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

Locomotivation wrote:
Frankly, Apple could have handled this in a more intuitive manner.

So what you're trying to say is that 2 years of SL beta phase wasn't long enough for all those developers out there?

LOL

I'm not trying to say anything. I said precisely what I intended to say. Reading the release notes, Apple indicated that support for third-party Contextual Menu Extensions was discontinued in SL. That notice was fine for developers and tech-saavy people. Not so much for customers that may not even know what a third-party Contextual Menu Extension is. Apple could have included a contingency for handling applications that still attempt to install such extensions under SL. A simple warning at the point of installation would help. This was a predictable eventuality. It's reasonable to believe that Apple knew of the potential ill effect caused by the continued presence of menu extensions. OS-X usually does a pretty good job of isolating ill effects of misbehaving applications to the application context. As a result, it's reasonable to assume the customer may not associate the seemingly ubiquitous manifestation of the symptoms with a particular third-party menu extension and instead interpret such ill effect to be caused by a flaw in the OS. Hundreds of postings to this forum bear that out. Two years of testing make for an even more compelling case. Thanks for helping make my point.

I'm a huge Apple fan. I simply believe this issue provides fertile ground for future enhancement to the customer experience.

cheers...

I tried what gajones said. And actually: check /etc/mach_init* folders too - they're old but Adobe uses them (they are retard-ed) and it might help.

I fixed my lock-up after sleep issue by removing VersionCue from /etc/machinit_peruser.d. But then I was still locking up after a 1-2 hours. I have 6 computers that I am testing Snow Leopard on and they all did the same.

On my blogpost (http://rcbi.rochester.edu/users/vanooste) I have detailed a solution:

I found a solution:

- I removed VersionCue (Adobe) folders from /etc/machinit_peruser.d
- I cleaned up and rebuilt all caches (especially the Dynamic Loader (dyld) caches). Use Cocktail or so if you don't know what you're doing

That fixed my crashes after sleep. But then I noticed crashing after an hour, sometimes two. I noticed if I was in superuser mode or if I could send something over ARD I could still do stuff except resolving what was in the directory (user id's etc). I created the following little tidbit that fixes it:

Create a file called edu.rochester.DirectoryServiceRestart.plist in /Library/LaunchDaemons with the following content:


<!-- cut here -->
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Label</key>
<string>edu.rochester.DirectoryServiceRestart</string>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>/usr/bin/killall</string>
<string>DirectoryService</string>
</array>
<key>Disabled</key>
<false/>
<key>RunAtLoad</key>
<false/>
<key>ThrottleInterval</key>
<integer>600</integer>
<key>KeepAlive</key>
<dict>
<key>SuccessfulExit</key>
<true/>
</dict>
</dict>
</plist>
<!-- cut here -->

Then do:

sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchAgents/edu.rochester.DirectoryServiceRestart.plist
sudo launchctl start edu.rochester.DirectoryServiceRestart

Now every 10 minutes, DirectoryService gets restarted and I don't hang anymore. Apparently there is a serious bug in DirectoryService that makes the whole system hang after a period of time (memory leak?) actually what I believe that happens is that user id's cannot be resolved anymore and you have issues when checking permissions.

If Safari is giving you issues, check you're on the latest version of Flash and Flip4Mac (WMV) has a beta for Snow Leopard compatibility so install those.

Also clean out your caches. Use Cocktail if you don't know what you're doing but your boot, kernel, font and user caches need to be cleaned out after an upgrade from Leopard. And if you recently updated your firmwares, reset PRAM and SMC

Anybody let me know if that helped? - Updates and links are on my blogpost.

gajones wrote:
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

Ah okay, brilliant. Thank you.

Right, well I've done a bit of "cleansing" from the Library folder and the one in my Home Directory. Everything is in the Trash at the moment, and no hangs have been experienced yet, but I haven't actually fully deleted anything as I'm unsure as to what is 3rd Party and what is native to my MacBook. I don't want to permanently delete ANYTHING until I can confirm that deleting the plugins etc.. currently residing in my Trash folder won't affect my computer long-term.
So, I'd really appreciate if anything could just have a quick scan over what I have in my Trash and telling me what is okay to fully delete (i.e. third party stuff). I would be so grateful for this. If it means that SL finally start to function as it should then that would be fantastic!
Here's my current Trash contents, following the very useful method according to gajones:

---------------------------------------------

ADFSMenu.plugin
DivXBrowserPlugin.plugin
+Flash Player.plugin+
+Flip4Mac WMV Plugin.plugin+
+Flip4Mac WMV Plugin.webplugin+
+Google Earth Plugin.plugin+
StuffItCM.plugin

+Adobe Unit Types.osax+
StuffIt.qlgenerator

at.obdev.littlesnitchd.plist
at.obdev.LittleSnitchNetworkMonitor.plist
at.obdev.LittleSnitchUIAgent.plist

com.adobe.CS4ServiceManager.plist
com.google.keystone.agent.plist
com.google.keystone.daemon.plist
com.sourceforge.macgpg2.gpg-agent.plist

DivX.prefPane
+Flip4Mac WMV.prefPane+
Perian.prefPane

flashplayer.xpt
npdivx.xpt
nsIQTScriptablePlugin.xpt

JavaPluginCocoa.bundle

NP-PPC-Dir-Shockwave

---------------------------------------------

These all came out of (~)/Library/Internet Plug-Ins, InputManagers, Launch Agents, LaunchDaemons, Preference Panes and ScriptingAdditions (I think...) but I can't remember which is from which, so I just laid it out about ^^ grouped in a way I thought would make more sense to someone well-versed in the technology field...

If someone could just copy&paste the files I listed above into another post, and just highlight which ones I SHOULDN'T throw away and those that are disposable then that would be great. I have an external hard drive so I'm pretty sure everything is backed up on Time Machine, but still - I'd like to be able to empty my Trash properly and get on with using Snow Leopard to it's utmost capacity!

Thanks in advance

Message was edited by: ab9109

Message was edited by: ab9109

A friend's MacBook was having the same problems I have seen repeated in this forum time and again. We solved it by discovering that the Disk had been corrupted and thus, repaired it with deleting a few files, the disk utility and the install disk.

Now these are the steps that we used:

1. Go to Macintosh HD/Library and send the 'Caches' and 'Start up items' folders to trash
2. Then, go to the user's account users/'username'/Libray and send the 'Caches' and 'Cookies' folder to the trash.
3. Go to System Preferences, and in the main user remove all start-up items other than the iTuneshelper.
4. Then, go to the Utilities folder, and open up Disk Utility, and select the Macintosh HD in the Left Panel, and on the right side again, under 'First Aid', select Verify Disk. {not Verify Disk Permissions}
5. In most cases, it should give an error result, probably saying that one or more files are different from what they should be. In that case, pop in the Snow Leopard disk, close everything and shutdown the mac.
6. Holding the 'C' Key to boot from the disk drive, turn on the mac, and key holding the key down until the Apple logo appears with the spinning gear.
7. Allow it a minute or two to boot to the disk, when booted, select the Language, and continue until you see the installation splash screen before you.
8. Do not go to reinstall the OS, instead go the the menu bar at top, select 'Utilities' and then, 'Disk Utility' from the pull-down menu.
9. When it opens, make sure the Macintosh HD is selected in the left panel, and under 'First Aid', on the right, here, select Repair Disk.
10. The disk will repair in a few minutes, and upon completion, Shut down the mac.
11. Simply, turn it on now, allow it to boot normally and when logged-in, you can now eject the install disk.

You should by now have noticed a great improvement in the responsiveness and speed of your mac.
Please note, you will have to reconfigure your desired start up items after this procedure.

same issue, the mouse cursor moves but nothing is responsive.

I observed that SL on my MBP seems to lock quite frequently after the utilization of the swap file has started.
SL has the odd behavior to grow the swap file to huge sizes regardless of making RAM free by killing some applications (I have 4GB RAM in my MBP and after 2 days of use the swap file grow to 3GB or more). During extending swap file my 2.5" hdd (5400RPM) is heavy on I/O and it is at these times that the lock-ups occur especially often.
To make matters even worse the spotlight demon (mds) is often active and generating additional hdd I/O. On some point I wonder: is that spotlight demon the cause for the fast growing (never shrinking) swap file?
If SL caches all these files spotlight has touched (for indexing), is SL erasing / cleaning these files from its RAM cache? after what time? at all?

Simple things like watching a video file with VLC or Quicktime and simultaneously copying files from DVD to hdd are often impossible without the video playback juddering. And again, it occurs in conjunction with a big swap file.

Because usage of the swap file starts after about 1-2 days (when RAM is fully used), I wonder how many reports here, like "I rebooted and after few days the lock-ups where back again", could be mapped to high I/O due to (unnecessary) big swap files.
Also I wonder: why doesn't the swap file shrink at all even after closing all applications?

The swap file will shrink eventually, but only after a while.

But you have a good point there, something I've asked myself too: why do operating systems swap out applications in favour of disk caching ? I'd like to see statistics on cache hits, because my guess is 90% of all the stuff that gets cached is actually only used once. In Linux there is a way to limit the amount of memory that the OS will use as disk cache, is there the same in OS X?

the swap file is a good idea as a cause for those f**** freezes. before osx starts to struggle my harddisks always goes nuts, even without doing anything. there are some peeks in the hd tranferrate in the activitymonitor aswell.

ive tried every single idea mentioned in this post to solve the problem, nothing worked out for me. what i can say is, that the problems begins when i start more or less real working on my mashine and only a restart solves it for a few minutes at least. or doing nothing for a while. (swap file?)

maybe its a good idea to find out what we have in common?
my stuff:
flip 4 mac
3g ntfs
perian
sneek peek
wacom driver
mobile me sync
and a ntfs bootcamp partition (still one of my favorites as a cause)
and just 2gb of ram

Except for Flip4Mac, I don't have any of the other drivers and still locks up. I already posted a 'fix' for it. Check it out and let me know if it works for you.

Flip4Mac does have a Snow Leopard compatible "beta" plugin. Try it out and see what happens.

I don't think it is memory. I have 14GB installed and was watching with iStat and memory usage never got above 4GB.

yeah hm, thanks for the advice guru,

the problem is, that i dont have any version cue installed on my system - so this cant be the reason.
i also have the flip4mac beta installed thats why this also drops out.

so the swap file issue is still on the top of the list.
or this is caused by bad blocks on the hd which have never been used before?

Dear Apple team,

For years and I am using Win OS, till I took a decision and moved to MAC OS. I never regret the move, yet I totally felt that I wasted many years on MS OS having to deal with all the lousy issues of their OS instability.

I started from Leopard 10.5 onwards, and every single day I am using the system I really do admire the power and stability of it. When Snow was released I managed somehow to be among the first to get the official released copy 10.6.0, and this was a real disappointment to me.

Since I started using the new OS and I am facing daily hang-ups, freeze, forcing a shut down or a sudden shut down by itself, which is bringing me back to the old miseries of using Win OS. Why on earth Apple team released the OS if it is still not fully ready. Why we have to suffer and get this bad feeling where our trust will start fading in using your beautiful Leopard OS.

Every single time I am using Safari, it keeps hanging and it takes more time to load a page if I have more than a tab. This never happened on the old Leopard 10.5.X release.
Many application cannot run on Snow, so what I will do with all the applications I have purchased that I am forced till they come out with a release for the new Snow OS?!! Wait and wait and wait?!!..
Now my other applications like, Entourage, FTP clients, and many others keeps hanging and I even cannot force a quit, the only way to kill the application is by forcing a shut down...

The main concern to us as users is STABILITY and AVAILABILITY. And unfortunately both are missing in the new Snow 10.6 release, even after I downloaded the latest update which is 10.6.1 the problems are the same... Guys for the first time I am thinking of downgrading to Leopard 10.5.X because of all the hassles I am facing. It is a shame that MAC made a big fuss over Vista and people downgrading from Vista to Windows XP... Now it is the same scenario where I really do feel that I have to downgrade from Snow to Leopard...

Are you guys doing something or should we take the move and stick to one of your most successful OS ever the leopard??????!!!!! Kindly answer me at least and keep the faith in us knowing that I have managed to convince more than 50 of my friends to move from Windows to MAC OS!!!.. And I don’t want to regret that...

A. Elyan

or it is this efi 1.7 stuff which was installed with snow leopard? actually i dont own a pro but and i dont have a 3rd party hardrive, so i dont know, but the behavier of the affected mashines fits quite well... http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2054387&tstart=0&messageID=103 91219#10391219

i need a solution asap because i have to use my computer here at university. argh.

I am having the same problem, especially when using Safari or Word. I restart my computer when it becomes too annoying, but that only helps for a relatively short period. I am not upgrading other computers to 10.6 until the issue is resolved.