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yuliang · Jul 10, 2002, 11:55 PM

In my 1+ year of using OS X, it has only given me 3 kernel panics, and true to Apple's claim, it hasn't crashed otherwise. HOWEVER, and a big however, is that sometimes when there are a lot of apps open, the OS would slow to a crawl in the middle of everyday operations such as opening windows or switching apps. The beach ball would appear in the violating app, and it takes minutes from clicking the icon of another app for it to appear. But then it is still useless because the system is still hanging.

What makes this all worse:
* Force Quit function won't respond
* Opening the terminal.app at the local machine is nearly impossible because apps won't launch anymore
* SSH login from another machine is useless also, as the hanging OS X comp would take forever to send communication back and forth

Once, I had the patience to login from another machine to kill some apps from the terminal, and it literally took me about 20 minutes to open terminal, login, wait for prompt, open top, then finally kill processes.

I hope this krap stops in Jaguar...cuz I dont' know if I can take one of those every few days.

moonmonkey · Jul 11, 2002, 12:03 AM

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by yuliang:
In my 1+ year of using OS X, it has only given me 3 kernel panics, and true to Apple's claim, it hasn't crashed otherwise. HOWEVER, and a big however, is that sometimes when there are a lot of apps open, the OS would slow to a crawl in the middle of everyday operations such as opening windows or switching apps. The beach ball would appear in the violating app, and it takes minutes from clicking the icon of another app for it to appear. But then it is still useless because the system is still hanging.

What makes this all worse:
* Force Quit function won't respond
* Opening the terminal.app at the local machine is nearly impossible because apps won't launch anymore
* SSH login from another machine is useless also, as the hanging OS X comp would take forever to send communication back and forth

Once, I had the patience to login from another machine to kill some apps from the terminal, and it literally took me about 20 minutes to open terminal, login, wait for prompt, open top, then finally kill processes.

I hope this krap stops in Jaguar...cuz I dont' know if I can take one of those every few days.<hr /></blockquote>The new finder is fully multithreaded

so at least some of these problems should be gone.

Detrius · Jul 11, 2002, 01:08 AM

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by moonmonkey:
The new finder is fully multithreaded

so at least some of these problems should be gone.<hr /></blockquote>This is not a finder problem. This is an operating system problem. The problem as I see it is more that the system, after a certain point, will no longer spawn new processes. Therefore, anything like opening a new application or logging in remotely will not work. In addition, killing any offending processes will not work, as the system has already been effectively taken down. Worst of all, commands like reboot and shutdown will not run either, as they are actual processes.

It is a REAL problem that has been here for a while. I don't use Jaguar enough to say whether or not it has been fixed.

fmalloy · Jul 11, 2002, 02:09 AM

Some questions:

1. How much RAM do you have?

2. How many apps do you have running when this happens? Are any of them real memory intensive, like Photoshop?

3. Could the disk that holds your VM swap be full? Do an 'ls /private/var/vm' and see how many swapfiles there are (unless you've moved your swap directory)

I'm thinking that #3 and/or an app that is allocating a lot of memory that's running away. Keep 'top' running in a terminal session and see if you can bring it up when the problem starts happening.

yuliang · Jul 11, 2002, 02:22 AM

I have 512 MB of RAM on a TiBook 550. Photoshop is on during some of these "hang sessions". Swap file has been moved to a separate partition but it has plenty of space also...

WJMoore · Jul 11, 2002, 02:27 AM

There is something wrong if that happens to you every few days. I have been using OS X since the PB and am yet to get a kernel panic (fingers crossed) and can count on one hand the number of times i've had the hang that you describe. I only reboot when software requires - usually VPC Update or Software Update. Perhaps you should try a little utility from Ambrosia Software (freeware) called escapepod that allows you to kill the frontmost app or force logout with key combinations.

<a href="http://forums.macnn.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=37;t=003371" target="_blank">Relevant Thread</a>
<a href="http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/freebies/" target="_blank">Page on Ambrosia Site</a>

Wesley

Cipher13 · Jul 11, 2002, 03:05 AM

It happens all too often.
It's worse than a crash in many ways.

Detrius · Jul 11, 2002, 03:50 AM

I have a gig of RAM, and I can be running virtually no programs. Recently, it seems to be caused by a change in the IP address--since the 10.1.5 Networking bug... really annoying. Not only do I not have an internet connection when I wake the thing back up, but if I manage to fix it, the machine hangs.

nforcer · Jul 11, 2002, 05:34 AM

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by yuliang:
The beach ball would appear in the violating app, and it takes minutes from clicking the icon of another app for it to appear.<hr /></blockquote>I've noticed this sometimes, but I've also noticed that if you cycle through the applications open in the dock (command tab or command shift tab), when you find an application that is doing nothing, you can bring up the force quit dialog from it and quit the app that is not responding at all. It's kinda weird, but it seems to work.

Sharky K. · Jul 11, 2002, 05:58 AM

I notice a lot of such "beachball parties" when I disabled application startup animation. very strange...

SpeedRacer · Jul 11, 2002, 07:32 AM

Same problem here - nearly daily since the release of 10.1.5. I think this is more common amongst laptop users (iBook/600 here) since desktop machines may not be set to sleep and/or moved around while sleeping like a laptop.

On the contrary i've installed X on nearly every type of Apple hardware since it's release and have rarely, if ever, had a machine that could stay up longer than a week. I guess it comes down to how hard you work the machine, plug/unplug devices, and (now) activate/switch network settings.

But ya. It blows. Call me crazy, but in many any circumstances i find 9.1 considerably more stable than any variant of 10.1.x.

Speed

SMacTech · Jul 11, 2002, 07:52 AM

Those of you encountering the SBOD, how many have external FW drives or CDRs? If so, see this <a href="http://forums.macnn.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=46;t=006824" target="_blank">link</a>.
I was having all kinds of problems burning CDs when the source was from my external FW drive. I installed FW drivers from earlier (10.1.3) FW SDK and it fixed ALL my freezing, which was exactly as you describe. I use my cube quite extensively and now enjoy weeks of uptime.

Targon · Jul 11, 2002, 11:50 AM

I have noticed system response deteriorates over time in a way that OS 9 never did. Strangely, im seeing alot of the time now the spinning disko biskit when moving though various system preferences an tabs. Often the disko biskit spinds for a couple of min's.

Concerning memory, i have a Pismo with 512. I notice the system does get considerably slower when more memory is used. However when this happens there is still enuff memory (50+meg) in reserve so as paging to disk is not happening. In contrast, OS 9x system never slowed down when most memory is used (unless only 3 meg was spare).

Anyone have any possible insights to this phenomena?

yuliang · Jul 11, 2002, 01:07 PM

regarding the suggestion from a prev. poster that I should cycle thru the dock, find the frozen app and force quit it from the dock popup menu...uhm when the computer hangs...it just hangs...the menu will come up, but maybe 5 minutes later, and then it takes another 5 minutes for the program to quit, if it'll quit at all...

sometimes...we might as well force reboot..just like the good old days

Drizzt · Jul 11, 2002, 01:32 PM

I think the problem is lookupd. Since I'm a laptop user, I switch location quite frequently. When I work it usually at least 4times/day (switch from house to offline, when I work from offline to work, then do the reverse order).

I know that sometimes lookupd goes gaga, than NetInfo can't know who it is on the network (since lookupd smoked pot), and apps willing to use NetInfo join the party of the stoned processes!

The solution thus far was a hard reboot. I've run disk first aid a couples of time recently and my laptop is now quite stable. I'm having a 9 days uptime right now.. and it's doint pretty fine

fmalloy · Jul 11, 2002, 04:50 PM

What's weird is that if it's lookupd, or any other process, still the OS has preemptive multitasking, so you should be able to switch to another application or the Finder almost immediately. For example, sometimes IE or Mozilla gives me the rainbow cursor and sucks 100% of the CPU, but I can always switch to another app, or go to Force Quit. And, I'm on a 300MHz Beige G3 with only 384MB of RAM.

If you get hangs like this, something is either corrupted on disk or in the OS, you might have bad RAM, or something is flooding memory or asynchronous interrupts, or otherwise interfering with process switching.

If it happens often, I'd leave a terminal session running with 'top -u' refreshing every second. You might be able to catch it in the act and see what's going on...