Snow Leopard freezes over time

Like many of the posters in this thread I also get a random freeze on my mid 2007 iMac running 10.6.1. I can only move the pointer around and the system is frozen to all input. I believe this may be due to running my external Seagate Freeagent drive connected via firewire 800. The freezes don't happen while connected via USB but that defeats the object of using the faster firewire interface. Are all the posters using an external (Seagate Freeagent) drive connected via Firewire 800?

Mike

Have the exact same setup - only difference is that the older version (white) iMac did go from Tiger to SL directly.

Since I stopped using the screen saver option on the white Mac the freezing stopped. Still have some weird sync lines though.
(this cured the problem for now - not sure it will save a marriage in the long run...sorry, back to work)

I had many freezes in the first week, by doing nothing just freezing, once by eject an external drive, from iPhoto, by launching some applications like skype or office.

i din't make any change, I didn't reload anything, but now it's more than two weeks that i don't get any freezes.....

I know it's impossible, but it seams that after sometime SL become more stable.
I'm using the same applications i was using in the first week, in the same way.... now it just works fine! I and don't understand how!

someone had the same experience?

Marco

A follow-up question to the discussion. I verified the main disk on the crashing iMac and discovered errors that required disk repair by booting from the DVD. Not sure if this resolves the crashing problem - but have others tried to verify their disks as a potential cure to the problem?

Well I have a Mac pro tower workstation amd it does the same..freezes up with the spinning wheel of death.
Mouse moves but that is all. Have to do hard power button re set to re start it.

Not done any work on this yet, just putting up with it till apple fixes it.

And as soem one earlier in this threa said, I tis not Windows...your right no it is not, but that does not stop fault finding of any sort being a pain..expecially when you have bought the machine with expectations of a stable OS that this sort of thing does not happen on.

It is just another OS, no more or less reliable than any other, be in Windows variants or other *nix /BSD boxes.

I have a MBP and I too have been experiencing slow performance and random freezes. These freezes are unique to ones I've seen before because they affect the entire system and don't allow me to isolate and "force quit".

I have a 1TB WD external disk drive connected to Firewire 800. I also have a 250GB Lacie external disk drive connected to Firewire 800. Both disks definitely made my MBP hang like crazy (whenever I'd hear the disk spin). I ejected both disks but I still have other freezes happening all the time.

MS Office applications are a lot slower on Snow Leopard. I'm sure that when it's written for SL, it'll be faster... but come on! Apple promised that SL would be sleeker, simpler, and faster! Nothing is faster from what I can notice. I'd hate to admit it but my cousin had a beta version of Windows 7 and it runs blazingly fast! I'm not tempted to switch but it sure takes the joy out of my loyalty for Apple.

Also I noticed that when I open a new tab in Safari, a video glitch appears fairly regularly.

I'm going to try creating a new user account and moving all my files to it. But come on... who wants to do that? Such a hassle. Very disappointed with SL.

I've got a mac pro tower and I get the freeze constantly. I have tried updating to SL twice, and I have given up as nothing seems to fix it. And I have downgraded and I am not going back anytime soon. I have work to do, not sit around and wait for an incomplete OS to work.

How do you downgrade?

What happens to apps that you have upgraded to work with SL do they have to be downgraded too?

Why, works fine?!!! All working fine and dandy! Much quicker loading app's, booting up/down and about 5 gb's saved on drive! Me happy!

I'm having the same problem with Slow Leopard on my MacBook5,1 aluminum. 1 GPF, 1 screen freeze and many spinning beach balls while the OS temporarily stalls. It's great to be on the bleeding edge. Reminds me of when I used to use Windoz.

I have this issue on all my Snow Leopard machines:

Mac Pro (1)
Mac Mini (2)
iMac aluminum (2)
iMac white (2)
Macbook Pro unibody (1)

One thing I found is that by restarting mDNSResponder (sudo killall mDNSResponder) I can last longer than an hour without a reboot. Since all the machines have crashed now I can't get to them remotely so I have to check if I create a script that restarts it automatically every 5 minutes or so if it fixes it.

The issue is that the logs don't work either so nothing gets reported. I know I can't sudo after a hang or do anything else that checks the user id's/login so maybe there is an issue there (DirectoryService, Kerberos ...?). I also see that the Kerberos renew script doesn't work (/System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.Kerberos.renew.plist) exiting with exit code 1

In order to fix my hang-after-sleep issues I removed Adobe VersionCue CS4 starter from /etc/mach init_peruser.d which fixes that part. Maybe I should remove all Adobe starters from /Library/LaunchDaemons, /Library/LaunchAgents. There is nothing else really that's non-Apple. Does anybody here have these issues with a clean (no-software) install of Snow Leopard or does everybody here have Adobe software?

I also noticed that cleaning the caches (I checked all options) using Cocktail doesn't help. Anybody here any idea about that? I also have to check the Fonts that Microsoft and Adobe installs. Anybody here have any reviews on that? We won't be getting 10.6.2 for a while so I hope we can fix it soon.

Does anybody have a way of consistently crashing the system so I don't have to wait 1-2 hours?

I'm seeing the same thing as Guru Evi, my Snow Leopard system hangs after awhile (1-2 hours) and it seems to do it when it needs to check the user info (user id, group, etc). It's not necessarily a complete system hang/freeze since the terminals that I have opened remain working, but any new terminal that gets opened freezes immediately and won't give me a prompt. Another thing is that the system won't allow me to ssh to any other machine from one of my still working terminals once it gets into that state.

The system was using kerberos for authentication and LDAP for user info (username, uid, gid, home dir, etc.). I removed the kerberos authentication thinking that may be the culprit, but still no luck. The problem still occurs even when logging in using a local system user or root. When the freeze happens there doesn't seem to be anything in the logs that pop out as the possible problem (I see exactly the same thing Guru Evi described, including the failed Kerberos script). Guru Evi are you using any remote service like LDAP for user info or is everything local to your systems?

Anybody have any possible suggestions? Hopefully somebody may have a fix or Apple comes up with something.

This problem is tainting my Mac experience an I would like to get it fixed very soon. If you agree, I would like to put a list together of what non standard thing we are using to try to find what could be the reason for this. This is the extra Hardware I have and Kernel extensions of 3rd party software. If you have something common, it might be great to mention it in order to isolate this issue. I have this issue on my iMac 20" 2,66 April 2008.

On SL 10.6.1 with iTunes 9.0.1
Special Hardware:
- External HD 1,5TB connected to FW800
- Epson Printer R800 using Epson drivers (not the gutenprint)
- Logitech Mouse MX400 (with Logitech Control center 3.1)
- Adaptec USB Hub
- External Bluray player using a IDE 2 SATA converter.
Special Software that might be running when this occurs.
- Little Snitch 2.2
- Logitech Control Center 3.1
- Paragon NTFS for Mac (Snow Leopard version)
- Growl 1.2
- MacFuse 2.1.5 Beta
- VMWare Fusion 2.0.6
- Espionnage 2.5.3

Help me try to isolate this issue, reply to my post with the common stuff you might have.

Of your list I too have:
Growl 1.2
VMware Fusion 2.0.6

Startup items that run on boot:
Window Wrangler
iTunes Helper
FileXaminer Hotkeys
Growl helper
Chronosyncbackgrounder
AppCleaner Helper

Have you ever had VMWare Fusion 2.0.5 with Snow Leopard, and if yes, can you remember having your system freeze back then ? I am asking, because at the very begining I had 10.6.0 with VMWare 2.0.5, and I believe not having had a single freeze issue back then.