[JazzCatDRP]

Lately, my Mac mini has been slowing and hanging. By that, I mean that after my mini's been on for several hours, it just starts dragging. It's so bad that when I mouse over my dock, it can't keep up and drags behind the cursor. After a little while longer, it will just start hanging to the point that I just have to reset it.

I've checked activity monitor and don't see anything that jumps out at me. For the record, the majority of the time I'm not using any CPU hungry apps. And quitting apps doesn't fix the dragging problem. It drives me nuts because I used to leave the mini running for weeks on end with no problems.

Does anyone have any ideas? Thanks!

[JazzCatDRP]

Any ideas at all? I'm about ready to just do a fresh install of OS X...is that my only real option?

[dimmer]

The usual voodoo / incantations of repairing permissions (the "rebuild desktop" of OS X) might be worth a try. Did you add any new software / hardware between the system being OK and it now being not OK? You could try an Archive and Install of OS X, that's a little less painful.

[Thinine]

How RAM do you have and what do you use it for?

[Old Toad]

JazzCatDRP:

How much free space do you have on the HD? And have you tried some of the usual maintenance operations:

1 - run OnyX or similar to clean out the user, system and font caches. Run the cron maintenance scripts. Re-optimize.
2 - boot into your system install disk and in the first window after the language selection window launch Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. Run the Repair Disk operation. If you get a message that repairs have been made, run it again until no such message.

To regain some real estate on your HD you can run Monolingual to remove the unneeded language modules (WARNING: make sure English and American English are NOT checked). I regained about 900 MB the first time I ran it.

[JazzCatDRP]

Hey guys, thanks for the help, I found a site which recommended zapping the caches, and that seemed to do the trick!

[JazzCatDRP]

Well I lied. It seemed to have worked for a while, but the problem's back. It's very odd. Everything just drags...like I said even mousing across the dock can't keep up. Activity Monitor shows nothing hogging the CPU or anything.

I might have found a common theme to the dragging. I notice that after a while, Safari ends up using a ridiculous amount of RAM, despite having only one window with one tab open. That seems to start the slowness, but quitting Safari doesn't fix it. Could that be possible? If so, anything I can do for it?

[CaptainHaddock]

Do you have any Safari plug-ins?

[JazzCatDRP]

I used to have a few, but most have been uninstalled a while ago.

[teszeract]

Hello

The first thing that I do is have a look at the Activity Monitor (Applications>Utilies>Activity monitor) to see what is causing the problem. Sort the list by CPU usage.

Second thing to do is have a look at the Console (/Applications/Utilities/Console.app). Don't worry if you cant read all the garbage, just check to see if anything is filling up the log repeatedly. I know some menu extras to that.

I find that menumeters (a menu extra ) is very useful to keep an eye on the computer (especially cpu & disk activity).

Hope this helps.

[JazzCatDRP]

Sorry it's been a bit! Stuff got busy. Anyways...still having the same problems. When I open up console, I get a WHOLE lot of this:

2007-03-05 13:57:06.298 DashboardClient[1645] Failed loading events from calendar key 765A6DF8-B18B-4072-9D2F-01B96B0A0D81
Could not connect socket (Can't assign requested address)
Could not connect socket (Can't assign requested address)
Could not connect socket (Can't assign requested address)
Could not connect socket (Can't assign requested address)
Could not connect socket (Can't assign requested address)
Could not connect socket (Can't assign requested address)
Could not connect socket (Can't assign requested address)
Could not connect socket (Can't assign requested address)
Could not connect socket (Can't assign requested address)

The "could not connect socket" also seems to affect some stuff with growl, but mostly stuff marked with ical and dashboard. I have a dashboard iCal widget, but I took that off, and I'm still having the problems. Any ideas what this all means?

[JazzCatDRP]

Also, Activity Monitor shows nothing hogging the CPU each time I take a look at it, with the possible exception of WindowServer...which always seems to be hovering at the top between 10 and 30%

[JazzCatDRP]

For the gurus out there, I'm still having this issue, and I'm noticing that when it's really bad, Windowserver is hogging up to 90% of my CPU. What could be causing it to need that much? Any fix?

[CaptainHaddock]

It's gotta be a buggy app or plug-in or input manager or something. What's in your two Library/InputManagers folders?