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

allan_vancouver wrote:
+I'm also new to the iMac OS X world, and have had a number of freezes with only the mouse pointer moving --+

I've had these too. I discovered that if I then put the machine to sleep by quickly depressing the startup button on the back of the monitor for a second, then waiting for a count of, say, ten, and pressing it quickly again, I get my dock and menubar functionality back. Strangely, that particular freeze hasn't happened since I disabled journaling on my main HD.

Less,
I wonder why you are running VirusBarrier?

Don't you have virus protection in your ISP's mail program?

Dale

allan,
I would actually to a repair.

Try using Disk Utility to do a Disk Repair, as shown in this link, while booted up on your install disk. Many here don't trust the Verify Disk function.

You could have some directory corruption. Let us know what errors Disk Repair reports and if DU was able to repair them.



 DALE

Dale Weisshaar wrote:
I wonder why you are running VirusBarrier?
Don't you have virus protection in your ISP's mail program?

As a graphic designer and print production specialist, I do a lot of work with printing companies in the US, Canada, and the EU. I am in and out of ftp sites all day long. I drop off and pick up zip files all the time. Virusbarrier scans these. To my knowledge, my ISP scans for PC viruses but not Mac malware (believe me, its out there). I also use Little Snitch to tell me if some app I'm not aware of is trying to phone home.

Thanks!

Dale

Disable "Last Access Time" in Paragon NTFS if you have that installed. It is located in the system settings pref pane. I haven't had a freeze ever since I disabled that feature.

I just spoke to Apple support. I did a reset of my smc http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964 and a zapped the pram and the problem went away.

i don't think that this is a solution to the freezings, i still got random freezes

{quote:title=z1ross wrote:}
OK INSERT-HANG-DETECTED Is related to a plugin or UI mod for Safari.

{quote}

I don't think this is entirely correct. I NEVER use Safari.

I suppose the problem may be related to an Internet Plug-In, or perhaps to WebKit itself. I have seen the INSERT-HANG-DETECTED associated with all of the following apps. Some obviously use WebKit (as does Safari) - but others are surprising (mdworker):

# of 
Hangs Application Name
===== ================================
 36 DashboardClient
 2 Google Earth
 3 Mail
 6 PubSubAgent
 2 Software Update
 7 SoftwareUpdateCheck
 1 iStat menus Background Checker
 6 iTunes
 1 mdworker
 3 quicklookd

On the other hand, this hang may actually be a symptom of some other more fundamental issue. Perhaps WebKit is trying to do some sort of I/O, and blocking, or triggering the OS to block waiting for some event.

The other thing I have noticed is that the problem seems to be intermittent. I made it through almost the entire day yesterday (from about 8am to 5pm) without any hangs, and then it started -- 30 sec. hangs every few minutes, until I gave up and rebooted.

Has anyone attempted any checks from a externally connected terminal session (ssh from another machine) during a hang? Could try some simple disk I/O, run ps, etc... This would allow us to determine if this is a GUI / WindowServer issue, or something more fundamental to the OS.

Spidey!!!

A little more information:

I tried removing the items in /Library/Internet Plug-Ins one by one, checking the startup behavior of Firefox between each (it turns out the Firefox does actually use this framework).

The one item which seemed to have an impact was the DivX plugin. Startup time for Firefox was orders of magnitude faster with it uninstalled. I will run this way for a while, and let you know if I see any further beachballs...

Spidey!!!

Message was edited by: spidey3

Many people here have noted that the causes of these lockups are varied - we may all be fixing slightly different problems. Here is what worked for me with a Mac Pro Xeon.

I've been experiencing the problem for 3 weeks and it got worse and worse. The screen(s) randomly froze completely apart from the mouse pointer. Very often it seemed to happen when the machine was 'stressed' by lots of apps / usage - Google Earth and Photoshop / Final Cut would regularly cause lock-ups. I could SSH in from another machine and nothing weird showed in the logs - could kill the 'heavy apps' but nothing changed and the only way to get the screen to respond was SSH and then "sudo reboot" which I had to do 5-10 times a day. I tried all the solutions suggested here - Disk Utility, zapping PRAM / SMC - new user account - even checked for rootkits & played with little snitch until I read an article (can't find it now!) which suggested the cure was a complete clean of the internals, dust, fluff etc. Seemed unlikely since it was only six months old.

Tried it - Useful to consult the pdf service manual for your model - google for it, before opening the case - its always worth being slow, thoughtful and informed when you open a machine's internals! Anyway having opened it I discovered some dust, the odd bit of fluff (it is sat on a carpet) and spent lots of time puffing and blowing it away (good lungs useful but a photo puffer or small vacuum probably better). Took out the video cards and puffed them to then reseated them. Reassembled carefully and......

... now perfect - no problems at all after 24 hours and no lock-ups - feel as though I've been reborn. Not sure if this applies just to Mac Pros or whether a clean / puff of iMacs / Macbooks may help - I'd be cautious and read the service manual. Mac Pros are meant to be opened, other machines more of a challenge but may be worth some external puffing, shaking, dusting! All the best

I've been dealing with this beachballing ever since the SL update. I didn't do an upgrade, I did a clean install. So I went through this entire thread this morning and implemented a bunch of things - removed istat menus, removed click to flash, removed vmware from contextual menu, disabled last access time in paragon's ntfs, disabled sms, disabled journaling, and set spotlight privacy to ignore boot camp.

And for the first time i've had no beachballs with all my normal work and apps open and running. Granted, it's only been three or so hours, but I have NEVER gone more than 5 minutes after a reboot without getting hit by the non stop beachballs...

I'll slowly start undoing a few of these to see what happens, since I like the istat menus and click to flash, so I'll reinstall istat after a few days, then go a few more days, see what happens, then throw click to flash back in there, let it go a few days, and see what happens. Nothing else that I changed causes me any loss of functionality so those I don't need to worry about undoing.

Thank you to everyone who contributed parts to this thread... I got so tired of seeing "reset pram" and "reset permissions" as the fixes everywhere else since they made no difference whatsoever for me.

Just a note to let you know that it has now been 4 days of pretty strenuous use, and I have not had a single beachballing incident since I removed the DivX plugin.

It looks like this plugin infrastructure is used all over the place. Almost anything which displays content depends upon it. Even Finder seems to use it (probably for thumbnails, quicklook and cover flow view). The end result is that a misbehaving plugin can make your machine lock up and run slower than molasses flowing downhill at the north pole.

Again - if you are still seeing problems:

1) Disable all of your /Library/Internet Plug-Ins and ~/Library/Internet Plug-Ins by moving them to a different directory.
2) Reboot, and verify that your problem has gone away
3) If so, start adding back plugins one at a time, preferably rebooting after each, or at least logging out and back in again.
4) Note which plugin was last added before the problem starts to occur again.
5) Remove that plugin. Hunt down it's creator and flog them.
6) Repeat 3-5 until you have either re-installed or permanently disabled all of the plugins which you disabled.

Note: You may wish to re-download and install the latest versions of the plugins you disabled from scratch, rather than just moving the disabled plugin back into place. This is ensures that none of your problems were due to a corrupt installation, old version, etc. -- but it could potentially introduce new issues. I suggest doing this only if you have already determined that a particular plugin is causing a problem.

Spidey!!!

(edit - fixed a few typos)

Hi guys. This one for the record.

I also have 30 to 60 seconds freezes on my iMac 21.5" with osx 10.6.2. Two days ago the delay between two freezes was about 10 seconds: click twice, wait 60 secs, click twice, ... you get the picture.

In the system.log I also had the legendary INSERT-HANG-DETECTED warnings.

Booting op using the install disk I launched the disk utility. There I immediately got the warning that my S.M.A.R.T. status indicated a failing disk (yes! A cause!). I tried the repair action anyways and after booting osx the system worked as long as I didn't use "corrupted disk areas": Mail, Firefox with my default profile, safari, chrome caused beach balls. Staying away from those apps or using a new Firefox profile seemed to work rather fine.

I found another indication of my broken disk in /var/log/kernel.log. Every time my system freezes this line is logged:

Dec 30 20:53:02 imac kernel[0]: disk0s2: I/O error.

Tracing back the log, it seems these I/O errors started at December 15. I bought my mac end of October.

Tomorrow I bring it to the local store: 3 to 5 work days to swap the disk ,yay.

Hi Guys,

I am not sure if anyone else has mentioned this.

I suspected the the constant freeze up with my macbook was related to VMware fusion. I just removed the VMware launcher from my top menu bar on the desktop and all is fixed. In preferences I just selected to never have it there and straight away I have no more problems.

It annoys me that neither VMWare or Apple have provided a solution that is so widespread.

I am not sure if this will help all of you but it helped me. I am not very happy with fusion at all!

Cheers