Spining Beach Ball of Death

C

callieX

Registered
I am running the latest version of Panther, just go the latest update. For the last month or so I notice that I am getting the Spinning beach ball mostly in iPhote but not exclusively. I open iPhoto and start to scroll down and then I get the beach ball. It goes for a number of minutes and finally comes back and scrolls. While the ball is spinning I can not do anything but wait. I can not do a force quit either.
I have a 17 in powerbook @1GHz with 512 RAM. Last Friday I added another 512 to take it to 1G of RAM. I have not seen any speed improvement at all. Any ideas? It makes using iPhoto very cumbersome. I have about 330 photos stored. I have been getting some unexpected quits on iPhoto and iTunes.
 
Do you have the shadows in the iPhoto turned on (it is as default) ? You have so many photos that it slows it down .. also, if it has to make a thumbnail of every picture while you scroll down, that takes effort too - if most photos were only in their albums (in iPhoto) instead of the main album, that would slow down the scrolling time too.

Unexpected quits? Try to Repair the permissions (applications / utlities > open Disk Utility, choose your hard disk in it, and hit Repair permissions. If it finds a lot of repairing, maybe run it once again) - it could be something has corrupted file permissions now in those programs.
 
Which version of iPhoto? iPhoto 4 is supposed to be much faster, esp. with lots of photos.

Doug
 
I am using iPhoto 4. I have noticed my computer seem awfully slugglish. Even before I added the 512M of RAM to it. Especially in iPhoto. I have about 400 pictures. When I go to edit and look at individual photos it takes a second or two to dislplay in full quality. I was hoping the ram upgrade would make it faster but has yet I do not see any improvement in speed. I have been searching the net looking for utilities or procedures that might improve things.
 
Giaguara said:
Do you have the shadows in the iPhoto turned on (it is as default) ? You have so many photos that it slows it down .. also, if it has to make a thumbnail of every picture while you scroll down, that takes effort too - if most photos were only in their albums (in iPhoto) instead of the main album, that would slow down the scrolling time too.
Click to expand...

Guys, honestly 330 photos is nothing. I don't use iPhoto, but my friend does on his old G4-500 (was top of line when he got it). He has THOUSANDS of photos, always importing more and while I wouldn't call it blazingly fast, it is fine. Some are in albums, but in the main they are all in the default view.

He has just upgraded to Panther and got iLife too, and notices very snappy performance in iPhoto 4.

Take into account that he has what today is a slow machine (bus, ram etc are slower than todays I guess) and it performs. If you are seeing problems with a few hundred pics, keep working at it! It isn't normal!
 
I just installed the new iphoto and for some reason all my pictures dissapeared, no idea where they went, but the worst is that my darn minolta f300 camera keeps crashing iphoto...oh,well maybe I can find the old iphoto3 somewhere.
 
I repaired permissions. Something I have never done before. It seems to have helped. I am not getting the spinning ball of death anymore. But I have a 1 Gig of ram is this beast and I would expect a little snappy performance than what I am getting. I noticed then when I launch an app like iPhoto for the 1st time it takes awhile to load. If I close it an reopen it, it open instantly. Getting loaded into RAM the first time does the trick.
 
Check other things, such as how much disk space you have left. You shouldn't ever let it get below, say, 1.5 gig. That can really slow things down and possibly cause system instability.

Also be sure to run Activity Monitor, found in -> Hard Drive/Applications/Utilities
Click on CPU (the title of the fourth column in the data table shown) to sort by CPU usage. Look to see if one of your running applications is using a large amount of CPU time. Idle applications shouldn't use more than roughly 10% over an extended period of time.

Doug
 
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