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

Oh yours, dlethe, I just tried, of course, that's all fine and standard procedure It's too early to tell if it worked but it's still doing ok with an uptime of 20 minutes...

What I meant to say is: be careful doing invasive things like downgrading firmware unless you have confidence in the source of the firmware and the instructions.

I can confirm the the Option-Command-P-R reset did NOT solve the intermittent freezing of my machine.

I am going to stop using Safari - I have a suspicion it might have something to do with it? Halfway though typing this last ^&^#^&@! sentence it froze again!!

Running it in 32bit mode did not help - only got Citrix working again.

well, there is then pretty compelling evidence that there are multiple bugs relating to random freezing. Perhaps you and others have more than one problem, and this fix addresses only one of them.

Here is something else to try. My MBP was unusable today. Everything slowed to a crawl and appeared to freeze. Rebooting usually helped out for a while, but the slow/freezing would return almost immediately today.

I noticed that spotlight was reindexing my hard drive after reboots, so I disabled spotlight indexing for the hard drive and I appear to be back on full throttle now.

Please try this and report if it helps:

1. Open System Preferences
2. Click Spotlight
3. Click the Privacy tab
4. Drag your hard drive from the desktop to the list shown in the Privacy tab
5. Close System Preferences

Good luck. Here's hoping for 10.6.2


Eric

On a hunch (I've seen similar behavior on Linux) I booted into the 64-bit kernel by holding down 6 and 4 during boot (confirmed with 'uname -a' in Terminal) and the problem has completely gone away. I had a virtualbox VM burning CPU cycles and churning away at disk I/O, iTunes importing a 1700 song library, and Firefox open with a whole bunch of tabs, including HD youtube videos. Everything was a bit sluggish, but there were no long stalls, and the video didn't miss a frame once it finally loaded. Since I only have 2 GB of RAM, it's not a memory utilization problem, but probably some sort of address space fragmentation problem, similar to the kind often seen on 32-bit Linux machines.

The fact that it doesn't happen in 32-bit Leopard indicates that there's still a regression to be fixed, but this may be a workaround for some people.

Reading through the thread, I think we're seeing at least 3 different bugs. Some people are having disk permission problems, some people are having hard disk firmware/driver problems, and some people are having kernel VM problems. If repairing permissions hasn't worked for you, this is definitely something to try before going to the trouble of reverting your firmware, because it's a lot simpler and easier to undo, simply by reboot, though there is a tool somewhere that makes the 64-bit kernel the default.

There will not be an official response. The caveat to the official update was that SATA II drives are officially unsupported. It appears Apple have put an update out that they have self-indemnified themselves against.

Good luck with your approach.

Meanwhile. 24 Hours no lock-ups. Enjoy your hair.

Yet another voice. I'm pretty angry about this. I sold a perfectly good MB on ebay to 'upgrade' to a brand new MBP... mostly for the backlit keys. It randomly freezes, I count the seconds, usually around 25 seconds to recover. I do web dev 75 hours a week or so, and this problem is really messing up my world, especially since I sold my perfectly good MB on ebay, at a huge loss. The geniuses say I must be overloading my machine.... yet my old Macbook ran the exact set up for 2 years, no problems.

Seriously, Apple, fix this or suffer the consequences. I've gone from full-on Apple evangelism to... not willing to go to the plate at all. As Carl.Walker said, when in a meeting with Windows heads, this happening sets Apple back YEARS. I'm seriously considering just trashing OSX on the thing and running Linux, everything I do is command line anyway.

I'm so disappointed and embarrassed.

--disgusted in NC

From my experience so far, the sysmptoms seems to correlate with the amount of swap space the system has allocated.
I'm using iStat pro as dashboard widget. To see swap related data, go into options/sections/memory and select advanced.

Lockups do not happen on my machine at all as long as Swap is down to zero. As swap file usage increases, lockups seem to occur more frequently. A lockup would typically last for a duration of 30s, at which the machine is completely frozen except for the mouse pointer, and is followed by a brief period of high disk activity and an increase of the "Page Ins" counter, which seems to point to a memory management related cause. The workaround seems to be: reboot often.

Another cause of lockups, although only the brief ones, not the 30s ones, seems to be hardware monitoring programs. While using a piece of software called Temperature Monitor, the system would frequently freeze briefly. After disabling the software and the HDD temperature monitoring in iStat pro, those brief freezes were practically gone.

Mojo66, I Agee with your comment about swap space. One of the problems I have noticed since installing snow leopard is that my disk would go from 50 gb free to co
pletely full overnight. Rebooting would clear the swap space and I would have 50 gb free again.

I have applied csnook's suggestion of booting into 64bit mode, and after a good few hours I have not had a freeze!!

I will monitor to confirm that the situation does not deteriorate - usage time since last boot seems to be a variable with this problem? I will then boot into 32bit mode again to test if I get the freezes again, and report back.

btw, to permanently boot into 64bit mode (avoids holding down "6" and "4" while booting up, and to check if you are in 64bit mode:

http://macperformanceguide.com/SnowLeopard-64bit.html

hello, im having the same problem with hanging since i upgraded to snow leopard, it has never had a lock up in the past, but now im starting to hate my mac, my partners vista laptop boots in half the time and can get on the net nearly 50 seconds faster than i can, this isnt acceptable and i cant believe the hype about snow leopard being better, quicker and easier to use, can i go back to the previous version without wiping everything on my hard drive?

Ive looked at my system logs and it just seems like there are constant errors, debugger calls, failures to start, errors with firefox, services failing to start, does anyone now what the following means?

Sep 19 19:46:22 localhost com.apple.launchd[1]: * launchd[1] has started up. *
Sep 19 19:46:38 localhost bootlog[38]: BOOT_TIME: 1253385982 0
Sep 19 19:46:40 localhost mDNSResponder[27]: mDNSResponder mDNSResponder-212.1 (Jul 24 2009 22:34:12) starting
Sep 19 19:46:44 localhost com.apple.usbmuxd[20]: usbmuxd-176 built for iTunesNine on Jul 20 2009 at 13:06:53, running 32 bit
Sep 19 19:46:47 localhost configd[13]: bootpsessiontransmit: bpf_write(en1) failed: Network is down (50)
Sep 19 19:46:47 localhost configd[13]: DHCP en1: INIT-REBOOT transmit failed
Sep 19 19:46:47 michael-howleys-macbook configd[13]: setting hostname to "michael-howleys-macbook.local"
Sep 19 19:46:47 michael-howleys-macbook configd[13]: network configuration changed.
Sep 19 19:46:47 michael-howleys-macbook blued[39]: Apple Bluetooth daemon started
Sep 19 19:46:48 michael-howleys-macbook /System/Library/CoreServices/loginwindow.app/Contents/MacOS/loginwindow[28]: Login Window Application Started
Sep 19 19:46:48 michael-howleys-macbook com.apple.SystemStarter[21]: Starting HP Trap Monitor
Sep 19 19:46:48 michael-howleys-macbook com.apple.SystemStarter[21]: /Library/StartupItems/HP Trap Monitor/HP Trap Monitor: line 15: /Library/Printers/hp/hpio/HPIO Trap Monitor.app/Contents/MacOS/HPIO Trap Monitor: No such file or directory
Sep 19 19:46:50 michael-howleys-macbook configd[13]: bootpsessiontransmit: bpf_write(en2) failed: Operation not permitted (1)
Sep 19 19:46:50 michael-howleys-macbook configd[13]: DHCP en2: INIT transmit failed
Sep 19 19:46:51 michael-howleys-macbook configd[13]: network configuration changed.
Sep 19 19:46:52 michael-howleys-macbook loginwindow[28]: Login Window Started Security Agent
Sep 19 19:46:52 michael-howleys-macbook WindowServer[57]: kCGErrorFailure: Set a breakpoint @ CGErrorBreakpoint() to catch errors as they are logged.
Sep 19 19:46:52 michael-howleys-macbook com.apple.WindowServer[57]: Sat Sep 19 19:46:52 michael-howleys-macbook.local WindowServer[57] <Error>: kCGErrorFailure: Set a breakpoint @ CGErrorBreakpoint() to catch errors as they are logged.
Sep 19 19:47:01 michael-howleys-macbook SecurityAgent[85]: NSSecureTextFieldCell detected a field editor ((null)) that is not a NSTextView subclass designed to work with the cell. Ignoring...
Sep 19 19:47:02 michael-howleys-macbook hdiejectd[94]: running
Sep 19 19:47:04 michael-howleys-macbook loginwindow[28]: Login Window - Returned from Security Agent
Sep 19 19:47:04 michael-howleys-macbook loginwindow[28]: USER_PROCESS: 28 console
Sep 19 19:47:04 michael-howleys-macbook com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[100] (com.apple.ReportCrash): Falling back to default Mach exception handler. Could not find: com.apple.ReportCrash.Self
Sep 19 19:47:05 michael-howleys-macbook com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[100] (com.apple.Kerberos.renew.plist[122]): Exited with exit code: 1
Sep 19 19:47:06 michael-howleys-macbook HP Scheduler[130]: Incompatible applications: app=com.hp.HPScheduler, targetApp=com.apple.Safari
Sep 19 19:47:06 michael-howleys-macbook GoogleSoftwareUpdateAgent[125]: Incompatible applications: app=com.google.Keystone.Agent, targetApp=com.apple.Safari
Sep 19 19:47:07 michael-howleys-macbook Air Mouse Server[133]: 192.168.1.67
Sep 19 19:47:07 michael-howleys-macbook Air Mouse Server[133]: Incompatible applications: app=com.yourcompany.AirMouseServer, targetApp=com.apple.Safari
Sep 19 19:47:07 michael-howleys-macbook com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[100] (com.apple.CSConfigDotMacCert-@me.com-SharedServices[126]): Exited with exit code: 1
Sep 19 19:47:10 michael-howleys-macbook firefox-bin[136]: Incompatible applications: app=org.mozilla.firefox, targetApp=com.apple.Safari
Sep 19 19:47:45 michael-howleys-macbook [0x0-0xe00e].org.mozilla.firefox[136]: Debugger() was called!
Sep 19 19:48:35 michael-howleys-macbook firefox-bin[152]: Incompatible applications: app=org.mozilla.firefox, targetApp=com.apple.Safari

this was just from my system log and in the space of a minute or so that happened. what should i do? Any help would be much appreciated.

Ok there are lots of item to check for leftovers that could be causing problems.

Run SIMBL uninstaller included in the 0.9.6b build.

Then Check these locations for stuff not properly removed and that only 64bit SL compatible versions of the software found in these locations are installed:


/Library/Application Support/SIMBL (This Needs to Be removed)
~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL (This Needs to be Removed from your home directory)
/Library/Bundles/
/Library/Contextual Menu Items/
/Library/InputManagers/
/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/
/Library/LaunchAgents/ (Remove SIMBL if its there)
/Library/LaunchDaemons/
/Library/PreferencePanes/
/Library/QuickLook/
/Library/ScriptingAdditions
/Library/StartupItems/
/Library/

To reinstall SIMBL run the installer for .0.9.6b only. and check that the permissions on the /Library/LaunchAgents/ folder are "755" or "drwxr-xr-x"

Have you tried repairing permissions? I had a few issues when I upgraded to Snow Leopard, a permissions repair seemed to iron them out nicely.

hello, ive done disk utility from inside leopard and through the installation disk it comes up with two errors that it says it cant repair, but ive checked the web about that as i thought that it might be causing the hangs but apparantly its quite normal, the thing is though, i never had those two unrepairable items before snow leopard.

whats the sibl or simble thingy i cant remember what it was called now as your post has gone off the page, is it on the snow leopard disk?

Repair permissions solved everything!!! I was using firefox for 2 weeks because I was annoyed with the safari freezing 20 times a day. Thanks!!!!