[MadBrowser]

I just started having a strange problem with Panther 10.3.2 on my 1GHz 15" TiBook.

All of a sudden I'm getting hard freezes (3 today). When this occurs, I can still move the mouse but nothing else.

I can't force quit apps. Mousing over them in the Dock does not pop up their name. I cannot Command-Tab between them.

I ran Hardware Test and no problems were found. I repaired the disk and repaired the permissions...

And still it just happened again...

Anyone else seen anything like this? I have had a pretty constant set of apps open:

Entourage, Safari, Preview, Terminal and SpamSieve. That's it.

Any help appreciated.

[bergy]

See this document ...

Resolving Disk, Permission, and Cache Corruption
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/repairprocess.html


For trouble free operation I recommend ....

Macaroni ... just set it and forget it.
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/9633

Macaroni is a tool which handles regular maintenance for Mac OS X's Unix core. Normally these tasks run on a regular schedule, in the middle of the night. However if you don't leave your Mac on all night, they never run. Your Mac won't wake from sleep to handle this. Macaroni solves this problem. If a scheduled maintenance task is not run when it's normally scheduled, Macaroni automatically ensures that it's run at the next opportunity, whenever the Mac is on. Repairs permissions also, on a weekly basis.

Also ...

Cache Out X
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/9538

Cache Out X clears out the cache entries on your machine, helping you recover valuable disk space on your machine. Items removed include the caches in System, Users, and Library, along with the Internet Explorer download cache. Optionally clears the IE's history cache as well.

If none of this works trash finder prefs

user/library/preferences/com.apple.finder.plist

Good luck!

[CharlesS]

I've had this happen on my Pismo a few times when I was running iPhoto slideshows. However, that was with 10.2...

Come to think of it, I did have that happen to me once on 10.3, but I don't remember what I was doing.

Might be the hardware...

[MadBrowser]

Thanks. I have tried cleaning out some of the cache stuff and running the periodic scripts.

We'll see. I also turned on SSH so next time it happens I can try to get in and see what is up.

I suspected hardware too, but it did pass the HW test with flying colors.

Who knows.

[parkds]

I actually have been having this exact problem. It started not long after I upgraded to 10.3 (maybe 2 weeks after). The applications that are usually open when it happens are Entourage, iChat, Safari, iTunes.
I have talked to a few other people who have had the same thing happen to them also. So you aren't alone. But I would love to know what is causing it.
I leave my computer on 24hr so I don't believe it is an issue with the Unix tasks that run at night.

[bergy]

Originally posted by parkds:
I actually have been having this exact problem. It started not long after I upgraded to 10.3 (maybe 2 weeks after). The applications that are usually open when it happens are Entourage, iChat, Safari, iTunes.
I have talked to a few other people who have had the same thing happen to them also. So you aren't alone. But I would love to know what is causing it.
I leave my computer on 24hr so I don't believe it is an issue with the Unix tasks that run at night.

After any update .. Repair permissions: Go to Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility and double click it. Then select your hard drive in the left panel and First Aid at the top. Then click on "Repair Permissions." It will take a few minutes.

Macaroni does this automatically once a week

[kjb]

exactly the same thing here on an ibook 500. I was having a similar problem under Jag., but the mouse would freeze too. The "fix" I found for both problems is to put the system to sleep by shutting the lid. It can take a couple of minutes sometimes for the sleeping light to show up on the front of the machine. But once it does, I can immediately open the lid and be back in business. I found this to be much faster than a hard reboot.

I've tried all of the cache and permissions fixes and still see the problem. I'm hoping one of these updates fixes it someday, but since I've been seeing it for nearly a year, I don't have my hopes up.

I'd be interested to know what brand of harddrive you laptop users that are seeing this have in your notebooks. I have a Toshiba 5400 rpm drive that was upgraded from the original IBM. Anyone else??

Kevin

[MadBrowser]

Interesting. I'll try the sleep thing next time.

I too have an upgraded drive. It is a 7200 RPM IBM with the large cache... 60GB.

My permissions have been fixed several times.

It's probably Entourage doing something funky in Carbon that is exposing a bug... Some weird non-reentrant CFM call that Apple was sure no one was using... Ha!

[JellyBeen]

I get the dreaded system freeze on the occasion. The mouse still moves but I can't force quit. A hard reboot is what I always do, nothing else will work. This happens like ~2x month on 10.3.1. I was at 10.3.2 but it sucked so bad I reverted (archive re-install) and am pretty happy for now.
I also use macaroni and run Cocktail fot good measure. Last night for kicks I ran TTpro 4.01 and checked all hardware and ram. All is fine. I have come to realise that poorly written and debugged apps will bring the system down sometimes, even in Panther.I suspect open GL is probably at fault in my case since games give me the most freezes.10.3.3 fixes open GL problems...lets hope it fixes mine.

[Carnage Visors]

I had exactly the same issue, but I couldn't ssh in to the machine, It happened when I was trying to archive some files....

B

[MadBrowser]

My problem was Airport 3.3.

I reverted to 3.1 on the Panther CDs and now I am working again.

[stuback]

I am having the same problem, and it did start after I installed Airport 3.3. Can you give me instructions on how to revert back to Airport 3.1?

Thanks,
Stu

[Big Mac]

The content of this thread really surprised me. I've never experienced a freeze like that personally, nor on any of the machines I have administered. Are you sure you guys aren't running OS 9 instead? The only times I've ever had to do an ungraceful reboot on OS X were the rare cases in which my iBook wouldn't wake from sleep. That problem disappeared with Jaguar, and I've been rock solid ever since.

[gorickey]

I've seen this exact thing happen; however, it was only when World Book 7.1.2 was launched...happened on any user...

[Terri]

I've seen this on a few machines and usually the machine has a drive that wasn't updated for 10.3 either the disk wasn't connected when 10.3 was installed or the system was cloned to it and not installed from the 10.3 installer.

Anyway opening Disk Utility and enabling Journaling on all the drives has fixed it just about all the time.

I'm not really sure why but I'm guessing that it is because it is updating the disk's driver.

Actually I don't understand why there isn't a driver update button in Disk Utility.

[frozentundra]

2 questions

What is journaling.

Why would I want too enable it?

I have had a few lock ups myself, since upgrading to Panther

I am curious as to wether the problem is Panther or another upgrade that was performed at the same time. I don't know about everyone else but I tend to upgrade a group of of apps when Apples software update makes them available.

So is the issue Panther or is it an Airport upgrade or something else?

FT

[Apfhex]

I though it'd never happen to me, but a few weeks ago I had my PowerBook lock up like that several times in one day. Never had that happen under OS X before, only under Panther. The culprit SEEMS to be iTunes - each time it happened, it was open and playing something from my music Library (after several crashes, I tried leaving it on a streaming radio station for a while and had no problems).

I repair permissions from time to time and my drive was recently reformatted when I upgraded to Panther.

[maceye]

I have been having the same problem, and it is really frustrating me. In fact it happened as I was posting a reply to this very topic. Here is what I have done so far to try to fix the problem:
- Reinstall OS X 10.3 (and then run software update)
- Fix permissions on all my drives
- Use disk utility on all my drives
- Enable journaling on all my drives
- Use Cocktail to run daily, weekly and monthly scripts
- Use Cocktail to re-do prebinding

The problem has happened in different user profiles both before and after the clean install. The system log usually has a line about pre-binding as the last entry before restart.

The last time this happened I got a bunch of text dumped out on the screen (I will post a pic of this soon). Link to image of screen

I have no idea what is going on here or how to fix this, and any help would be appreciated!

EDIT:
Here are the last few entries in the system log before the last crash (although this crash was different as it dumped text on the screen):
Feb 7 14:41:29 localhost /usr/libexec/fix_prebinding: 2004-02-07 14:41:29 -0500: prebinding for HotApp done.
Feb 7 14:41:55 localhost mDNSResponder[166]: mDNSResponder Sleeping at 155369
Feb 7 14:41:57 localhost kernel: AppleNMI mask NMI
Feb 7 16:36:33 localhost kernel: System Sleep
Feb 7 16:36:33 localhost kernel: System Wake
Feb 7 16:36:33 localhost kernel: Wake event 0008
Feb 7 16:36:33 localhost kernel: enableClockSpreading returned with 0
Feb 7 16:36:33 localhost kernel: AppleNMI unmask NMI
Feb 7 16:36:33 localhost kernel: AirPortFirmware: start Sta f/w download
Feb 7 16:36:33 localhost kernel: ADB present:8c
Feb 7 16:36:32 localhost configd[86]: posting notification com.apple.system.config.network_change
Feb 7 16:36:32 localhost mach_init[2]: Server 0 in bootstrap d03 uid 0: "/usr/sbin/lookupd": exited as a result of signal 1 [pid 275]
Feb 7 16:36:32 localhost configd[86]: executing /System/Library/SystemConfiguration/Kicker.bundle/Contents/Resources/set-hostname
Feb 7 16:36:33 localhost lookupd[363]: lookupd (version 324) starting - Sat Feb 7 16:36:33 2004
Feb 7 16:36:33 localhost set-hostname[369]: setting hostname to [xxxxx].local
Feb 7 16:36:36 localhost configd[86]: posting notification com.apple.system.config.network_change
Feb 7 16:36:36 localhost mach_init[2]: Server 22bb in bootstrap d03 uid 0: "/usr/sbin/lookupd": exited as a result of signal 1 [pid 363]
Feb 7 16:36:36 localhost configd[86]: executing /System/Library/SystemConfiguration/Kicker.bundle/Contents/Resources/set-hostname
Feb 7 16:36:36 localhost lookupd[372]: lookupd (version 324) starting - Sat Feb 7 16:36:36 2004
Feb 7 16:36:37 localhost set-hostname[384]: setting hostname to [xxxxxxx]
Feb 7 16:36:41 localhost mDNSResponder[166]: mDNSResponder Waking at 170986
Feb 7 16:36:41 localhost diskarbitrationd[87]: disk2s3 hfs 1B36C876-2AC7-339C-A505-01B7633CC276 My iPod /Volumes/My iPod
Feb 7 16:37:59 localhost /usr/libexec/fix_prebinding: fix_prebinding quitting for now.
Feb 7 16:40:07 localhost kernel: hfs: Initializing the journal (joffset 0x17de69 sz 0x800000)...
Feb 7 16:44:13 localhost syslogd: restart

[maceye]

It did it two more times and the system log was identical each time (see below).

It seems as if there might be a problem with /usr/libexec/fix_prebinding, but I don't know what this file/app does. There is also a signifigant time delay between the last entry and the restart command, so maybe these logs are useless as far as helping me to fix this freezing problem.

Feb 7 17:04:47 localhost /usr/libexec/fix_prebinding: The file /Applications/Internet Applications/Transmit.app/Contents/MacOS/Transmit changed after the prebinding problem was noted.
Feb 7 17:04:47 localhost /usr/libexec/fix_prebinding: 2004-02-07 17:04:47 -0500: prebinding for Transmit done.
Feb 7 17:06:47 localhost /usr/libexec/fix_prebinding: fix_prebinding quitting for now.
Feb 7 17:08:34 localhost /usr/libexec/fix_prebinding: /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunes could not be launched prebound.
Feb 7 17:08:34 localhost /usr/libexec/fix_prebinding: The file /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunes changed after the prebinding problem was noted.
Feb 7 17:08:34 localhost /usr/libexec/fix_prebinding: 2004-02-07 17:08:34 -0500: prebinding for iTunes done.
Feb 7 17:10:34 localhost /usr/libexec/fix_prebinding: fix_prebinding quitting for now.
Feb 7 17:11:17 localhost kernel: resize: max chain len 50, new table size 8192
Feb 7 17:16:46 localhost /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari: *** Warning: ATSUSetFontFallbacks has been deprecated. Use ATSUFontFallbacks objects instead. ***
Feb 7 17:18:13 localhost syslogd: restart

[kcmac]

We have experienced this problem as well but only on our iMac DVSE 400. We just thought it was the Sims game but today it locked up while using Safari.

OS X v.10.3.2. Airport 3.3. iMac is the software base station for my PB.

[parkds]

Well I have seemed to have found the culprit for my problem. As I posted above the one constant seemed to be iTunes was playing a song when the system froze up. I also run the small program Synergy on my computer. A new version of synergy was release the other day with these release notes:
dual-CPU systems were seeing lock-ups with the old versions once they'd upgraded to Panther; 1.0a4 works around the Panther changes and completely fixes the potential lock-ups
I have a dual 1ghz, so I am guessing this was my problem.

[Kiddo311]

hey,

if anyone in this thread who is expieriencing these problems is using a draytek router for network / internet-access you might want to update your firmware. i know my machine had these problems after the 10.3.2 update and it got really bad. repairing permissions only was a temporary fix. so i finally found a thread in the apple discussion forums with people with this problems. seems that 3.2 locks up over a dns-lookup. updating the firmware on my draytek 2200 e router fixed all the issues. my macos x is rock solid again - as it should be.

if this helps you, please let me know =)

Kiddo

[Link]

Originally posted by parkds:
Well I have seemed to have found the culprit for my problem. As I posted above the one constant seemed to be iTunes was playing a song when the system froze up. I also run the small program Synergy on my computer. A new version of synergy was release the other day with these release notes:
dual-CPU systems were seeing lock-ups with the old versions once they'd upgraded to Panther; 1.0a4 works around the Panther changes and completely fixes the potential lock-ups
I have a dual 1ghz, so I am guessing this was my problem.

INTERESTING. I have a dual 800 and have the exact issue when playing itunes... what da ya know!

[Spheric Harlot]

Originally posted by kcmac:
We have experienced this problem as well but only on our iMac DVSE 400. We just thought it was the Sims game but today it locked up while using Safari.

OS X v.10.3.2. Airport 3.3. iMac is the software base station for my PB.

Same machine, same setup, same problem.

Locked up about 8 times over the past few days, about five times today while attempting to copy large files via Airport from the iMac to the Powerbook.

*very* annoying.

Methinks I should revert to Airport 3.1 and see what happens.

My Powerbook has NOT locked up at all yet, btw.

-s*

[pimephalis]

Add to the list of afflicted systems my poor little iBook 700 (16 MB VRAM). I don't lay the blame at the feet of itunes, as it has crashed on me several times when itunes wasn't playing. Instead, it seems as though it's network activity which brings the machine down (vnc, bt, copying files between computers). I'm using the Airport 3.3 software, and think I will downgrade to 3.1 to see if that will help.

In passing, my system.log shows the same flurry of prebinding problems as the above posts. Very curious.

[Spliff]

I've been having this problem ever since upgrading to 10.3.2. It only occurs under heavy network traffic.

My brother has the same problem on his Powerbook after upgrading to 10.3.2. A heavy network load leads to a hard freeze.

There's a long discussion at the Apple Support forums, 193 posts and counting.

http://discussions.info.apple.com/[email protected]

[alphasubzero949]

All 3 of my laptops lock up under 10.3.2 to the point where switching to another app results in the cursor beachballing.

I highly believe that Safari 1.2 is the culprit. The lockups occur under heavy network traffic (I have MenuMeters installed), especially when viewing a QuickTime movie from within Safari. Any way to revert to the previous version of Safari?

[austeros]

sorry sub, i dont think its possible, with out reinstalling.

and my system has been doing the same ever since i installed 10.3, not just with safari 1.2 (actually hoped 1.2 update would have fixed this)


damned annoying, on a os 10.3.2. tried cache out x and macaroni, neither solved my problems.

[gorickey]

This is pretty bad between this thread and one over at Apple Discussions...sure hope Apple has something to say about it...

[Spliff]

Originally posted by gorickey:
This is pretty bad between this thread and one over at Apple Discussions...sure hope Apple has something to say about it...

We should email MacFixit.com so they put this problem on their frontpage.

[Kiddo311]

has anybody even read my post? or does nobody have a router installed. because i had the same problems and the solution ( which is at the apple forum!!! ) FIXED my problem.

the class - anyone?

[Azzgunther]

Seems that many of us with this problem have Airport 3.3.

Perhaps we should start noting what software is common on afflicted computers.

10.3.2
Airport 3.3
iTunes 4.2
Usually happens with BitTorrent running
Safari 1.1 and then 1.2

These are the four processes that are ALWAYS running when I get a freeze.

[gorickey]

Originally posted by Kiddo311:
has anybody even read my post? or does nobody have a router installed. because i had the same problems and the solution ( which is at the apple forum!!! ) FIXED my problem.

the class - anyone?

It only effects Draytek routers? If so, that won't help me.

This sort of freeze only happens for me when launching and trying to use World Book 7.1.2 (Panther update)...the system is just fine BEFORE I launch that sucker. I've reformatted, totally re-installed and same thing happens. Everytime. It's sytem-wide as any user logged will see this freeze. It's absolutely wild. Hardware tests say everything is fine. No extra RAM installed.

[Spliff]

Originally posted by Kiddo311:
has anybody even read my post? or does nobody have a router installed. because i had the same problems and the solution ( which is at the apple forum!!! ) FIXED my problem.

the class - anyone?

No, I don't have a router.

[Spliff]

Originally posted by Azzgunther:
Seems that many of us with this problem have Airport 3.3.

Perhaps we should start noting what software is common on afflicted computers.

10.3.2
Airport 3.3
iTunes 4.2
Usually happens with BitTorrent running
Safari 1.1 and then 1.2

These are the four processes that are ALWAYS running when I get a freeze.

Definitely 10.3.2. I don't have Airport 3.3 installed. Safari is running when the freeze happens. The freeze has happened when Bittorrent was running and when it wasn't. Freeze also occurred when Thoth was running. So it seems to be triggered by heavy network access on my system.

[Spheric Harlot]

Originally posted by Kiddo311:
has anybody even read my post? or does nobody have a router installed. because i had the same problems and the solution ( which is at the apple forum!!! ) FIXED my problem.

the class - anyone?

No router here.

Not that I wouldn't love to fix my problems by updating some nonexistent router's firmware.

[pimephalis]

Originally posted by Azzgunther:
Seems that many of us with this problem have Airport 3.3.

Perhaps we should start noting what software is common on afflicted computers.

10.3.2
Airport 3.3
iTunes 4.2
Usually happens with BitTorrent running
Safari 1.1 and then 1.2

These are the four processes that are ALWAYS running when I get a freeze.

Yes, yes and yes. Actually, you're set up and conditions sound exactly like mine. I'm also behind a router, but a linksys one.

[cashg]

I've had the same problems. Noticed though, that this only started after I installed bluetooth 1.5. How many of you all are running bluetooth devices?

[pimephalis]

Originally posted by cashg:
I've had the same problems. Noticed though, that this only started after I installed bluetooth 1.5. How many of you all are running bluetooth devices?

Well, I don't use any bluetooth devices, and haven't updated to 1.5. Not sure that rules it out, but ...

[Zim]

I've had mouse-only-sign-of-life lock-ups since 10.3 came out. Always while running processes in Terminal, processes that NEVER hung 10.2, and from a unix point of view, should never bring a system down (I'm just using trn to read news.. not very complicated).

Submitted to Apple in late Nov. Got one reply for more info (ping answered, but www/sssh access failed). Also syslog showed a gap indicated that cron jobs were not running either (have a cron job every minute with entry into syslog).

G4/800 (not DP)

Mike

[alphasubzero949]

I just had Panther lock up on me again.

Apps open at the time:
Terminal
DesktopCalendar
iCal
ADGate
Safari
Netscape
iChat
iTunes
401(ok)
QuickTime Player
Preview
Activity Monitor

I was about to view a QuickTime movie from within Safari when it locked up. I tried to go to the Terminal to see how many processes became stuck; it locked up. I switched to the Finder and tried to activate "Force Quit." No worky. Finder then locked up. I then switched over to iChat and tried to quit it. It too locked up.

Also, iDisk was apparently syncing at the time.

Reboot.

Now, iChat will not open at all. I even tried installing the new beta. It still fails to open. I tried a few things. It now launches, but sporadically. The exec file within the package says there's a "Broken Pipe." (I started a thread about this in the Software forum).

[entrox]

I think I should chime in with my experiences, since Panther froze twice on me yesterday. I've been experiencing these since the Jaguar, but hoped they would be fixed in Panther. They always happened while using OmniWeb, so I suspected a bug in there (something akin to a fork-bomb: spawning thousands of threads until it bogged everything down to a screeching halt).

Apparently this seems to be a bug in OS X itself. Everything except the mouse pointer seems to freeze, but the machine didn't actually crash. It responds to pings and I can actually do some things like putting it to sleep or eliciting some response with huge delays (1-2 minutes).

Seems like some critical process goes tits up and hogs all resources. Very annoying. BTW, both my 12" PB and my MDD 2x1GHz freeze like that.

[pimephalis]

Well, my iBook crashed again last night. The only active app at the time was an sftp session using Fugu. I had closed everything else. To me, that indicates that the problem has to do with network activity (would explain the frequent references to quicktime movies in Safari, bittorrent) and possibly Airport 3.3. It would also be corroborated by Kiddo311's experience of eliminating the problem by changing his router's firmware.

All in all, this makes for rather frustrating times Apple. You've cooked an OS which now periodically crashes a machine which is simply trying to transfer a lot of data (interestingly, this only seems to happen when downloading, not uploading).

Now, does any one my thinking above not hold up under scrutiny? Have I missed or misrepresented anything?

[Azzgunther]

I'm beginning to believe it has to do with heavy network usage as well. Is anybody willing to refrain from using the internet for 24-48 hours to see if the freezes cease?


Also, please send Apple feedback:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/feedback/

[alphasubzero949]

Originally posted by Azzgunther:
I'm beginning to believe it has to do with heavy network usage as well. Is anybody willing to refrain from using the internet for 24-48 hours to see if the freezes cease?


Also, please send Apple feedback:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/feedback/

I have before and the freezes stopped. For me it's only happening whenever there is heavy network usage. I have Airport 3.3 installed like others, but I'm using a wired T1 connection.


My main problem is viewing a large QT movie in Safari. I've had this problem since Jaguar, went away for a little bit with 10.3 and 10.3.1, and came back with a vengeance in 10.3.2 along with the 1.2 update.


I've gone back to 10.3.1 since my last post.

[jokell82]

I have this happen as well, although not all that often. The past couple of days it's done it with Quicktime appearing as the culprit, but it's done it before without QT running... *Usually* if I let it sit there it'll revive itself, but that can take a while so I just give it the three finger salute.

Happens probably once every week or two, but has happened a couple of times in the last few days.

[Spheric Harlot]

No, my iMac will freeze up even when I just leave it sitting at the login screen, i.e. NO applications are running.

That is, Airport will die, and I can login locally, but as soon as the login dialog window disappears, it freezes.

-s*

[pimephalis]

Originally posted by Spheric Harlot:
No, my iMac will freeze up even when I just leave it sitting at the login screen, i.e. NO applications are running.

That is, Airport will die, and I can login locally, but as soon as the login dialog window disappears, it freezes.

-s*

Interesting. Sounds like Airport is failing, but failing in such a way as to initiate a cascade of failures until the whole system locks up.

Is everyone experiencing these failures using Airport 3.3?

[Zim]

FWIW, I do not have an Airport, very much a stock G4/800, with few mods to the System (if any).

It only happens for me runnin trn (threaded news reader) which is going to cause significant network usage. What is odd is that it only happens when I am 's'aving many parts of music files together to one file for future processing. If I am instead 'e'xtracting many smallfiles one-by-one it never locks up ('s'aving locks up ~10% of the time).

I tried to see if there was any correlation with file size, and the ~20M file size for auto-defrag (wild theory), but nothing I could identify.

Mike

[pimephalis]

Originally posted by Zim:
FWIW, I do not have an Airport, very much a stock G4/800, with few mods to the System (if any).

It only happens for me runnin trn (threaded news reader) which is going to cause significant network usage. What is odd is that it only happens when I am 's'aving many parts of music files together to one file for future processing. If I am instead 'e'xtracting many smallfiles one-by-one it never locks up ('s'aving locks up ~10% of the time).

I tried to see if there was any correlation with file size, and the ~20M file size for auto-defrag (wild theory), but nothing I could identify.

Mike

Interesting. It sounds to me like you're describing a situation analagous to bittorrent in that there are multiple connections working simultaneously from within one application. I've had that type of activity bring my computer to its knees as well.

However, I've also had my iBook lock up when downloading a single .dmg from a web site and when running an sftp session. Both of those should initiate only one network connection (I believe).