[kennedy]

Its always been common for a single app to give a spinning color wheel for a while... but I could always switch to another app and it would be responsive like normal.

Since I upgraded to Snow Leopard, it has become common for the entire UI except for the mouse to lockup for 30-45 seconds... its extremely annoying. The dock won't show... none of the UI's update at all... so, I can't look at Activity Monitor to see what's going on. Eventually it frees up and operates fine after that... until the next time.

Is this something new with Snow Leopard?
Or should I be suspecting my new hardware?
(I just bought a new MacBook Pro with the new Sandy Bridge processor and 10.6.)

[mduell]

I get the same on my i5 iMac ever since I received it. Happens daily but no way to reproduce on demand.

[Big Mac]

That is completely unacceptable behavior, especially from brand new hardware. It's not a Snow Leopard thing. If it were happening to me on new hardware, I'd take it back. It certainly indicates to me a harware issue.

[Atheist]

Check the Console Log... there must be something going on during the UI freezes. I've had it happen to me in the past and it was caused by a bad hard drive.

[Waragainstsleep]

Bad HDD or sub par RAM.

[Big Mac]

Agreed, a bad hard drive is the most likely culprit.

[P]

I had the same, and it drove me crazy until I realized that the culprit was the backup drive spinning up due to the OS trying to access some file. Disabled the drive spin down in Energy Saver and the problem went away.

[kennedy]

I don't think it is either HDD or memory... because I was having the problem when I first got the machine... the next day I swapped the memory from 4GB to 8GB and swapped the HDD for an SSD, but that problem remained. I figure its unlikely that I got bad and then swapped in more bad. Unfortunately, because that would be a much easier fix.

So, now I am suspecting the HDD controller... because the one thing that changed after the swap is that the delays got substantially shorter, implying to me that the disk is being accessed during the delay and it takes far less time with the much faster SSD. Thoughts?

I don't see anything obvious in the Console log... but the next time the delay happens, I'll go look to see if anything shows up coincident.

Thanks for the suggestions!!

[kennedy]

Just had a short hang (15s) followed very quickly (30s) by another short hang (20s)... the system.log shows:

May 18 15:26:26 BMK Safari[3639]: Periodic CFURLCache Insert stats (iters: 360) - Tx time:0.009342, # of Inserts: 9, # of bytes written: 6372, Did shrink: NO, Size of cache-file: 181497856, Num of Failures: 1
May 18 15:28:04 BMK Safari[3639]: INSERT-HANG-DETECTED: Tx time:52.631579, # of Inserts: 1, # of bytes written: 708, Did shrink: NO
May 18 15:29:07 BMK Safari[3639]: QUERY-HANG-DETECTED - time: 51.885985, DB size: 181497856
May 18 15:29:07 BMK Safari[3639]: INSERT-HANG-DETECTED: Tx time:50.866637, # of Inserts: 0, # of bytes written: 0, Did shrink: NO
May 18 15:29:08 BMK Safari Webpage Preview Fetcher[11386]: INSERT-HANG-DETECTED: Tx time:52.482289, # of Inserts: 15, # of bytes written: 144386, Did shrink: NO
May 18 15:30:15 BMK Safari Webpage Preview Fetcher[11386]: INSERT-HANG-DETECTED: Tx time:49.892169, # of Inserts: 3, # of bytes written: 69386, Did shrink: NO

Does that tell anybody anything?

There was nothing in the Diagnostic and Usage log, nor the Database search log.

Activity Monitor showed nothing until each hang ended, but at that point showed somewhat higher CPU usage. (BTW, why would Activity Monitor show 4 CPU histograms on a dual core 13" laptop? What do they each show?)

[P]

Originally Posted by kennedy 

(BTW, why would Activity Monitor show 4 CPU histograms on a dual core 13" laptop? What do they each show?)

4 logical cores - 2 real ones and two virtual cores added by Hyperthreading.

An modern processor can and will execute more than one instruction per clock cycle, if the mix of integer instructions, floating point instructions, vector instructions etc is correct. With Hyperthreading, the CPU scheduler can pick instructions from more than one thread to better fill up the execution resources.

[Waragainstsleep]

Do these hangs occur when Safari is not running?

[Waragainstsleep]

Seems like a common issue. People have had joy disabling top sites in Safari and switching off spotlight. Others have not. You said this issue has transcended from HDD to SSD. Was the HDD an Apple one?

https://discussions.apple.com/thread...art=0&tstart=0

[kennedy]

Originally Posted by Waragainstsleep 

Seems like a common issue. People have had joy disabling top sites in Safari and switching off spotlight. Others have not. You said this issue has transcended from HDD to SSD. Was the HDD an Apple one?

https://discussions.apple.com/thread...0&tstart=0

Thanks for the pointer to that thread... amazing that Snow Leopard has had this issue since 2009 and its still a problem today! That definitely shakes my confidence in Apple quality that they can't fix this.

Yes, the HDD was the one Apple shipped in the brand new MacBook Pro 13... specifically, a Seagate Momentus 5400 500GB.

[P]

Have you installed Click2Flash? IMO, that thing solves all Safari issues ever.

[kennedy]

Originally Posted by Waragainstsleep 

Seems like a common issue. People have had joy disabling top sites in Safari and switching off spotlight. Others have not.

Since the system.log was showing Safari hangs, I decided to leave Spotlight alone and just try disabling Top Sites. I didn't see a way to disable it per se... so, I just made sure it wasn't my default page and wasn't in the toolbar and otherwise wouldn't get invoked. Is that enough? Or is there some way to disable it completely?

What I did certainly helped... I went almost the whole day without a hang... but I did get a hang this evening. Unlike the prior log I posted above, I just got a single hang message:

May 20 01:09:14 BMK Safari[3639]: INSERT-HANG-DETECTED: Tx time:35.107941, # of Inserts: 1, # of bytes written: 708, Did shrink: NO

And since then I got another. So, I am wondering if there is still some leftover bit of Top Sites that I need to disable.

[kennedy]

Originally Posted by P 

Have you installed Click2Flash? IMO, that thing solves all Safari issues ever.

No, hadn't seen that before... but that looks like a great thing, whether or not that solves this hang problem.

[Waragainstsleep]

I'm Not Bruce: Safari 4.0 how to turn off Top Sites and reclaim CPU cycles

[kennedy]

I'm thinking its not Top Sites... its just that Top Sites causes a lot more instances of Safari loading a page. The problem is just Safari.

So, I've changed my default browser to FireFox (nice that 4.0 came out recently).
I have not had a hang yet... and I've opened all the same tabs that I had open in Safari as a manner of test.
Let's see if I can make it through 48 hours without a hang with Safari gone...

[kennedy]

P.S. Even with Safari as the culprit, I still don't understand what they changed about Snow Leopard such that it allows Safari to hang the entire OS. With all past versions of OS X, if a single app hung, it never hung the whole OS. They seem to have taken a MAJOR step backwards with Snow Leopard.

Or maybe they're giving the Safari team special access to the OS that they shouldn't.

[Koralatov]

Originally Posted by P 

Have you installed Click2Flash? IMO, that thing solves all Safari issues ever.

+1 on that. ClickToFlash will solve a *lot* of the problems you’re experiencing. After a couple of years of using CTF, I went a step further and completely deleted Flash (ala Gruber), and hangs/beachballing (which had been occasional even with CTF installed) disappeared totally.

[freudling]

Same behaviour for me. Snow Leopard was a bit of a mixed bag for me. I'm on the latest Lion Developer Preview 3 now, and loving it.

I can confirm that under my tests, Safari was a significant part of the sluggishness in Snow Leopard. From Top Sites to several tabs open, Safari is simply a pig for system resources.

Safari isn't the only problem, but one of them.

[P]

Originally Posted by Koralatov 

+1 on that. ClickToFlash will solve a *lot* of the problems you’re experiencing. After a couple of years of using CTF, I went a step further and completely deleted Flash (ala Gruber), and hangs/beachballing (which had been occasional even with CTF installed) disappeared totally.

By default, CTF will load "invisible Flash objects", as it is far from obvious when one exists and isn't loaded. You can disable that, however, which is the same as uninstalling Flash completely.

[kennedy]

So, I've been using Firefox instead of Safari and... I still occasionally get hangs of the whole machine! But nothing appears in the system log now. So, perhaps Safari is NOT causing the hangs, it is just detecting the hangs and logging it when it detects it.

So, the other suggestion on the table above is that the culprit is Flash (since both Firefox and Safari use Flash and since some have observed the problems vanish without Flash).

I will experiment with that next. Thanks for the inputs.

[Koralatov]

Originally Posted by P 

By default, CTF will load "invisible Flash objects", as it is far from obvious when one exists and isn't loaded. You can disable that, however, which is the same as uninstalling Flash completely.

I hadn’t realised there was that setting, but it may have fixed the issue had I known about it. As it stands, though, I’m actually not missing Flash much — and any time I do, I just open Chrome and view the page in that.

[kennedy]

Okay, last night I removed Flash completely and rebooted the machine.
I got several long delays during the boot up... before any apps were running.
And during the day today I have experienced several 30s spin cycles in Safari and Mail.
In the case of Safari, it gives the:

May 26 14:33:53 BMK Safari[268]: INSERT-HANG-DETECTED: Tx time:35.315798, # of Inserts: 2, # of bytes written: 3060, Did shrink: NO

In the case of Mail, it sometimes gives:

May 26 15:00:06 BMK Mail[298]: QUERY-HANG-DETECTED - time: 32.379452, DB size: 13488128

So, its not Flash and its not Top Sites... any other suggestions??

Note that going to sleep when I shut the laptop takes over a minute... as opposed to the 5-10 seconds that Leopard would take.

It seems Snow Leopard is just a DOG... should I go back to Leopard? (sigh)

[jmiddel]

I am sorry that you are having these hangs, but it definitely is not SL, which I have running on 4 machines. All of them have at least 4 Gigs of RAM, anything less and you will get slowdowns. Two of my machines are older and slower than yours also. BTW I have Flash installed, so you are correct, it's not that. If you have enough memory, I'd recommend that you do a fresh Archive and Install, and then use the combo updater to bring things up to the latest and greatest state. If that does not help, well then you are looking at hardware possibilities.

[mduell]

Your lack of issues in SL is not definitive that it's not an SL issue.

[kennedy]

Originally Posted by jmiddel 

I am sorry that you are having these hangs, but it definitely is not SL, which I have running on 4 machines. All of them have at least 4 Gigs of RAM, anything less and you will get slowdowns. Two of my machines are older and slower than yours also. BTW I have Flash installed, so you are correct, it's not that. If you have enough memory, I'd recommend that you do a fresh Archive and Install, and then use the combo updater to bring things up to the latest and greatest state. If that does not help, well then you are looking at hardware possibilities.

As shipped, I had 4GB of RAM and an Apple (Seagate) HDD. I was experiencing the hangs and they took a really long time.

As modified, I now have 8GB of RAM and a Crucial SSD. The hangs take half as long now. Making me think the hang involves accessing the disk (since that's much faster).

When I swapped the drive, I did a clean install from the DVDs... so, the likelihood of having two bad installs of SL seem pretty low.

So, if it's not SL or Safari or Flash, but instead its hardware, it's not RAM or Disk... ugh... I'd hate to think its a bad motherboard in my new machine (major pain to get fixed).

Turning off Top Sites seemed to reduce the frequency of the hangs substantially... but that may be just because it reduced background saves to a disk cache??

Any other ideas before I try to convince an Apple genius to give me a new machine (cuz I can't afford to send this back and be without a machine).

[Koralatov]

Originally Posted by kennedy 

It seems Snow Leopard is just a DOG... should I go back to Leopard? (sigh)

Absolutely not. Snow Leopard is a *much* better OS than Leopard on Intel hardware. I agree with what jmiddel says below…

Originally Posted by jmiddel 

All of them have at least 4 Gigs of RAM, anything less and you will get slowdowns.

…except this part. My machine (a second-generation unibody 15″ MBP) has 4 GB, and runs like a dream. My girlfriend’s first-generation 13″ MBP has only 2 GB, and it still runs it beautifully. Granted, she’s not the heaviest of users, but she does medium-light browsing, watches the BBC iPlayer (Flash) and YouTube, and various other activities without it grinding to a halt.

Thinking about it, you could have a disk error that’s causing the problem. My machine was beachballing a while back for weeks with no apparent cause, and fsck fixed it for me. Before doing it, though, you absolutely *must back up*, just in case it goes wrong.

[Spheric Harlot]

I wonder if it's related to the bad cable in some 2011 MacBook Pros:
Hardmac.com : Le "Macbidouille" in English - A possible solution for the SATA III problem on the 2011 MacBook Pro