Spinning Wheel - Pain in the ar$e

D

dave261266

Registered
Guys,

Please help.

I used to have grief in pages/numbers where the spinning wheel used to appear during normal usage (typing and stuff) and the way to get it to go away was to focus on another window and go back but it was seriously irritating. I stopped noticing it after a while (maybe because it disappeared or maybe cause I don't use pages/numbers very often). I have now upgraded to Snow Leapord and at first everything was fine but now it seems to be doing it again. It happens in Quicktime too but not in full screen mode, just windowed mode.

Has anyone got any ideas ?

I initially thought it might be CPU related as I found a background process eating up cpu but that has not been the case most of the time.

Please help - it's getting depressing!!!!
 
First run some software maintenance on that Mac. Download on either free programs YASU or ONYX and run all the cleaning routines. Once the program reboots your Mac (the restart might take a bit to rebuild startup cache) manually reboot again to completely rebuild your shutdown/startup cache, for fast operations.

Hopefully running some maintenance can help. Also how much RAM are you running in your Mac?
 
One more thing, how much free space do you have left on the startup drive? I asked because all Unix flavors (including OS X) use swap files for faster application response.

Since you have enough RAM things should go nicely. However if you have very little hard drive space left the swap files will slow application response. An OS X users should keep about 15% of the hard drive space free on the startup drive.

Hopefully the cache cleaning might help to. Plus learn about the log files (viewable in /Applications/Utilities/Console) by reading the article Running the Mac OS X maintenance scripts and you will learn how to rotate those logs so they don't grow to big.
 
Sorry for not getting back to you.

The problem related to a process that was spinning. It wasn't using up all the cpu however it was spending most of it's time on memory ops.

In relation to swap files or swap space - unless Osx is radically different, when a process starts an amount of swap space will be allocated (not used) and only if the process needs to be swapped out will the swap space be physically used. The only way a process will require swapping is if the amount of free memory drops below a certain threshold (minfree) and if that's happenning it's painful. I assume that Osx works in roughly the same way (this is Solaris).

In my case though I had about 1.5Gb of free memory so no chance of swapping.

Many thanks for the suggestions

Dave
 
A friend of mine had a problem like this running some PowerPC (not Universal/Intel) programs, which were running through the PPC emulator. They show up in the Activity Monitor (Utilities) in the process list (Intel vs. PPC in one of the columns.)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top