[GSixZero]

I'm getting a lot more beach balls lately, and I'd like to figure out what's causing them before I throw money at new hardware.

Any tips on figuring out what's actually happening when the beach ball is spinning? Waiting for disk? Page ins/outs? etc?

Thanks.

[besson3c]

Does it do the same thing in a different OS X account?

[imitchellg5]

What OS do you have? Available RAM? What's your specs? Could be one certain app hanging, could just be that you don't have enough RAM, or sufficient free space on your boot HD.

[GSixZero]

I've got snow leopard with 2 gigs of ram with a laptop hard drive. It could easily be ram related, or a disk bottleneck. Trying to figure out if I should be investing in more ram, a faster disk, or both.

Just trying to figure out what is causing the beach balls, so I can put my money in the right place. Any advice on this?

Thanks.

[besson3c]

If you suspect a disk bottleneck you can run an iostat to check for your load average. Your system load average will reflect over saturated IO too. A memtest86 test will test your RAM.

You have given us too little information to suspect a hardware problem though. Have you tried running things in a different OS X account? Does it do this in all apps or just particular apps? Does it do this under high loads, or just randomly? Have you checked on top/Activity Monitor while this is happening to see if there is a process consuming too many resources?