[ryju]

I had one last week. I had iTunes, Photoshop, Safari, and a couple smaller apps open. iTunes wasn't playing though.

I was working in Photoshop CS, just saved an image, clicked the Finder icon in the dock to check the file size, next thing I know the Dock gets the beachball so does Photoshop, I try to force quit then everything locks up, all my apps lock up. I disconnected everything except power, put it to sleep twice, left it for 10 minutes, nothing.

16 days uptime gone

[Zim]

I think it is linked to iTunes and heavy network activity as that's what I've been doing every time it has locked up.

My point is that I rarely use iTunes, so I'd suggest that its heavy network usage + "something else" (for many ppl that something else happens to be iTunes, for me it is just another unix/Terminal app)

Mike

[The Placid Casual]

Originally posted by Zim:
My point is that I rarely use iTunes, so I'd suggest that its heavy network usage + "something else" (for many ppl that something else happens to be iTunes, for me it is just another unix/Terminal app)

Mike

Rereading your post, I am very tempted to agree.

I have just had another crash, but since then, stopped serious network activity but restarted everything else:

Safari,
Mail,
iTunes,
Increase / F@H.

No problems at all.

As soon as I try to use acquisition or do any intensive network work, the issue returns.

[TheTraveller]

Since I stopped using Limewire/Bitorrent/acqlite, I haven't had a single instance of this problem. It's been at least two weeks. I was having the problem reguarly using those applications.

[Spudboy2004]

Well after a couple of good weeks, the problem is back (after doing all the fixes mentioned here). So far just isolated to MacPar. I don't dare show off my Mac to anyone. Would be far to embarrassing too crash in front of anyone. Maybe by the time MacOS XI comes out, Apple will have a fix.

[The Placid Casual]

Originally posted by TheTraveller:
Since I stopped using Limewire/Bitorrent/acqlite, I haven't had a single instance of this problem. It's been at least two weeks. I was having the problem reguarly using those applications.

I have just run my machine overnight with as many apps open and working on stuff as I could, but no network apps... No problems to report.

I just launched Acquisition and immediately a freeze

[Zim]

I know several of us have already submitted this to Apple... anyone know how we can get them to look at this thread in case they can glean some info out of it? (I have not gotten any followup questions on my bug submission since December).

Mike

[yukon]

Still haven't seen it after that crashreporter fix, still lots of network traffic and iTunes use, though I don't run bittorrent on the G4 (not sure if i did when i last posted).

All I can suggest is to make a seperate OS X partition, install on that next time. When you're having big problems, backup to the main drive, erase, and reinstall. If a "fixing" method is good enough to fix Windows, it's more than enough to fix OS X.

[waffffffle]

Originally posted by yukon:
Still haven't seen it after that crashreporter fix, still lots of network traffic and iTunes use, though I don't run bittorrent on the G4 (not sure if i did when i last posted).

All I can suggest is to make a seperate OS X partition, install on that next time. When you're having big problems, backup to the main drive, erase, and reinstall. If a "fixing" method is good enough to fix Windows, it's more than enough to fix OS X.

I did this (zeroed my HD, reinstalled 10.3 and did none of the OS updates) and I still get the freezes. I get them about once a day. Its been driving me nuts.

[Link]

One annoying thing I've found, is after totally reinstalling the OS from scratch and starting an entirely new prefs folder, now the crashfreeze STILL happens, except when I reboot it'll almost always immediately happen AGAIN once I start doing things.

GRRRRR 10.3 is about to drive me insane.. another thing that 10.3 does is this thing outputting null characters (they look like [] or show up in safari's location bar as %03)... when you hit a certain key combination (usually a backspace typo) It's annoying as heck and really pisses me off.

Another thing I've found is that OS X still ocassionally has a process get stuck which causes the OS refuse to mount disks when you plug them in..

AHA! THIS REALLY NEEDS TO BE FIXED! Sometimes processes will get stuck, and there's NO WAY IN HECK to get them to die, I mean not even a sudo kill -9...

not even multiple times.

This is seriously a bad problem that needs to be addressed quickly

[The Placid Casual]

Well, I have doubled my RAM to 1 Gig, and defragged the drive...

All has been well for 3 days of 24 hours intensive usage.

I suspect that it is a VM problem, and defragging helps/cures the issue.


I have spoken to Apple about it, and they say that are 'aware' of the issue, and it should be fixed in a point release soon.

[mbi]

I have spoken to Apple about it, and they say that are 'aware' of the issue, and it should be fixed in a point release soon.

Ah, some good news, at last!
Thank you :)

[yukon]

if it happens very often and on a new install, it's probably a hardware problem (or the software's problem with specific hardware). Try taking off USB hubs, 3rd party PCI cards, check the RAM, etc.. At least Apple knows of the problem.

[Azzgunther]

The one solution that will work for almost everybody is to simply downgrade to 10.3.0.

I get freezes with:
10.3.1
10.3.2
10.3.3

Never with 10.3.0. I REALLY hope Apple is working hard on this. 10.3.3 was a pleasure compared to 10.3.0 until it started freezing.

[Zim]

Originally posted by Azzgunther:
The one solution that will work for almost everybody is to simply downgrade to 10.3.0.

I've had the freezes ever since 10.3.0 came out.

Mike

[MadBrowser]

Wow... This little thread I started has been popular...

I upgraded to AirPort 3.4 and all of my freezing problems are back! Damn!

I tried to revert to 3.3.1 and I'm still having problems.

Damn.

[MrFixMille]

Hi!

I had the same trouble with AirportSW 3.3(.1) and solved it with a fresh panther install and avoiding airport updates.
Today I gave 3.4 a try and guess what happened? The freezes came back.

My experiences:
The SystemUIServer takes all CPU time when the freeze occurs. You can watch it growing with "top" in terminal, while waiting for a crash.

After 20 minutes the system works for a few seconds and freezes again.

Heavy airport traffic causes freezing.

Attaching an external monitor (spanning hack) seems to forward the freezing. (speculation)

The firmware of my airport card is 9.42. anyone with the same?

Now I'm trying to revert to airport 3.1... Does anyone now how I do this??

[bremner770]

Originally posted by MrFixMille:
I had the same trouble with AirportSW 3.3(.1) and solved it with a fresh panther install and avoiding airport updates.
Today I gave 3.4 a try and guess what happened? The freezes came back.

My experiences:
The SystemUIServer takes all CPU time when the freeze occurs. You can watch it growing with "top" in terminal, while waiting for a crash.

After 20 minutes the system works for a few seconds and freezes again.

Heavy airport traffic causes freezing.

Attaching an external monitor (spanning hack) seems to forward the freezing. (speculation)

The firmware of my airport card is 9.42. anyone with the same?

Now I'm trying to revert to airport 3.1... Does anyone now how I do this??

Here's what I posted to the Apple support forums earlier today.

--------------

I've got a 15" Ti-Book 800MHz. It had been away for repair when 10.3 was released and so when it came back I applied the update and all subsequent update to 10.3.3 only for the freeze problem discussed to occur. At first I thought it might be badly seated RAM after being in transit but after removing it and re-seating it I was still getting problems.

Next I thought that it must be software related and so thought since all my data was off the machine anyway that I would do a virgin install of 10.3 and upgrade to 10.3.3. Unfortunately whilst applying all the various updates to the system I got the same problem. This got me to thinking that perhaps the logic board was broken but before I phoned AppleCare I thought that perhaps I should check out a few forums and see if anyone else was suffering the same thing. Well to my surprise I discovered lots of people were having the same problem.

Finally I thought that since I seemed to be getting the problem when downloading from the Internet that perhaps it had something to do with the networking. I reinstalled 10.3 and used that for about a week without problems. I then got up the courage to upgrade the system one update at a time to see if I could find out what update could be causing the problem. I kept the Airport update until last as I thought since it was network related that this could be the problem. All updates applied flawlessly and my system worked perfectly. Finally I applied the Airport update and within a couple of minutes of heavy network activity the system went into the usual comatose state.

So my advice is don't upgrade Airport and it seems to solve the problem. My Airport network works fine anyway and so why break what works perfectly anyway and at least the rest of my system is up to date. I've not had the courage to upgrade to the latest Airport update released this week but may clone my system and give it a shot later on and see if the problem has been solved.

--------------

It looks like from what you are saying that I shouldn't bother updating to Airport 3.4. God this is frustrating!

[barbarian]

I have exactly the same 'freezing but the mouse moves' problem on a G5...

one things I've noticed... it seems to happen only after waking the computer up...

[mbi]

one things I've noticed... it seems to happen only after waking the computer up...

That's how it started on my system as well: in the beginning it would only freeze when waking from sleep, then it started happening after I waked it from screensaver, and now it's happening randomly during normal operation.

[The Placid Casual]

Originally posted by barbarian:
I have exactly the same 'freezing but the mouse moves' problem on a G5...

one things I've noticed... it seems to happen only after waking the computer up...

Interesting... Thinking about it, my problems have stopped since I stopped sleeping the machine.

Although I made the other changes noted above at the same time, so I don't know what has cured it...

[macintologist]

So could anybody explain how to do downgrade to an older Airport version or post a simple script/installer that does it for you?

[bremner770]

Originally posted by macintologist:
So could anybody explain how to do downgrade to an older Airport version or post a simple script/installer that does it for you?

Not sure if this is all you would need to do, but I think it's just a simple matter of using Pacifist to extract the Airport package file from the 10.3 install disk and then installing it. You probably want to remove all Airport receipts from the /Library/Receipts/ folder first.

As I say this is just a guess as I did a fresh install of 10.3 and then updated everything up to the current version except Airport.

[MadBrowser]

I wanted to confirm that others are still seeing this with Airport 3.4.1? I sure am.

I'm going back to Airport 3.2.

Ughhh.

[kevyang]

Yes, still happens with 3.4.1.

[ImpishLM]

I think this bug is due to Crash Reporter. Check your hostconfig file: is there a line of text regarding Crash Reporter?

If there is, you might try changing 'YES' to 'NO'. But there are many of us that don't have a line about crash reporter at all. If this is true for you, you can add the line to the end of the text.

Note that when viewing your hostconfig file (step 3+4 below), you'll need to scroll the text down to see all the text within.

Here's how to disable Crash Reporter (lifted from MacOSXHints.com)

In the Terminal, type

1) cd /etc
2) sudo pico hostconfig
3) type your administrator password
4) Look for "CRASHREPORTER=-YES-" and replace with "CRASHREPORTER=-NO-"
5) Press CNTRL+X then "y" and finally RETURN
6) restart you Mac

Warning: you can mess up your system in Terminal quite easily, so only do this if you're comfortable using it.

Let us know if this resolves your problem....

[yukon]

The crashreporter daemon has been reported earlier in the thead and corrected for, thanks Impish. The repeated suggestions to use programs that invoke cron scripts are useless really, install anacron if you have to (I did, it's a good idea, drop a permissions fix line in there too). The tips to clear out caches haven't worked for most people, and programs to do this are a bit overkill (delete the folder contents, geez, rather than trust some applescript studio crap from god-knows-who with root access).

Anyway, still no freezing here, crashreporter was my problem, haven't crashed in any way since. I've never used Airport, nor a firewire anything, I use a PCI SCSI card and a USB hub or two (keyboard counts). No haxies or real system modification since installing 10.3 (had some bad experiances, replaced the functionality).

If it's related to VM, I might ask if anyone notices heavy paging due to the Finder, I do, probably because I have 'Calculate folder sizes" on (it keeps track of this and other info). If people have problems after reformat, what applications/drivers are you adding if any? If it still happens, try a different mouse, keyboard, ethernet/networking (specifically DNS servers). Try adding your local IP to your hosts file, a new username and password setup, different or new installer CDs, resetting the CUDA, a UPS battery backup system, Techtool4 Pro scanning everything, reset-all from open firmware, converting to another religion, sacrificing a goat, I really don't know.

If nothing works, it would seem obvious that we're all seeing the same generic crashing symptom for different problems.

[ImpishLM]

Originally posted by yukon:

Anyway, still no freezing here, crashreporter was my problem, haven't crashed in any way since.

So what did you do that stopped all your crashes?

[MadBrowser]

Hmmm. Turning off crashreporter...

The problem is that I use it all the time while debugging my software... So that would kinda suck if I couldn't use it anymore.

[ImpishLM]

I'm one of those that had no line regarding CrashReporter in the hostconfig file at all.

Just after asking my question of Yukon just above, I had another freeze.

So I finally got around to adding the line, set to 'no'.

My fingers are firmly crossed!

[TheTraveller]

Well, it's been about a month since I last used Limewire/Bittorrent/acqlite, and I *still* have not experienced the problem. It's really cut into my porn downloads, but it's a small price to pay for system stability.

[Big Mac]

This problem seemingly began with 10.3.2. Is it safe to assume that a base install of 10.3 does not contain this bug? I'm not entirely sure the AirPort update is to blame, since people who don't have AirPort cards installed have also experienced this problem. Right now I'm still a neutral third party, since I thankfully still haven't been bitten by this bug.

[Link]

Nah it's been happening to me since 10.3's early existence

[bremner770]

Originally posted by Big Mac:
This problem seemingly began with 10.3.2. Is it safe to assume that a base install of 10.3 does not contain this bug? I'm not entirely sure the AirPort update is to blame, since people who don't have AirPort cards installed have also experienced this problem. Right now I'm still a neutral third party, since I thankfully still haven't been bitten by this bug.

They may not have Airport cards, but have they installed the Airport updates rather than put them on ignore?

[RealMac]

Originally posted by TheTraveller:
Well, it's been about a month since I last used Limewire/Bittorrent/acqlite, and I *still* have not experienced the problem. It's really cut into my porn downloads, but it's a small price to pay for system stability.

I'm going to give this a shot too. I was joking around with my friend about how Panther's GUI locks up when I use those apps and right after he typed snerk the GUI froze up. It was like beeep beeep beeep beep beep, my paper was gone. Well not really, though I've lost some coursework I had typed up in TextEdit and forgot to save. :/

[willrob]

I've also been plagued by the freeze phenom. I disabled crashreporter a month or so ago, and thought it was fixing my problem. But after a week, the freezes returned.

I went back to the early posts on MacFixit and MacIntouch, when Panther first came out, and re-read the issues many people were having. The firewire drive problem was big, but so too was ethernet router problems with certain brands. Since I don't use an ethernet router, I didn't pay much attention.

My personal network is between a dual 1G G4 and an iBook, via ethernet. A DSL modem is shared via a Linksys network hub (not firmware upgradable). As a network, it's simple and effective: fast tansfers, both computers can share the modem as well as three printers.

But lately, after a number of agrivating crashes, I'm beginning to suspect the DSL modem may be part of the problem. My typical freeze occurs while quiting an application. It can be any application, even something as small as TextEdit. If I'm going to get a freeze (and I get them at least twice a day or more), it will happen after quiting something. Although I have had them at start-up.

I thought it might be VM swap files, but monitoring them shows no excess creation of them (I have 1.2Gs). So I decided to run a test on the modem.

I unplugged it, and went for three days with no freezes. I plugged it back in, restarted, and had a crash within half an hour. Unplugged it again, and went freeze free for two days. Decided to get my e-mail; turned it on and crashed immediately before I even had the chance to restart. So I'm pretty convinced there is some connection to my internet connection, or the modem itself, or the Lynksys hub � but only since upgrading to Panther.

Can anyone suggest ways to isolate the problem more? I plan to remove the hub tomorrow and plug the cable directly into the computer (give up the network for a while). But if the problem continues, does that mean the modem is the fault, or could it be a signal coming from my ISP?
William

[proudestmonkey]

[QUOTE]
But lately, after a number of agrivating crashes, I'm beginning to suspect the DSL modem may be part of the problem.

Maybe, but if you are having the same problem, it is not your router. I too am having problems with freezes, but I am using an Apple Extreme Base Station (Snow). My freezes occur when my iBook has trouble keeping its connection to the AEBS.

Here's what my console says:

localhost /usr/libexec/crashreporterd: get_exception_ports() failed: (ipc/send) invalid destination port
localhost /usr/libexec/crashreporterd: get_exception_ports() failed: (ipc/send) invalid destination port.

This is the exact same thing that another poster reported on Apple's Discussion page a few months back. Mine started right after upgrading to Aiport 3.4.1 and Apple Extreme Base Station Firmware upgrade 5.4 and the iTunes, Quicktime, iPod updater updates (did them all within a few days).

Have repaired permissions, quit crashreporterd, all of it, and still, my iBook freezes anytime an app loses a connection it is using to the AEBS (iTunes streaming, Safari, Mozilla, Mail, and even the Finder).

Someone needs to send this entire thread to Apple itself. I don't know how to do this, but they need to be aware of this. This instability is like, well its like, like, yes, like OS 9 extensions conflicts, or even worse, like Windows.

[RealMac]

Kinda OT, but have you ever done somethng stupid and have the system totally freeze on you. For example, ripping a DVD in Handbrake and running repair permissions in Disk Utility.app. Well I did and the results weren't too pretty. :/ Guess I'll see if the lack of running P2P sw and intelligent use of the system results in reliable system stability.

[waffffffle]

I used to experience the temporary freezes (a few seconds) and then more recently I had hard freezes that would require a restart almost daily. That really drove me nuts. Nowadays I get the temporary freezes again, which isn't as bad. I haven't had a hard freeze in over a week, which is strange because I was getting the hard freezes even after I downgraded to 10.3.0, after a clean install and zero-ing the HD. Then somehow they stopped. I don't know how they stopped, since I am using the same apps as normal: AdiumX, Safari, Mail, iTunes, iCal, Address Book and occasionally GarageBand and iPhoto (which slows my computer to a grinding halt, I guess 8000 pictures can do that).

I am afraid to upgrade OS X at all but I would like to use the newer Safari version. I'm not sure what to do. Since I WAS having the crashes in 10.3.0 for a little while I'm thinking that I probably should see no change if I upgrade but these freezes are so strange that I'm not sure its worth it.

Strangely I have only had these freezes on my 15", but not at all on my 12" PowerBook.

[barbarian]

Re the Freeze issue this is how we resolved things here.

We've had both the freeze issue and all the various airport issues with 3.4 on a variety of machines.

We have most of the problems fixed.

This is what we discovered.

1. Several users were having the freeze issue before installing 3.4. They were only seeing it after waking from sleep or when invoking Expos�'s show desktop command with the mod that minimizes to a window (instead of moving the windows off screen)

2. The upgrade to 3.4 caused 2 distinct problems:

Problem A) Bad reception

Problem B) Disconnect from the internet when multiple streams of info were requested at once (this could happen in Safari when downloading 5 or 6 files at once) or in a variety of other apps. Once the internet connection was disconnected there was no way to re-connect other than sleeping and waking up or rebooting. Also access to the base station disappeared.

We aren't actually sure whether the freeze issue and the 3.4 upgrade were related, but many people did seem to have worse problems after the upgrade. Could just be voodoo.

---
We have fixed all the problems by doing the following.

1. We set expose's expose desktop back to the default behavior.

2. We turned off "Put hard disk to sleep when possible" in the Energy Saver.

3. We got rid of the system preferences and all the airport preferences.

4. We upgraded to 3.4.1

Now all machines seem to be fine. If expose's default "reveal desktop" behavior is changed to minimize to the little window, the freeze bug will still occasionally happen (about 10%) of the time, but we now just leave expose set at the default.

[Big Mac]

I wonder how long it's going to take Apple to realize there's a problem here, and to what extent OS X's reputation will be damaged as a result thereof.

[willrob]

I've spent this week testing the possibility that my Lynksys Ethernet Hub was the source of my freezes. It now seems pretty conclusive. If I remove the hub (and give up having a network) the freezes vanish. Since I needed to use my laser printer, which connects to the hub via a Asante Talk bridge, I needed to revert to the Lynksys device periodically, Whenever I did, the freezes returned, two or three a day, and typically when quitting an application. If I remove the hub, I am freeze free, but can't use my laserprinter or connect to my iBook. So it looks like I need to get a good Panther compatible Router.

Another interesting thing I've noticed regarding swap files. I was monitoring my swap files to see if VM might be a problem, With the hub connected, I never went beyond the first 64 MB file. With the hub removed, and the DSL modem plugged directly into the computer, I generated six swap files, all the up to the 512 MB size. I'm not sure why the hub prevented the creation of swap files, but that may be what the freezes represented�an inability to correctly utilize VM.

[Link]

One thing I'm finding more and more true is that every time my machine has one of these freezes, if I restart it and do the exact same thing again THE EXACT SAME FREEZE HAPPENS within 2 seconds of booting up.

It's also been happening more often than once every 3 days. The annoying part is apple seems to be paying NO ATTENTION AT ALL to the bug.

WTF?! Are they this much more concerned about a stupid MP3 player than anything else?

[RealMac]

I wonder if any of you have tried downgrading to 10.3.2and <b>not</b> installing the airport (3.4.x) or java 1.4.2 updates.

I had to reinstall panther, then searched google for the update (link above) and didn't install any of the software updates.

I did this yesterday, have been running acquisition and generally pushing the system hard without any crashes so far (knock on wood). I'll probably update once 10.3.4 comes out, but this observation definitely leads me to believe either 10.3.3, airport or the new java vm is at fault.

I know my previous up to date config would've surely frozen up on me. Just for kicks I cranked up dnetc to see what would happen. Things have slowed up on my 1G powerbook, but nothing has crashed yet, knock on wood.

Update: Well, I froze the gui under 10.3.2. Time will tell if that's because I was pushing everything really hard or because the bug exists in 10.3.2 as well as 10.3.3.

[Krypton]

Originally posted by Link:
One thing I'm finding more and more true is that every time my machine has one of these freezes, if I restart it and do the exact same thing again THE EXACT SAME FREEZE HAPPENS within 2 seconds of booting up.

It's also been happening more often than once every 3 days. The annoying part is apple seems to be paying NO ATTENTION AT ALL to the bug.

WTF?! Are they this much more concerned about a stupid MP3 player than anything else?

Calm down dear

Apple know about it (I have had some feedback), and unless they have become exceedingly lazy in the past 4 months I imagine they are working very hard to fix it.

10.3.4 should be with us soon, and I expect a solution then.

[Big Mac]

Originally posted by Krypton:
Calm down dear

Apple know about it (I have had some feedback), and unless they have become exceedingly lazy in the past 4 months I imagine they are working very hard to fix it.

10.3.4 should be with us soon, and I expect a solution then.

That is a comforting thing to hear, Krypton. I thankfully don't have any problems with my iBook, but I can empathize with those who are having problems. Widespread sporadic but not universal failures are obviously the toughest to pin down.

[nforcer]

Originally posted by Krypton:
Apple know about it (I have had some feedback), and unless they have become exceedingly lazy in the past 4 months I imagine they are working very hard to fix it.

10.3.4 should be with us soon, and I expect a solution then.

What exactly were you told? Have they found the source of the problem yet?

[Zim]

Originally posted by RealMac:
Update: Well, I froze the gui under 10.3.2. Time will tell if that's because I was pushing everything really hard or because the bug exists in 10.3.2 as well as 10.3.3.

The bug exists back to the release to 10.3.0. Its coming up on (at least) 6 months since Apple was notified about this bug.

And they can't get that little mp3 player bug-free either (deep-sleep bug)

Mike

[The Placid Casual]

I have had further problems AT ALL since adding 512MB RAM extra (up to 1Gig now) and defragging.

Since then I have been running 24/7 at full processor usage.

I would look for a fix in these directions rather than relying on Apple for the moment...

[Krypton]

Originally posted by nforcer:
What exactly were you told? Have they found the source of the problem yet?

Everything they say (from devbugs) is under NDA supposedly, however it was vague enough that telling you wouldn't make much difference.

I haven't had any freezes for some time, so I am slightly less bothered by this now.