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

Actually TM will bring you back all the preferences and the system settings you were having with your backup. If there is something wrong with your current environment, unless you will do a REAL clean&go reinstallation, probably you will have the same problem, that's why I believe a clean install + TIME Machine is == to apply a Combo Update.

In my case, I did the reinstall and the Combo Update, but unfortunately, still having serious issues with freeze and dns name resolutions (is mDNSResponder the guilty guy here), and I believe the problem (which seems also well known to Apple) is still there and not solved at all in this build. I hope 10.6.3 will have it, and I'm afraid we will have to wait beginning of February to see it solved.

I'm almost convinced to do a total reinstall, but it will take days (for the 400Gb of dataappsfiles I have in my MBP), and normally you may lose something there..

If they just solve the mDNS issue and the Safari problem I would be stunned by the gain that SL brings to our hardware...

At today is unusable... (p.s. I'm reviving a first gen macbook with Leopard, just in case...)

It is important not to assume that every freeze under Snow Leopard is due to the same issue. It seems everyone who has seen a freeze under Snow Leopard is piling into this thread and assuming there is some problem with Snow Leopard. Freezes can have innumerable causes, such as hardware or software problems, lack of basic maintenance skills, etc. Each freeze needs to be treated as an individual case. If I were seeing problems like this on my machines, I would have run Disk Warrior by now, to eliminate Directory corruption as an issue.

like the previous poster suggests - I thought my problem was all these things. I did everything anybody suggested, with some success but my system continued to hang.

Eventually I'd had enough, and today I have done a completely fresh erase and install, and manually restored everything I considered necessary from a time machine backup. So I dumped loads of unwanted/unnecessary applications that had accumulated over the years, along with stuff that was just clogging up the system. My only difficulty was restoring the keychain (which I eventually managed to do by importing the old one using keychain manager)

Result - a really snappy system that hasn't troubled me for over 6 hours - a lot more that I could have obtained previously.

most likely you have a background process which is causing this. I havent seen this on any of the many Macs I daily come into contact with.

1. launch Terminal
2. type "top" and scroll to see which process is actually using up CPU time
3. products like Growl, antivirus, as well as browser plugins, and any kernel extensions, can cause this behavior
4. login to another admin account on the affected Mac. Does the problem follow ?

Yes, Gary suggests what I would do also.

If Disk Utility can't fix it, you'll need a more robust utility to repair it.

I would recommend DiskWarrior. It is the best at directory repairs. It rebuilds then actually replaces your old directory. I feel every Mac owner should have a copy.

Make sure you get the disk so you can boot up on it to run repairs. You can also install it on another drive and run it from there to repair this one. DW works faster that way.

I use DW once a month to try and catch errors in my system from getting too far out of hand. It has repaired every little and big issue I have ever had with my three Macs.

If you have a good backup, hopefully a clone of your system before you had issues, an Erase and Install will also rid you of this issue. But, beware! You will lose everything on the drive with this procedure. Let us know if you need help with that!

Good Luck! DALE

p.s. Here's a rewiew of DiskWarrior 4.

I do not agree... Of course, many freezes and locks may be caused by different issues, however, I never saw (since the 10.5.2) this lack of regression tests and fault of quality in a build. mDNSResponder is so buggy, software crashes (QT, Mail, Safari... ahhhhhhh) so often and third party software with full instability (due to the fact they released the software ahead of schedule!).

I personally brought back my MBP to the more stable 10.5.8 and I will not move from here until they will fix 3 serious bugs which don't permit my machine to work in a production environment. If you use it to play or see photos, it may be ok for you, but with certain providers, you cannot surf the web because DNS is messing up the orders of the servers to query, and this is generating problems with the DNS of the DSL provider...

I'll see how will works with 10.6.3 or 10.6.4, just after I'll move to Snow (...at that time hopefully they will have moved ALL the apps to 64 bit...)

For now, downgraded (and Time Capsule failed to render a suitable TM backup to use while restoring... SL's fault...) and happy with it.

I bit the bullet and did a clean reinstall. Left everything out of the box basically. Just froze AGAIN! It's a mystery at this point. Very disappointed. It's either the drive, ram or both. I really hope it's not the logic board.

Hi Thedavew;

Have you run AHT yet?

Allan

Hi guys,

I have been suffering from these random 30 - 40 second freezes too. I have been reading all these posts on Internet trying to find the answer. I have been trying to solve this problem by all possible sorts of means including Permission checks, complete Hard Drive check, Hardware Diagnostic even a reinstall of Mac Osx 10.6.2. After some time it always came back.

So what I finally found was that it is related to Spotlight. So you can try this.

1. Disable Spotlight "sudo mdutil -a -i off"
2. Change the preferences of Spotlight to only index (Applications, Folders and Documents)
3. Enable Spotlight again "sudo mdutil -a -i on"

This will cause the index to rebuild. The problem went away for me. I don't know which indexing option it is that is causing the problem but since I don't need the other ones its fine by me.

Hope this helps

I bit the bullet too... reformatted the drive and scratch installed SL. Freezes continue in every app. I don't think the problem is hardware related as my mini run WindowsXP via Bootcamp flawlessly -- no problems whatsoever running Windows. Other than getting the Bootcamp drivers, I'm regretting the upgrade to SL.

--Alan

OK....

Brought my iMac to the Apple store. They changed the HD (gave me a 640G rather than the 500G I had). By luck it was still under the warranty!

SL is running perfectly for two weeks now.

I just don't know!!!!

All the problems may be related to bootcamp. However, I won't test it.
In my opinion, Apple did mess up big time!!!

I'm having the same problem since my original hard drive crashed. I've tried two or three Western Digital hard drives. Caviar black, green, blue, whatever. I read (and was told by someone via phone at WD) there was a SATA issue with 1st gen MBPs.

I just installed a Seagate internal HD (320g)...totally fresh and clean install. Random freeze ups, and crash screens and a question mark startup. It runs fine until the beachball comes up.

Really sad.

I'm on day 4 of no lock up's. I'm not sure if it's related to an update or something related to it. I have stopped using Safari/Mail, and use Firefox/Thunderbird combo instead. Seems like a coincidence, but no lock up since I stopped using them.

{quote:title=co-kid wrote:}... as my mini run WindowsXP via Bootcamp flawlessly -- no problems whatsoever running Windows.{quote}

OMG, this is scary... if we declare that now XP run better than SL...

just sarcasm, don't flame please...

THANKS !!!!
My MacBook aluminium unibody has been freezing very often after the 10.6.2 upgrade ( slugish since the 10.5.8 upgrade to SL). I blamed the wireless card, as these freezes came often after fiddling around with the Airport. BUT THE RE-INDEXing, as adviced by svenner888, made is much more responsive and stable ( no crashes so far, really fast laptop as it should be according to the specs).
Great, man, this ended ( hopefully) a really miserable week for me.