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

I had the same freezes in all types of occasions, apparently when the swap file was involved.
I have an SSD drive in a 2006 MacBook, so Sudden Motion Sensor is not the issue (or not the only issue) and a slow hard drive should not the issue either.

I can report that repairing the volume seems to have done the trick for me (I only had one freeze in the past 24 hours) instead of pretty much one every hour or more often (depending on what I was doing). That one freeze was related to Safari and it could be that the system was heavily swapping in that case (opening a new Tab in Safari while launching iPhoto with 12000-pics library).
The important thing to keep in mind here, is that while booted on the hard drive, Disk Utility's repairing tool *did not detect any failures*. When booted on the install CD though, reparation did have an effect (I did not check the disk before I repaired, so I can't say precisely what it was).
So, my advice clearly is the same as Dale Weisshaar's: take the time to boot on an install CD and to repair the volume even if Disk Utility does not see any problems when booted on that volume.

Allow me to add my voice to the growing cacophony. I have a 2009 Nehalem Mac Pro w/ 16 GB of RAM and an ATI 4870. I experience random beach balling which typically lasts several seconds when using just about any application. I have created a new user account, which didn't help. Booting into the 64 bit kernel also didn't alleviate the problem. The experience is so frustrating that I can almost feel a brain aneurism developing if I use the system for more than a few minutes. I'm hesitant to downgrade to Leopard as that would make it difficult to determine if the problem is fixed by a future software update. I have a macbook pro with more or less identical software which doesn't seem to have this problem.

Try to clean install snow leopard (have a working backup ready first) and before adding anything run a permissions repair and then upgrade to 10.6.1 and the "performance update 1.0". Then run again permissions repair and afterwards install ilfe and any other stuff you want.
Just be very conservative with applications that utilize safari plugins, contextual menus, launch agents, input methods, etc.

I had this issue on a macbook pro 17' (early 2009) and it seems following this guideline helped me a lot.

Alternatively you can wait a bit as 10.6.2 is around the corner and then you will see whether your issues will go away or not.

I personally doubt if this issue will be healed straightforward e.g with the upcoming snow update build. It seems that the reasons and the circumstances under it occurs are so different and random from system to system, that ultimately many of the people suffering will have to do a clean install of the OS.

I've performed a clean install and ran repair disk permissions and it didn't find any problems. The issue persists even before I've loaded any additional software. For instance, it took upwards of 15 seconds to open a new Finder window. Navigating to the Utilities and waiting for it to display its contents was also painfully slow, as was waiting for Disk Utility to load. As I'm having the problem on a Mac Pro, so there is no available performance update, only 10.6.1. I do have the OS installed on a mirrored raid array, and I'm not aware if this has caused anyone problems.

ryan.ringle, When you did a clean install, Did you set up your user account from scratch or did you import it from a previous install? So far every ones MACs that were running into some issue like this have all been software related with the exception of the machines that the Performance update was for. And several of those I have worked on also had software issues on top of the Performance update.

Here is a list of machine I own and currently running with 10.6.1 without any issue:

MacPro 2.8GHz Octo-core, 12GB RAM 3.6TB HD space with Raid 1.
13" MacBookPro 2.53Ghz, 4GB RAM (the latest, I just got it last week)
17" MacbookPro 2.4Ghz SantaRosa with 4GB RAM & updated 500GB HD.
15" MacBookPro 2.26Ghz CorDuo with 2GB RAM & updated 500GB HD (my wifes)

And I've installed ll my software on all these machines and have no problems. The only time I had problems was when I upgraded my first machine (my MacPro) to Snow leopard I had to go through and clean it out of old crap that was installed during 10.5... days that is no longer compatible with 10.6...

It was a fresh user account, I only entered in my mobile me info so it synced my mail accounts and such. I'll try updating to 10.6.1 again and see if that changes anything.

I still get the random freezing with the beach ball on my iMac 24inch Model 9,1. Its running a Clean install of Snow Leopard 10.6.1.

The finder will show the beach ball and nothing will work for at least 60 seconds. It is very annoying. I even got the performance update which did nothing for the random beach ball. It normally happens a couple minutes after boot up and sometimes while working with the iMac later on with a second beach ball freeze.

Apple needs to fix this with the up coming update or this is going to be their version of Vista. Funny how things come back to bite you when you spend so much time making fun of Microsoft.

I went a couple of days without a lockup, but today, twice. Really frustrating.

Ok, this is enough...

I'm begging any developer who has access to the last build of 10.6.2 (which seems out with no known issues), do you know if the OS is more stable...

With no BeachBalls floating around?
With a SERIOUS DNS management (mDNSResponder is the nightmare of the nightmares!)?
With at least a 10-15% less warnings, critical messages, errors in our console?

I'm a bit tired of this.... I don't remember even on Leopard such a mess...

After the 10th random lockup since installing SL I've decided to wipe and install a clean OS. Using Time Machine to restore files, apps and settings. I'm not installing Parallels 4 for now to see if that has any affect with the total lockups. These total lockups with SL needs to be seriously addressed by Apple. I feel like I'm back to System 8/9 with these random total lock ups. I guess I'm back to using DELL with XP Pro for awhile. At least I can rely on that to not randomly freeze like Snow Leopard on MBP.

Were you running Leopard before installing 10.6?

Did you save a clone of that system?

Dale

No clone. Time Machine has all my backup. I erased the HD with SL DVD. Ran the installer, rebooted and selected TM to back up files, apps, settings and folders. I also uninstalled Parallels 4.0 as it loads a Daemon on the system and I also suspect having Windows running constantly with SL may be causing issues. I'll have to run window on another machine for awhile to make sure that it wasn't causing SL on my MBP to lock up completely. Now I'll leave my MBP running for days and see what happens.

Forgot to mention. Yes I was running Leopard before 10.6. My MBP is late 2008. Running perfectly and no complete system lock ups until installing SL. I'll see how the system run for a few days with the clean install and TM migration and no Parallels installed.

Did you have these issues when running 10.5?

Dale

Just Apps would crash. Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator.... just that kind of issue with 10.5. No total system lockups where you have to hard restart. Unlike SL where the entire machine locks up.