OS X 10.6.6 almost grinds to a halt

D

discostu

Registered
Hi, first post on this forum.

I was wondering what I could do to help isolate a problem I've been having with my mac book pro (2.4 ghz intel) running 10.6.6.

After a while of working (firefox 7, Eclipse IDE, open office, thunderbird, song bird) on it, putting it into and out of stand by using the lid-close, it will just grind to a halt after a while: You can com+tab to applications but none of them respond, displaying only the beach-ball. The Dock bar is also dead, showing only the beach-ball. The top tool bar works after a long pause, but clicking any options just results in the beach ball. You can leave it for 10 minuets to possibly sort itself out, but it's still messed up. The only thing left to do is a reboot.

Whenever the problem starts, the next song Song Bird tries to play is played back stuttered. Sometimes this problem has occurred while the computer is idle (with those apps opened), as you can tell by the audio.

Ever since the first couple of times this has happened, I've always left the activity monitor opened so I can see if there was an application responsible for this. However, every time this happens and I manage to get to the monitor, it just shows average CPU and RAM useage. Using it to close as many applications as possible still doesn't solve the problem.

Any ideas? I don't really want to send this in for 'repairs' because it's the only computer I have right now.
 
Two suggestions:
  1. Make sure that you have at least 10% of your hard drive capacity available as free space.
  2. Run Software Update to bring MacOS X 10.6 fulling up-to-date.
 
thanks for the reply.

Got 60+ gig free.

There is the 10.6.8 update (I've got all the others apart from an iPhoto and remote desktop update), but after having such a bad problem since I bought it at the start of the year, I'm not confident it'll solve it (I assumed it was just me somehow). I'll still give it a shot thought and post back here if it's still happening.
 
Been a while but:

Updated to 10.6.8 and nothing has changed. Is there anything that can be done to isolate this issue? I've noticed this happening regardless of the applications I'm using.

Sometimes I can just be working with thunderbird and open office working. Sometimes it happens right in the middle of playing portal 2. But when it happens, the mac goes into suck mode and needs a restart.

I have a feeling there is some kind of resource that is getting locked or trashed, and isn't your typical max CPU or ram issue.

Is there some common spot where OSX keeps system logs? Perhaps there are some warnings about things not being correct.
 
discostu said:
Is there some common spot where OSX keeps system logs? Perhaps there are some warnings about things not being correct.
Click to expand...

The log viewer application is in /Applications/Utilities/Console.app.

Then try downloading either the applications YASU or Onyx and run all the cleaning routines. Then let the program reboot your Mac and upon that reboot manually reboot again to completely rebuild your Mac's startup/shutdown cache.

IMHO them software cleaning should be done once about every three to four months. Doing this will keep OS X lean a mean.
 
If activity monitor isn't showing excessive CPU usage, and RAM is not showing excessive page outs I'd say its almost textbook symptoms of a failing hard drive.
 
All logs can be viewed in the Console.app - in the Applications/Utilities folder.
The main log is called system.log

In your Activity Monitor, do you have the drop down set to show All Processes, and not just My Processes?

Have you tried running a nice cache file cleaner? Download YASU, and try that out.
If that doesn't make a difference, and the spinning cursor continues - I usually suspect that there's a problem with the hard drive.
Boot to your OS X installer disk, and run Disk Utility from the Utilities menu.
Click the Repair Disk button (different from Repair Disk Permissions)
When complete, Quit Disk Utility, and restart your Mac. No reason to continue with the installer, yet.
 
Thanks everyone.

Ah there it is, good error-reporting makes me happy.

Anyway, The console has quite a few of these, constantly:
com.apple.launchd[1] (com.jft.PdaNetMac[13799]) posix_spawn("/Applications/PdaNetMac.app/Contents/MacOS/PdaNetMac", ...): No such file or directory

com.apple.launchd[1] (com.jft.PdaNetMac[13799]) Exited with exit code: 1
com.apple.launchd[1] (com.jft.PdaNetMac) Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds


Removed using advice from here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2449102?start=0&tstart=0

Will post back to see if that changed anything.
 
Fixed the launch daemon and got some better performance. But I still get times when everything just runs terribly, and needs a reboot to fix.

It often occurs when doing this like using eclipse and java, but I can't see anything in the log console which might let me know why everything starts to suck.

Any ideas what I might need to look for?
 
djackmac said:
If activity monitor isn't showing excessive CPU usage, and RAM is not showing excessive page outs I'd say its almost textbook symptoms of a failing hard drive.
Click to expand...

Do you have your Activity Monitor showing All Processes, and not just My Processes? If you look at the System Memory tab, does that show lots of Pageouts, and large swap files, and very little Free Memory?
If that doesn't really show anything, and the CPU also is not high, then you should rightly suspect the hard drive.

How much RAM memory do you have installed in your Mac?
 
Cheers DeltaMac:

Total installed = 4gig, real is 3.75gig.
Virtual memory = 150 gig (seems a bit crazy)

RAM Useage during suckage:
free = 660meg
wired = 40meg
active = 2.2gig
inactive = 1.1gig

CPU idle = 70%

HDD = 250gig, -140gig personal files
free = 60 gig, so virtual memory seems wrong.
Reads in sec = 12

Re bad HDD:
I'll give the hardware diagnostics a go soon. However I ran it a little while ago because the USB port died (and still is), and nothing was reported. It may still be the drive, but I have to take this mac in for some dead pixels on the screen, the dead port and I'll ask em to check the drive.

I'll post back when I know more. Thanks everyone for the advice.
 
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