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

Although in my case I've noticed that the hang happens most often and most severely when using Safari, I also noticed a number of times when the PubSubAgent process reported 'INSERT-HANG-DETECTED' errors as well. Since other applications, such as Mail.app, use the PubSubAgent, it's quite possible that users experiencing this problem who are not using Safari are experiencing an issue derived from the PubSubAgent.

Just a thought….

I have been getting these since the 10.6 and 10.6.1 updates too. Overall, my laptop is running way hotter than it did on 10.5, which was quite stable for me. For the last 3 days, I have woken up to find my laptop very hot and unresponsive. The iphone plugged into it didn't charge and in fact drained the entire iphone battery... (was at 3% remaining this AM).

Just today, the machine started to lock up and freeze for periods of time. I managed to get an activity window open after a few minutes and it reported about 8MB free memory (out of 4GB!). After several minutes of freezing up and running hot, the memory went back to 2GB free. That's when I started noticing these in the system.log and found this thread:

Sep 14 13:03:56 marcel Safari[724]: INSERT-HANG-DETECTED: Tx time:6.336314, # of Inserts: 16, # of bytes written: 107486, Did shrink: NO
Sep 14 13:04:20 marcel Safari[724]: INSERT-HANG-DETECTED: Tx time:5.396150, # of Inserts: 43, # of bytes written: 315847, Did shrink: NO

I've started removing anything that might contribute to this with no luck so far. Right now I am a pretty vanilla setup with Mail.app, Safari, iTunes, Adium, Parallels 4.0, Entourage.

Hope something comes of this soon! I at least had a report to send to apple this morning when I had to power-cycle it to un-lock it.

Oh one more thing. The kernel.log does show it running out of memory too:

Sep 14 12:55:56 marcel kernel[0]: (default pager): [KERNEL]: Switching ON Emergency paging segment
Sep 14 12:56:00 marcel kernel[0]: (default pager): [KERNEL]: System is out of paging space.
Sep 14 12:56:30: --- last message repeated 1 time ---
Sep 14 12:56:25 marcel kernel[0]: (default pager): [KERNEL]: Failed to recover emergency paging segment
Sep 14 12:57:45 marcel kernel[0]: (default pager): [KERNEL]: System is out of paging space.
Sep 14 12:57:45 marcel kernel[0]: (default pager): [KERNEL]: Failed to recover emergency paging segment
Sep 14 13:00:43 marcel kernel[0]: (default pager): [KERNEL]: System is out of paging space.
Sep 14 13:00:43 marcel kernel[0]: (default pager): [KERNEL]: Failed to recover emergency paging segment
Sep 14 13:02:40 marcel kernel[0]: (default pager): [KERNEL]: Recovered emergency paging segment

That covers my ~5 minutes of the system being completely unusable.

Same issue here. Upgraded to SL to fix the iTunes/Quicktime crashing problems with the Radeon 4870. Now getting random 30-second freezes in various apps or when trying to use spotlight. 10.6.1 upgrade did not fix the issue.

I wanted to add my name to the list of those affected by this problem. Tens of seconds hang-ups from any and all applications (Safari, iPhoto, Finder, anything that's in use). I also see the INSERT-HANG-DETECTED scattered through the system.log. I haven't performed any in-depth study to find usage trends associated with this issue.

A quick summary of what I have seen is that it is not associated with any application, filetype, workflow, CPU load, RAM usage. I find it happening all over.

Also wanted to note that my 2007 iMac has not seen this issue but gets similar workload with same software/OS setup.

Really hope this gets fixed soon.

While browsing the forums I received a freeze and got this in system.log:

Sep 14 22:04:06 Marshall-Levesques-MacBook-Pro /usr/libexec/hidd[33]: IOHIDEventQueueEnqueue: Error enqueuing memory. (0xe00002e8)
Sep 14 22:04:36: --- last message repeated 75 times ---

Any chance that others are running a macbook pro with the GeForce 9600M GT in the hardware accelerator mode? I was in that during all of the previous crashes from the last few days. Today, I turned that off (went back to Better Battery life) and also set Safari to work in 32-bit mode. I noticed my lock-ups happening when I changed both of those. I had been running safari in 32-bit mode since the upgrade to 10.6 for 1password, but had changed it to 64-bit after the beta was installed.

I'll see what happens in the morning if it's still running or not.

I'm also getting the Random Freeze as above, but not the HANGs in the logs like some of the above posters have found.

In my case it seems to be related to CCacheServer waiting for tickets and timing out:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2152097&tstart=0

I use terminal and "tail -f /var/log/system.log"
To follow the system log

I got one while trying to type this response also

Woke up today to find the macbook pro dead again... no responses to anything. Powered off and on and was presented with a crash report to send in, which I did. In looking at it, I did notice that there were kernel extensions for fusefs and virtualbox in there, both of which were removed from the system months ago...
I manually removed those with kextunload (anyone know if that is permanent?) and will see if this helps with the freezes.

having random freezes too, few times a day, spinning beach balloon. I noticed the network connection always stalls when this happens, always. However, in some cases, I am able to switch to a different application, the dock responds. Other times, it's a complete freeze.

I don't know what the problem could be. Could it be the ethernet driver? Not sure it has happened over wifi. I have noticed the ethernet connection is always killed, for about 20/30 seconds or so.

The one freeze I just had ( a minute ago ), system.log reports CCCacheServer no valid tickets, timing out. There is an INSERT-HANG-DETECTED from WeatherBug Alert; and a crash from WebKitPluginHost. All three "issues" at the same time.

Message was edited by: BigCat400

I think I found a possible cause.
I think there may be an issue caused by the sudden motion sensor

I have disabled it and so far no freezing and no more INSERT-HANG-DETECTED in the logs

By any chance is anyone else with this issue using an upgraded HD?
I replaced my stock 250 GB with a 500 GB Hitachi

*Potential Solution*

I downgraded the HDD even though it was not reporting any errors from the disk. I did have a 7200rpm Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB hard disk in there; today I downgraded to a 5400rpm WD 500GB hard disk, have been using all day and am not suffering any lockups.

I rescanned the Seagate for SMART errors as an external drive, and its come up clean.

I'm thinking that the issue is related to the 7200rpm 500GB combination? I hear that later Unibody MBPs have also been having similar issues after firmware upgrades.

S

Admiral,

See my above post - I also replaced my stock 250GB with a 500GB Seagate and suffered the hanging.

Put a 500GB WB in there today and no freezeups so far - but this is a 5400 and not a 7200 (which the Seagate was).

How do you disable the sudden motion sensor? I might swapt he old drive back in for a test.

S