[macintologist]

I was just using DVD player and I selected "Open VIDEO_TS folder" from the file menu, and there was a spinning beachball for 45 seconds before the open dialogue showed up. According to MenuMeters there was no insane CPU activity during this time.

I find this kind of sluggishness is completely unacceptable for any piece of software, especially from Apple. There is absolutely no reason why a program should beachball for 45 seconds when it's not working hard or processing anything.

I find this happening on other applications like Safari, iChat and Quicktime Player, usually whenever I select something like "Save As..." from the file menu. When they occur, there never is any significant CPU activity. I find it unjustified.

[OptimusG4]

Hmm..good question. Try repairing permissions and running Cocktail to delete any logs/run the cron tasks to see if that helps. Also try logging out/in again to see if that helps. Other than that I'm at a loss, sorry.

[Chuckit]

The CPU is not the only thing in your computer. In this case, it sounds like there's some sort of difficulty reading your disk.

Good grief, what do you think? Are you imagining that Apple programmed in a causeless beachball just to annoy you?

[Kate]

This usually occurs when intensive swapping is needed to load the required data from virtual memory. It is occuring more often under low RAM condition than when plenty of physical memory is present.
However, even under these conditions the beachball should not show up for such a long time. There seems to be some problem with the vm system under certain conditions.

But there is no single cause for extensive "beachballing". A defective prefs file can cause a similar experience. Unprebound libraries, inefficient programming etc. and other causes are quite common as well. Even Apples software in its early stages is often showing unpleasing slowness and many beachball turns until an update turns this for the better. The early iTunes, iPhoto apps come to mind that were performing not up to par in their early incarnations.

On the other hand, if you got plenty of RAM and are using well matured software it may be really caused by some quirks in the OS itself. And there are situations where this seems to apply. So in some sense you're not alone. However, an OS of that size and complexity needs more that a few versions to mature. From a developing point of view OS X is at version 1.3.5 . This means it has some areas left where there is much room for improvement and where speed gains are likely to happen in the future.

[IamBob]

System Preferences->Energy Saver; Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible.

Is that option enabled? That could easily explain your beef.

[Chris Grande]

I find that a beachball at open & save dialogs on my computer is usually caused by the computer spinning up my external hard drive. IamBob's suggestion above will fix that, if thats the issue.

[macintologist]

My PB is never set to go to sleep automatically nor spin the hard disk down automatically.

Plus it shouldn't take 45 seconds for a hard disk to spin up shouldn't it?

[eevyl]

Originally posted by macintologist:
My PB is never set to go to sleep automatically nor spin the hard disk down automatically.

Plus it shouldn't take 45 seconds for a hard disk to spin up shouldn't it?

But a optical support like a CD-ROM or DVD can, specially if scratched.

But the posibility of the beachballing to be "unexplicable" is intriguing .... are they coding it on purpose? Is there a parallel beachballs company being developed as a backup in case Apple sinks in bankrupcy and they are giving us subliminal visual marketing? Who knows.

[eevyl]

By the way, the lag when choosing "Save as..." could be caused to having the dotMac iDisk synchronization turned on (manual or automatic). It is a feature well know to cause slow-downs in open & save windows.

[macintologist]

Originally posted by eevyl:
By the way, the lag when choosing "Save as..." could be caused to having the dotMac iDisk synchronization turned on (manual or automatic). It is a feature well know to cause slow-downs in open & save windows.

I have it off on this machine.

It seems to happen completely on random. For example I just went to Save As.. now in Safari and it was out in 2 seconds like it should be. However often it beachballs for 30-60 seconds, with no significant CPU activity.

I just wish Mac OS X was perfect, that's all I've never had a PC so maybe I'm just not being appreciative

[bergy]

See if any of this applies to you ... good luck

Spinning Pizza Wheel of Death
http://www.macattorney.com/tutorial.html#Anchor-38414

[z|gzag]

Its your DVD/CDROM drive spinning up. I had a PowerMac G4 dual 1Ghz and it had the same problem. I am not sure how to correct it, but I believe resetting the PRAM and/or (yeah i know it sounds silly) reinstalling the OS/updating the OS helps.

[macintologist]

Originally posted by z|gzag:
Its your DVD/CDROM drive spinning up. I had a PowerMac G4 dual 1Ghz and it had the same problem. I am not sure how to correct it, but I believe resetting the PRAM and/or (yeah i know it sounds silly) reinstalling the OS/updating the OS helps.

No it doesn't take 45 seconds for a CD to spin up. I usually don't have any CDs in here anyway.

[Person Man]

Originally posted by Kate:
From a developing point of view OS X is at version 1.3.5 . This means it has some areas left where there is much room for improvement and where speed gains are likely to happen in the future.

Actually, from a developer's standpoint, OS X is at version 3.5. Remember, in OS X, the number after the 10 is a "major release," which is a "pay for" release.

The jump from 10.2 to 10.3 (and to 10.4) would have been like a jump from 8.0 (8.1) to 8.5 or from 8.5 (8.6) to 9.0. The jump from 10.3.0 to 10.3.5 is more like the jump from 8.0 to 8.1 in that respect.

OS X is MUCH more mature than a jump from 1.0 to 1.3.x implies.

Also, as was pointed out above, there are MANY factors that go into what causes a beachball to appear, and it is not always just "sloppy coding"

[Kate]

Well, I know the official numbering scheme, but i do not agree on the system making those big steps as are implied by this scheme, therefore I prefer the more conservative numbering, which in my view better reflects the actual progress.

Do not get me wrong, there haven been huge improvements all over the place, but system 10.1 was barely a release 1.0 . It seems however, that Tiger will bring things up to what I would call a 2.0 version .

Anyway, what I intended to tell was that there are things in a rough state at the bottom that need work for the better. Maybe my wording was a bit provocative.

All that put aside, Apple seems aware of things not always working properly and releases hidden bug fixes along with updates that are officially named to fix primarily other things. So things are getting better all the time.

I am waiting patiently for a fix of the firewire memory leak and other things less obvious.So while Apple is at it, it is likely they will bring fixes for various things maybe even related to our problem discussed here.

Now back to the topic.
(Edit...copied answer to other thread here..)

[Old Toad]

How much free space do you have on your HD. It recommended to have at least 10G free with OS X to allow for the memory pageouts, cache files, etc. I'd run either Panther Cache Cleaner, Onyx or Cocktail to clear out those cache and other files. Then I'd run DeLocalizer to remove the unneeded language files. I saved 900+MB the first time I ran it. It will run under 10.3.

[Gavin]

10 GB free huh...

That can be difficult if your laptop only has a 10 GB drive

I can not really get mine to more than 1GB free.
It starts to have problems if I let it get below 500MB free. It totally craps out with less than 300MB free.

Your min. free disk space should be double your ram for there to be room for swap and some caching. That's the minimum. Anything more is bonus.


That's a good tip for the language files, etc. I'd also zap any unneeded printer drivers and fonts you don't use. If you use iPhoto archive and remove some pix. You can re-encode any MP3s at a lower bit rate (makes a difference is you have lots). I put mine on my desktop and I stream them. I only keeps a small set of songs for traveling.

Anyway, he was talking about opening a VIDEO_TS folder not using an optical disk. Spin up time is not involved in this case. Sounds more like a swap issue.

How fast is it after a reboot with nothing running but the DVD player?

How much free disk space do you have?

There are some apps that really kill the disk with caching. Safari will kill your available disk space fast, quitting doesn't seem to free it back up. If I log out then back in I can get back hundred of MBs

[z|gzag]

Originally posted by macintologist:
No it doesn't take 45 seconds for a CD to spin up. I usually don't have any CDs in here anyway.

It happens even if there is no CD in there, and it does take about 45 seconds. I am quite sure this is the problem. If you listen carefully I believe you can hear a sound from the drive when this happens.

[york28]

I get the darn beachball whenever I'm browsing a mounted share from another computer. Instead of the little "loading" animation that I recall from previous OSs (Was it really Mac OS 9?), I just get a beachball and the finder hangs until it can load the needed information from the shared volume.

The entire Mac OS has has this issue with disk-reading holding it up since I remember. I often have to wait for all of my HD's to spin up when I do the simplest tasks that only require one drive. I guess I should turn drive sleep off in System Prefs.

[Chuckit]

Originally posted by Kate:
Well, I know the official numbering scheme, but i do not agree on the system making those big steps as are implied by this scheme, therefore I prefer the more conservative numbering, which in my view better reflects the actual progress.

Do not get me wrong, there haven been huge improvements all over the place, but system 10.1 was barely a release 1.0 . It seems however, that Tiger will bring things up to what I would call a 2.0 version .

You don't think Quartz Extreme, Expose, complete Windows integration, a journalled file system, an integrated Web framework and the million other changes since 10.1 are as big a leap as OS 8 to OS 9? They've added features up the wazoo in both Jaguar and Panther. I can't think of any full-version release of any software ever that seems to live up to your requirements for being more than a point-release.

[z|gzag]

Originally posted by york28:
I get the darn beachball whenever I'm browsing a mounted share from another computer. Instead of the little "loading" animation that I recall from previous OSs (Was it really Mac OS 9?), I just get a beachball and the finder hangs until it can load the needed information from the shared volume.

The entire Mac OS has has this issue with disk-reading holding it up since I remember. I often have to wait for all of my HD's to spin up when I do the simplest tasks that only require one drive. I guess I should turn drive sleep off in System Prefs.

Finder sucks, they need to finallly rewrite it with threads, clean code and Cocoa!

It would be nice if it looked like a real application too, not the hacked together crappy UI it has now.

[macintologist]

Originally posted by z|gzag:
Finder sucks, they need to finallly rewrite it with threads, clean code and Cocoa!

It would be nice if it looked like a real application too, not the hacked together crappy UI it has now.

The only thing that truly sucks about the Finder is the way it handles iDisks and all mounted internet disks.

My DSL is fast for downloading, but has a slow ping and is not very agile since I live in Cyprus a small island far away from America.

The Finder ALWAYS beachballs when I'm dealing with the iDisk. Why can't it just load the iDisk in the background and let me do other things in the Finder? Why does it hang the whole thing??

[Devin Lane]

Originally posted by Person Man:
Actually, from a developer's standpoint, OS X is at version 3.5. Remember, in OS X, the number after the 10 is a "major release," which is a "pay for" release.

The jump from 10.2 to 10.3 (and to 10.4) would have been like a jump from 8.0 (8.1) to 8.5 or from 8.5 (8.6) to 9.0. The jump from 10.3.0 to 10.3.5 is more like the jump from 8.0 to 8.1 in that respect.

OS X is MUCH more mature than a jump from 1.0 to 1.3.x implies.

Also, as was pointed out above, there are MANY factors that go into what causes a beachball to appear, and it is not always just "sloppy coding"

I would have to agree with you, *except* for the jump from 8.0 to 8.1 That was pretty damn big, considering 8.1 introduced HFS+.

[Person Man]

Originally posted by Devin Lane:
I would have to agree with you, *except* for the jump from 8.0 to 8.1 That was pretty damn big, considering 8.1 introduced HFS+.

Yes, but it was still free.

[Kate]

Originally posted by Chuckit:
You don't think Quartz Extreme, Expose, complete Windows integration, a journalled file system, an integrated Web framework and the million other changes since 10.1 are as big a leap as OS 8 to OS 9? They've added features up the wazoo in both Jaguar and Panther. I can't think of any full-version release of any software ever that seems to live up to your requirements for being more than a point-release.

No, I don't think so. The add ons to the system are nice and a good thing, but they do not alter the state of the base system. The add ons are worth a dot number. Expose and other things are quite nice, but do nothing about old structures, like e.g. networking blocking all other tasks, lack of sufficient threading, like e,g, in volume access, you see selecting a menu still blocks most other things and so on.

While there have been huge steps forward a bunch of heritage holds development up that really would justify major release jumps. But we are talking about different measures. In the world of *nix development a 0.5 release can be a functionial thing lacking features, while in the Apple world a 10.1 release lacked function and features.

It is a bit difficult for me to justify anything like "windows integration" to call a major step, when the Samba implementation they integrated is an old release and the way it has been put in has bugs.
Even today the system fails to properly browse, mount and log windows shares. And there is still the odd Finder hang with AppleShares alike. There has been a program named SMB-Browse for instance that is at version 0.92 if I recall correctly, that is able to browse and mount worth its version number. X compared to this is only at, hm, 0.5 ?

And there are many other things like the sluggish way text is put in this window while I type. When I want to go back to edit this cursor in Safari jumps and stutters like mad. Not all is well under the hood of those many libraries. So for me the state of basic things does not justify those major versioning jumps. If you are used to have the numbers jumping with evey add on while the basics still are not fully functional or up to their promise this is a bit too much difference between life and advertisement for me. Anyway, those are just numbers...different measures..nothing to get too worried about.

[DeathMan]

I'd say introducing graphics card acceleration of the gui is pretty fundamental, and is worthy of a full point upgrade. So I'd say they're at LEAST at version 2. Tiger's implentation of all the new Core libraries (especially data) would constitute another full version. I'm trying to think if there is anything in Panther that would make it a full point upgrade. Its easily as much of an improvement as 8.6->9. I'd say as features go, I'd take expose over sherlock.

I'm not trying to be disagreeable here, I'm just illustrate that in the marketing world (I.E. The guys in charge of the whole stupid numbering system we currently use -- it could be worse. you put the engineers in charge and you'd have MacOS 7M34 -- "Ahhh, dude, did you see the new 2D-opengl hardware accelerated window management routines in 7M34?? they're teh s3x0r!!!" ) you can spin it however you want. Personally I think the OS is mature enough to not have these weird beachballs when it comes to working with file systems on remote machines. I don't see why it can't be threaded, and do two things at a time.

For that matter, I don't see why we can't be saving in Photoshop, or running filter on one document, and not be working on another document (in photoshop) at the same time. When is this going to change?!

[Kate]

Originally posted by DeathMan:
When is this going to change?!

Agreed. It is going to change when developers make their apps multithreaded. Currently too many are still bound to Mac OS 9 or Classic, so making them threaded makes little sense compared to the effort needed. Let alone having a double code base.

However there is no real excuse for the system or Finder beachballing. Since the Finder is still linked against Carbon and Carbon still lags behind Cocoa in some ways and since the Finder is a major rats nest of code there is much to be done to get it up to the capabilities of X. And well, there is no excuse for filesystem access beachballing or network access beachballing. Neither on the system level nor on the app level. It is up to Apple to shift these things from the late 70s to the next century.

[z|gzag]

Originally posted by Kate:
Agreed. It is going to change when developers make their apps multithreaded. Currently too many are still bound to Mac OS 9 or Classic, so making them threaded makes little sense compared to the effort needed. Let alone having a double code base.

However there is no real excuse for the system or Finder beachballing. Since the Finder is still linked against Carbon and Carbon still lags behind Cocoa in some ways and since the Finder is a major rats nest of code there is much to be done to get it up to the capabilities of X. And well, there is no excuse for filesystem access beachballing or network access beachballing. Neither on the system level nor on the app level. It is up to Apple to shift these things from the late 70s to the next century.

DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS!

Apple needs better QA on their software.