Terminal Application constantly freezing

Question

Terminal Application constantly freezing

Dear Forum :

I am from a Unix background and I am very familiar with the command-line, but I find in Mac OS 10.5 that the Terminal.app is constantly freezing.

Symptoms: seemingly randomly the Terminal.app 'freezes' (is unresponsive) with the dreaded colored pinwheel. This will happen independently of what is actually being done. It could be during a simple ls -al or tab-completing or even just editing a file in vim (in the middle of typing some text I get the pinwheel).

It seems like it is waiting for some process to finish or perhaps looking up something (like a dns delay ???) but in any case it doesn't respond for a good 3-5 seconds before returning. It doesn't seem to be at intervals, but annoyingly random.

On the contrary the xterm application (which launches with X11.app) is very fast and no visible delays. Thus it seems independent of what shell or application is being run within the terminal.

Is anyone experiencing this same phenomena? It makes Terminal.app completely unusable. I am familiar with X11 and xterm, but Terminal.app seems to offer some nice features.

What can be done to alleviate this situation?

Mac Book Pro 2.33 Ghz Core Duo 2, Mac OS X (10.5.5), 2 GB Ram

Posted on Dec 1, 2008 12:10 AM

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Answer 1

Dec 1, 2008 8:24 AM in response to Ks. Jan Jenkins

Let me just ask the basic mac questions, since I have no clue what this problem could be caused by.

Have you restarted your computer in the past month?
Is your computer sleeping at 1 a.m.
Have you tried reseting the program using Activity Monitor.

These are the only things I could think of.

Oh, on startup see if holding command option p r helps any. I think this resets some sort of cache ram.

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Answer 2

CT

Level 7

24,239 points

Dec 1, 2008 8:30 AM in response to Ks. Jan Jenkins

I have never experienced this behavior.
For me Terminal is always completely responsive.
But I have not tried to customize the display very much.

If this were happening to me, I guess I would suspect
a corrupted preferences file for Terminal.app, or maybe
something fishy with fonts.

Another standard troubleshooting thing to try is to create a new user and see if the
bad behavior persists.

charlie

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Answer 3

BobHarris

Level 9

56,933 points

Dec 1, 2008 10:18 AM in response to Ks. Jan Jenkins

This is a question that is better asked in the Discussions -> Mac OS X Technologies -> Unix forum <http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=735>

I have not seen this with Terminal. So I would wonder if you have lots of Terminal sessions active (either as separate windows, or as tabs)?

Do you have Terminal displayed in multiple Spaces?

What I'm wondering is if you are doing anything beyond using a single Terminal session window. It is NOT that I think anything is wrong with using multiple Terminal sessions, I am just looking for something beyond your active session that might affect the Terminal App behind your back.

I would also like to point out that iTerm is another terminal emulator for Mac OS X that a lot of terminal users like.
<http://iterm.sf.net>
Again, I'm not saying anything negative about Terminal, as I use BOTH Terminal and iTerm all day long on my PowerMac G5 at work.

Message was edited by: BobHarris

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Answer 4

Dec 5, 2008 4:27 AM in response to Hivetyrant36

Dear Hivetryrant,

Thanks for the advice. I restart the computer fairly regularly as I do most of my work on a laptop.

What is strange is that the Activity Monitor does not show any unusual usage from Terminal.App (it is very low on the active process list). There is not even a spike on the CPU usage when it does the infamous pinwheel.

I have tried resetting the pram, but not helping the situation. I've removed .bash_profile and .bashrc but I usually have nothing in there, as I use terminal often just to ssh to another machine.

What is strange that it is so completely random - it is very difficult to diagnose it. Seems independant of whether I am connected to another machine or simply doing some work on the localhost.

Thanks for you help in any case.

JJ+

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Answer 5

Dec 5, 2008 7:43 AM in response to Ks. Jan Jenkins

Hmm. Does it pinwheel when you first start the program or is it later on during use?

I know a networking genius I could ask for advice.

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