Q: Random freezing from Snow Leopard - total lock-up for about 30 seconds

So every possible solution and apple support link that has been posted here is a "bizarre ritual" except the link you posted? LOL.

While I read all the posts before I began posting here. I'm not a real techy type and not all that comfortable playing around with Library Folders (however thanks for the suggestion gajones).
I did the 64-bit start and I was "beach-ball free" for 2 days! A huge thanks to whomever it was that suggested it!

.. Oddly enough though, this morning Safari started freezing up again.

And as for resetting the SMC as someone suggested - I read the link provided and it seems to only refer to portables. My problem is only on my iMac and not on my MacBook Pro (thankfully!).

Here's hoping we get a fix soon!

Well after 8 days of uptime, the 30s freezes came back today while watching some podcasts in iTunes. To investigate my theory of bad hard disk bocks, I had the complete drive checked for bad blocks and it come out clean, so as far as I'm concerned, my bad block theory is dead. As usual, a reboot fixed the problem, but hey, while 8 days of uptime might sound good for a windoze box, this is UNIX isn't it?

Anyway, what strikes me is that those 30 seconds seem to be kinda universal, so what is it that can cause the whole system to freeze and times out after 30 seconds??

lmcnl - if you stick to cleaning out just the Library folders mentioned, I don't think you can do much damage. Any stuff you find in there will be from 3rd party software you've installed. If you're not sure what anything is for, post a list and we can help you out.

For what it's worth I've still had a few lockups since when using Firefox/Safari or invoking Spotlight. Nothing like as bad as before, so can live with it for the moment. However after using SL since day one, I can safely say I wish I'd held off with the upgrade until a few more point releases down the line.

gajones - thanks!

I'll try the Library clean-out tomorrow night when I'm more alert or since I share your sentiments re upgrading to SL (obviously) prematurely. I'm seriously considering doing a full restore from Time Machine and waiting until SL performance improves. For now I'm really intrigued about the randomness of the freezes/lock-ups but am grateful as that so far things are running smoothly this evening.

Here's hoping... !

I can say I've followed every suggestion so far except for a reinstall, and none of them have worked. The only thing that stops it for a while is reboot.

Sep 30 07:21:42 Macintosh Safari[90705]: INSERT-HANG-DETECTED: Tx time:30.363946, # of Inserts: 1, # of bytes written: 25, Did shrink: NO
Sep 30 07:21:43 Macintosh DashboardClient[89862]: INSERT-HANG-DETECTED: Tx time:30.704271, # of Inserts: 7, # of bytes written: 76118, Did shrink: NO
Sep 30 07:22:20 Macintosh Safari[90705]: INSERT-HANG-DETECTED: Tx time:13.206920, # of Inserts: 1, # of bytes written: 25, Did shrink: NO
Sep 30 07:23:42 Macintosh Safari[90705]: INSERT-HANG-DETECTED: Tx time:35.331990, # of Inserts: 1, # of bytes written: 25, Did shrink: NO
Sep 30 07:23:43 Macintosh Safari[91316]: INSERT-HANG-DETECTED: Tx time:36.807506, # of Inserts: 6, # of bytes written: 6743, Did shrink: NO
Sep 30 07:24:23 Macintosh Safari[90705]: INSERT-HANG-DETECTED: Tx time:21.630514, # of Inserts: 1, # of bytes written: 25, Did shrink: NO

Mac 2,8 Quad / 12 gig ram / raid 0+1
Leopard was simply put Flawless for me.
I was in a fast, balloon-free-world & spent my time laughing at my friends windows crashes.
I looked forward to the 64bit update like a kid does christmas.

Snowleopard seemed Amazing .. 1 week of clean, prestine, speed & Everything seemed better.

Then... I started doing some Quicktime 10 Trimming of my movie catalog (.mov) and unbehold the ballon started. I hadnt seen it for more than months. No Matter what i do, "Sudo Periodics" , the "Disk Utility Rotation from the Snow leopard Disk" , Reboot .... I open Quicktime, do 5 Trims and im off to Ballon-world again.

Now after 2 days its worse, Safari, Firefox, DW, Quicktime, Flash, NeoOffice,... **** EVEN WORSE --> "Systems Preferences is Even doing it now"

I cant reboot , disk-utility anymore than this.... All this power and my stability is gone. **** i even figured id cheer myself up with some WoW ... another ballon.

I turned off the Tower for a night, cleaned everything up and restarted ...aaand seems Even worse.

What todo ? Could it possibly be a virus we have ?
Is it an issue any PRam clearing can solve ( i´ll report back on this one)
Is it a fail in SnowLeopard ?

What do I do ?

edit : yes ive tried pretty much everything in this thread & checked hd blocks

im lost asking for help....thnx ( pram did nothing . ProTolls8 Balloons also)

help

This is getting worse by the day. Mine locked up while I was writing this.
It's a very annoying, very persistent problem since installing SL.

I've already done a lot of what's been recommended here.

I have waited patiently since the initial release for a fix. I thought that the recent 10.6.1 update would have addressed this, but in fact, it's worse now, so I am joining in the fray.

At this point, I am going to look into doing an in-place downgrade back to Leopard, assuming that's possible.

Locomotivation, If your having that much trouble. Add me to your iChat friend list (ZoeRoss) and This evening (4pm PST) I'll help you debug what third party software is screwing up your Computer. I'm running SN on 5 of 6 machines now, and Over half our Department has upgraded with several of the same issues posted here and all of them were worked out.

Wow - +sincere thanks for the offer to help!+ I am swamped right now, so I am just going to have to tolerate things until I get out of the weeds. I will keep your offer in mind, and there's a possibility I will take you up at some point in the future.

Cheers!

Well, I think you may have just solved the problem for me.

After seeing console messages related to third-party plugins, I went back through your earlier post and found corresponding Contextual Menu extensions in the directories you listed. One was for Fusion, another was for SimplyBurns.

I promptly removed these files (since they are no longer supported in SL, per Apple's documentation). After that, I rebooted.

So far, everything seems to be working, including the Apps with the extensions that were removed. In fact everything is noticeably faster. Let's hope this holds for the long term.

Thanks!!!!

gajones wrote:
I was having a similar issue until I read a post advising to go through the following folders and remove any third-party stuff:

/Library/Bundles/
/Library/Contextual Menu Items/
/Library/InputManagers/
/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/
/Library/LaunchAgents/
/Library/LaunchDaemons/
/Library/PreferencePanes/
/Library/QuickLook/
/Library/ScriptingAdditions
/Library/StartupItems/

You should also check the Library folder in your home folder.

Since I've done this SL is running perfectly.

Hey there people. Man, I am so relieved to know that I am not the only person suffering with this frustrating bug! Seems like it's something affecting the majority of recently-upgraded Snow Leopard-ers. I've been reading through various forums and I think I've done everything I can. Well, not everything, but that's why I have a few quick questions for the discussion...

First off, I've done the SMC reset (as it was worth a shot), used Snow Leopard Cache Cleaner to repair/maintain/optimize everything, done a complete reboot from disk... and I still get the spinning beachball every 15 minutes or so, lasting for about 30 seconds. This occurs when using Firefox, Safari, iTunes and - most annoyingly - the new Quicktime X. A simple restart of my laptop does help temporarily, but the beachball comes back after about an hour or so, depending on which software I'm using...

The two things I am yet to try are downgrading my Firmware and 'gajones' removal of 3rd Party stuff; both of which seemed to work for the individual. The problem is, I'm a bit "simple" when it comes to working with my MB Pro using anything without a straightforward, layman's GUI (:P) so I'm tentative about both ideas.

The firmware downgrade seems counterproductive to me. I mean - great, if it fixes the problem, then great. However, I though the whole point of getting Snow Leopard was that it was an upgrade, so downgrading something integral to that seems like a step in the wrong direction to me. This problem has been made very aware to Apple (so it seems) so I am hopeful that the 10.6.2 Update will come about soon and that will sort everything out.

Failing that, what I am left to try is 'gajones' method (see above). Thing is, as I said, I'm not too good with moving & deleting files manually, as I can never been too sure of myself and am afraid I could erase something core. I do have a 500GB external hard drive which I've been using as backup with Time Machine, so that makes me feel a bit better about it all. Still...

gajones: If I am to go ahead with your method, surely I will be deleting all the plugins and preferences that I have spent time carefully downloading to improve performance for certain software? I mean, in my '/Library/Internet Plug-Ins' folder I have my DivX Browser Plugin, Flash Player, Flip4Mac WMV Converter. And likewise for my '/Library/PreferencePanes'...
Surely deleting all of these would severely reduce the capabilities of my browsing and restrict what I am able to do on my computer..??

I may be completely wrong; I am unsure of how these things work, but it just seems like I would lose software capabilities that I rely on quite frequently when using the internet. Is there a workaround for this? Can I re-install afterwards, or does this mass-3rd Party erase simply correct itself and solve the beachball problem?

Any help would be greatly, greatly appreciated!

Also, I noticed some people here are being really friendly: i.e. offering to help others out via iChat, so if anyone is willing to do the same for me that'd be fantastic! I'm in the UK so I'm on GMT (making it 12:45pm here), but I'm assuming most users are from the US or elsewhere...? Which means most people are likely to be on EST time - GMT-5hrs; making it ~7:45am in the USA & Canada). BUT, if anyone is kind enough to help an avid Apple user with this problem then I'll make special time to be on iChat when needed...

Apologies for the rambling, I just wanted to make sure I had laid everything in terms of my situation so people 'in-the-know' would be able to help me as much as possible. If you need more info or screenshots of what I have in my '/Library' and/or '~/Library' folder(s) then I'm more than happy to do that if it means I can get over this persistently irritating freeze!
Again, though, any info is greatly appreciated

Thanks.

-Alex-

Message was edited by: ab9109

ab9109 wrote:

gajones: If I am to go ahead with your method, surely I will be deleting all the plugins and preferences that I have spent time carefully downloading to improve performance for certain software? I mean, in my '/Library/Internet Plug-Ins' folder I have my DivX Browser Plugin, Flash Player, Flip4Mac WMV Converter. And likewise for my '/Library/PreferencePanes'...
Surely deleting all of these would severely reduce the capabilities of my browsing and restrict what I am able to do on my computer..??

I may be completely wrong; I am unsure of how these things work, but it just seems like I would lose software capabilities that I rely on quite frequently when using the internet. Is there a workaround for this? Can I re-install afterwards, or does this mass-3rd Party erase simply correct itself and solve the beachball problem?

Any help would be greatly, greatly appreciated!

Hi - what I did was simply to clean out those Library folders, then used the machine for a while to verify that it had indeed solved the freezing issue.

Remember in Snow Leopard when you right-click something in the Trash you have the handy 'Put Back' option, so no need to be scared.

I then re-installed the latest versions of what I'd deleted - first checking the compatibility wiki to make sure they were SL ready - http://snowleopard.wikidot.com

I do have different hardware to you, so your mileage may vary...

Feel free to drop me an email if you need help, I am based in London.

Gareth

Just do what gajones recommends.

Snow Leopard no longer supports contextual menu extensions, so whatever enhancements these plugins provided are no longer working anyway. When they are present, they seem to cause the symptoms described in this thread. Removal of these files completely resolved the issue for me. It worked like a charm. As another poster pointed out, you can always restore the files from the trash (as long as you don't empty trash until you are sure all is well).

Frankly, Apple could have handled this in a more intuitive manner. The average user shouldn't be bothered with having to deal with the OS at this level. It smells a bit too much like Redmond to me. I think they were in a hurry to deploy. To their credit, SL is one sweet upgrade once you fine tune it a little.

cheers...