. Even turn off the menubar clock, if you have it running. See if things improve.
If not, then my guess is that a reinstall is your only hope. :(
 
This sounds like a classic case of a MenuExtra running rampant. I would look first at 3rd party extras, and then at Apples.
 
all i have is massinova menu extra, and that's worked fine for months. The other things are just sound volume, battery level, and the clock. Those have worked fine since 10 beta :rolleyes:
 
its that stupid speed deamon chimera.

causes the os to get highly unstable.

i recommend sticking to the stable releases, although i have had kernel panics with the stable realease too!!!
 
Originally posted by X-wiZeroS
its that stupid speed deamon chimera.

causes the os to get highly unstable.

i recommend sticking to the stable releases, although i have had kernel panics with the stable realease too!!!
Click to expand...

sorry, but that's completely wrong and an ignorant statement. Chimera was not even running when this happened. It was off a fresh restart.
 
Hmm... I'd point to a menu extra, too - whatever the reason it's freaking out... But I'd also just take the easy road of reinstalling in a case like that...

Btw.: I've just upgraded my TiBook/500 to a 40G IBM Travelstar harddisk. It's incredible how much faster the machine feels right now. It's a clean install alright, so I guess it'll get slower over time (although I'd hate that and would have to fix it through optimisation & repairing permissions) - but I - and my machine - feel great and my TiBook's just got another (cheap enough) new lease of life.
 
fryke, oh my god really? I need a new hard drive so bad. The ONLY ONE HORRIBLE thing about htis TiBook is the 10 GB hard drive. Even 15 would've been good.

How did you upgrade the hard disk??? Did you have to void your warranty? Please help me out. Thanks so much!!
 
Sounds like your SWAPFILE (used for OSX's virtual memory system - very important) has been unlinked. I experienced the same thing when I relocated my SWAPFILE to a dedicated partition for improved performance. Updating the prebinding located the swapfile and it was fine after a restart.

I have no idea how your SWAPFILE may have been unlinked if you weren't doing what I did, but rather than reinstall your system, you might want to try updating the prebinding. You can do this with a freeware app called SpeedMeUpPro which you can find at Versiontracker.com, or through a command line command in the Terminal (which I cannot remember).
 
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