spinning color wheel - why?

hazmat

hazmat

Rusher of Din
I have 284 megs of RAM, and Memory Monitor in the Dock. Sometimes I will do something with some software, like a web browser or Adium, just entering text, for example, and it will sit for say a minute with with spinning color wheel. I can go to other apps no problem, but why does it do this? At the same time, I will see less then half of my RAM actually active, so that's not the problem. I guess I don't see CPU usage at that time, so could the app in question be shooting up CPU usage? Not making sense to me. What are factors for the spinning color wheel to show up?

Thanks.
 
It's just a HUGE bug/issue in os x. apple is fixing it for 10.2 and you would see it less, but it's still there. what apple must do is totally re write the finder to fix this completely. mostly anyhow i think it's finder issue possibly. so maybe by 10.4 in a year.
 
That issue is not the Finder, he's not IN the Finder when he's experiencing this:

I can't tell you exactly what's going on, something is failing, and timing out within that application. I've only had it happen with Apps that were crashing anyway. Usually they just eat themselves and go away rather than spinwheel me.

I don't know what your issue is, but it's not the Finder. It could be virtually anything though from what you say. Could be a bad sector an your HD, maybe flaky RAM, maybe a bad library file. It could be hardware or software, system or application level, About the only thing we can fairly well rule out is the kernel, and other Applications.

I'd try running some diagnostics and see if you can find file corruption or anything of that sort.
 
Not necessarily the Finder. Right now IE is doing it a lot. I can be typing, or simply clicking or scrolling with the mouse, and the color wheel will come up for maybe 10-15 seconds. Mem usage is at about half right now. And btw, I have 384, not 284. :) It's not always like this, though. I don't think it would be flaky memory. Very irritating, though.
 
Are you connected to any remote drives via any means when you experience this? I've found that when things are going well, OS X's drive handling is good. But when things get flaky, it doesn't properly reprioritize and work around blocks. So if your network mounted drive was asked for a directory listing just prior to a write to another drive (saving preferences?) then maybe one IO activity is blocking another IO activity. (Reads are higher priority than writes usually)

Run CPU Monitor, and see if CPU usage during these crapout periods is abnormal, and if so, if it's system time or app time that's out of line.
 
Originally posted by buggs1a
It's just a HUGE bug/issue in os x. apple is fixing it for 10.2
Click to expand...

Just one question, how does one come by information like this? "Apple IS fixing it". IS Apple really fixing it or is it just what you hope?
 
Originally posted by theed
Are you connected to any remote drives via any means when you experience this? I've found that when things are going well, OS X's drive handling is good. But when things get flaky, it doesn't properly reprioritize and work around blocks. So if your network mounted drive was asked for a directory listing just prior to a write to another drive (saving preferences?) then maybe one IO activity is blocking another IO activity. (Reads are higher priority than writes usually)

Run CPU Monitor, and see if CPU usage during these crapout periods is abnormal, and if so, if it's system time or app time that's out of line.
Click to expand...

No, no remote drives. I will watch top or process viewer to see if anything strange is going on next time this happens.
 
Originally posted by Kristjan
Just one question, how does one come by information like this? "Apple IS fixing it". IS Apple really fixing it or is it just what you hope?
Click to expand...

I'd love to know this too... seems like too many people take rumor for fact these days. I don't know anyone who knows anything about 10.2 other than those leaked screen shots making their way around the 'net from last year.

At any rate, you'll probably find that IE exhibits the "spinning wheel of death" more frequently than other programs. At least it does on my machine. Again, if it's only doing it for 10-15 seconds at a time, then the program isn't crashing -- just hanging for some reason. Keep your terminal open with the "top -u" program running, and when the wheel appears, check the "top" program to see what program is using a very high amount of CPU %. That's the culprit right there.

I've got my CPU monitor bar in my menubar horizontally so I can keep an eye on it all the time. When i see the spinning wheel, the CPU monitor is usually maxing out. Some program is hogging the CPU, which it's not supposed to do under OS X... and my culprit is usually IE.

...and it's definitely not the Finder. The Finder no longer is tied into the other applications running anymore. In OS 9, if you didn't have a Finder, your computer was basically useless since that controlled your desktop, etc. Now, the Finder has the same functionality, but other programs are not affected as much as they used to be by the Finder. You can kill the Finder and keep others apps running -- the Finder itself is, actually, just another application running.
 
There's another thread around here about lookupd (part of netinfo) putting crazy stupid failure logs into the console (console.app can see them) and so I'm wondering if these two things are related. If this is the case, then the process that's hanging isn't actually the same process that's using the CPU so heavily, even if these events seem consistently related. It's like the app is biting its nails waiting on a system service to "get back to it" but it never does.

Check your console and see if netinfo / lookupd are flailing. Anyway, pure conjecture and anecdotal evidence.
 
I don't know why any one program in particular is doing this, but I'm pretty sure that I know "why" it happens. This is the technical reason...

When one writes a mac program, one doesn't write all of the code that handles displaying windows, fetching data from the internet, drawing menus, etc. Instead, one writes the "logic" of the program and lets the operating system (Mac OS X) do the rest. One accomplishes this by using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs - these are the Carbon and Cocoa things you may have heard of).

For example, if one wants to create a new window, one asks the operating system to create a new window with this title, at that location on the screen, etc.

Getting back to the original question, Mac OS X is set up so that if you ask the operating system to do something and it doesn't finish within a certain amount of time, you get the spinning cursor. Also, if the operating system wants to tell your program that the user has performed some action like a keypress and your program doesn't respond within a certain amount of time, you get the spinner.

Of course, this doesn't tell you why certain programs do it all the time - it just says that the program's authors need to spend more time multithreading and Apple needs to spend more time optimizing. Which shouldn't come as a shock to anyone...

Hope the techtalk was helpful:eek:
 
Originally posted by ElDiabloConCaca
The Finder no longer is tied into the other applications running anymore. In OS 9, if you didn't have a Finder, your computer was basically useless since that controlled your desktop, etc. Now, the Finder has the same functionality, but other programs are not affected as much as they used to be by the Finder. You can kill the Finder and keep others apps running -- the Finder itself is, actually, just another application running.
Click to expand...

I see what you are trying to say, but it's not fully correct. The classical OS 9 Finder was also just a running app. The difference however is that the multitasking and protected memory capabilities in OS X, does not make the Finder influence other apps.

Talking about the Finder I really hope Apple will make it truly and fully multithreaded and more optimized for the next major update. I have faith :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top