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

I've performed the firmware downgrade (instructions on page 5) and I have been beachball free for 24 hours. I didn't have a USB drive around so actually just used an SD card. I can now say that my new computer is now actually useable.

Hey guys, I had this problem for the whole of last month and managed to fix it by booting into 64bit mode. So far I've had two beachball free days! Even went ahead and set up 64 bit as my native boot kernel.

Just throwing this out in case someone doesn't feel like downgrading firmwares. Try it out, just boot holding 6 & 4. It works!

robrecord,

What you are experiencing is an NVDA(Open GL) channel exception and timeout. It is a known problem and NVIDIA is working on a new driver for the 7300GT.

Path Finder is what clued me into this. See this thread: http://forum.cocoatech.com/showthread.php?t=5393

Hope this helps.

i dont feel so confident in downgrading the firmware, ive uninstalled alot of stuff off my macbook to see if it would help but it hasnt.

ive also tried the booting into 64 bit mode but my macbook just wont do it, even though its more than capable, i have seen somewhere that macbooks cant be booted into 64 bit mode?

Should i start again, backup my data, do a fresh install of leopard whilst wiping everything on it, then install snow leopard?

As promised, I have feedback on the solution of booting into 64bit mode. I have just had my second freeze after being in said mode! The freezes seem to be shorter in length 10-15 sec?

This is really baffling me - it seems we are at the point where Apple has to step in and put us all out of our misery. I don't want to downgrade my firmware and don't want to go through the hassle of doing a clean re-install, this is why I switched to Mac 2 year ago - with windows I had to do this every 6-12 months. (as per the previous poster's question, do you folks think it would do any good?)

I have noticed that it does take some time after a reboot for the freezes to start, 3h in my last test attempt. Could a previous post be true - that the freezes start when the memory swop file indication in not at 0% ?

I believe a few of the supposedly successful fixes are in fact due to the reboot they involve. It seems to take a while for the system to get back in "hang mode". I currently see a lot less hangs but they're not gone. One reason is that I rebooted to reset the parameter ram and another, trivial one is that I don't tax the system as much over the week-end. (No heavy use of virtual machines and oracle databases, both of which will result in memory activity and, eventually, some paging. Maybe there's some truth to the swap file observation.)

I felt compelled to write again.

I have been freeze free since completing the firmware downgrade I posted on page five. My MacBook Pro has become the very thing I bought it for. I have gone from feeling melancholic, angry and anxious each time I used it to not being able to leave it alone. I can now watch a movie while working on two windows virtual machines, (one for development and one for test), I can even take a Skype call whilst all that's going on with barely a beat missed; this thing is great and it all looks shiny.

I have noticed a reticence from other posters to downgrade the firmware and, for the sake of clarity, I'd like to say some words around that.

When I went to the Apple store they diagnosed my problem as being a conflict between the motion sensor on the hard disk and the motion sensor built into the machine. For this they would need to order a new hard drive and then apply a fix to that drive. All of this was nonsense. I disabled the onboard SMS, it kept locking up, so, no prize Apple Genius guy. This indicates there is no formal approach to this issue from the stores, they were actually a bit choppy with me when i went in, I guess they don't like it when you speak real words back to them. Who knows. The upshot, Apple were not going to be any use if I wanted to make computer work.

I tried the Parameter RAM fix. Lots of different connotations. Nada. Big fat fail.

I tried re-installing Snow Leopard, I tried all manner of repair permissions contortions after re-installation. Zero. Nothing. Freezeville, Tennessee.

I then tried the firmware regress as I had read this was another approach Apple were taking in store. I tried it because;

It was on an Apple forum. My experience of Apple users is much more encouraging as they appear to more aligned to community and helpfulness.

The fix had been tested and acknowledged as working by several individuals across different forums. Some had used the "unofficial" online fix and others had been to Apple for the same thing with Apple stamped on it's shank.

Now. I braved the fix and I'm telling you. It works. My machine is working in a way I could only have dreamed of beforehand, I mean, the freezes were a thing of true misery for an IT Guy. Now they have gone, it's a beautiful thing.

I'm saying all this because I know the pain you guys are feeling and it's a bit frustrating to know that the firmware regress is a worker and you guy are choosing to wait for Apple while in the meantime suffering with a bona fide agony of what, in IT term, is of blade-turningly bad proportions.

To summarise. The freezing issues you guys are having are due, in the overwhelming majority, to a problem with your firmware. The fix is to regress it back to it's previous iteration as prescribed on page five. If you elect not to do this you then need to accept your fate until Apple ring up with a fix, and good luck with that. All else is futile and will only increase the pain on fail.

Cheers,

C.

Hi Carl,

thanks for your help so far.

It's true. Since downgrade of the EFI firmware to 1.6 the main freezes and beachball times are gone. But I'm continuing observing errors in the logs like this:

Sep 20 16:09:22 iah Safari[2363]: INSERT-HANG-DETECTED: Tx time:18.872587, # of Inserts: 113, # of bytes written: 918298, Did shrink: NO
Sep 20 16:13:24 iah Mail[2368]: INSERT-HANG-DETECTED: Tx time:4.531898, # of Inserts: 0, # of bytes written: 0, Did shrink: NO

I didn't expected this errors before Snow Leopard. This error comes with different applications but mainly Safari and Mail.

I still don't know how to fix this. I hope Apple will with 10.6.2.

Cheers,

Jan.

My macbook pro is the first generation MBP, and it has the same random freezing problem after it was upgraded to SL 10.6 from Leopard.

I was so happy to see that the downgrading EFI to 1.6 solved this problem for some of you across the forums. However, I am so frustrated when I discovered that my EFI version is 1.2 which is already the latest available firmware for my MBP.

I guess I have to suffer such 30-seconds freeze until Apple releases an official update to address this issue (please, Apple!)

Unforutnately Carl's solution doesn't work for me - the firmware cannot install itself on my MBP. I think this is because mine is a Late 2008 MBP which already has the 1.6 firmware on it. We should be aware that we all have different "versions' of the Unibody MBP so what works for one may not work for the other.

The other suggested solutions (permissions, defrag, fresh re-install, 64-bit mode, disable sensor) didn't work for me either. The therory of reboots and swap files has some merit, will keep that in mind.

In my case, swapping out the 7200rpm 500GB HDD with a 5400rpm 500GB HDD solved the issue. I've tested both HDDs, no SMART errors or anything. I even cloned the working system back to the 7200 and put that in - and got my hangs back. I know this doesn't work for others, so maybe we should post what version of the hardware we're using.

Like a number of other posters, the hangs I get are system freezes but I am able to move the mouse and - sometimes - windows; however everything else is unresponsive. I don't get the INSERT-HANG statements in the error logs, and I don't use Safari much.

I'm going to make it work hard this week and see if the problem reoccurs. If it does, its back to Leopard for me. Or, even worse, XP on the bootcamp partition.

I have a MBP and have been experiencing the same beach ball random freezes. Also have a 2006 iMac also recently upgraded to 10.6.1 and no problems with it. I have just finished running the repair permissions and no freezes as yet. HDD is Hitachi 500GB 5400 RPM, so I may not need the firmware downgrade posted earlier (I hope). I am both disappointed and a little disgruntled. Will report back as to success/failure. If failure, next step is to boot into 64 bit mode.

Macbooks (some? all?) don't have 64-bit firmware, which the Mac OS kernel requires to boot into 64-bit mode. The 32-bit kernel will still run 64-bit apps, but if you're having an address space fragmentation problem in the kernel, you're SOL.

Based on the comments in this thread, I think there are several different bugs at work here, so you may want to try the other suggestions.

Well, that did not take long - still at the beach. Have booted in 64- bit mode. Will see how that works.

I agree with sas71. The 30 sec freezes on my MBP disappeared after a simple reboot. The machine went into standby a couple of times since then and has been under some load (swap currently at 2GB), no firwmare downgrades, messing with SMS or 64 bit kernels.

My new theory looks like this: maybe the swap file was created on a bad sector of the HDD. Any ideas how I can prove this? I don't even know where the swap file is located on OS X (I'm a Linux guy).

I'm with the reboot theory now.

I had previously posted that my problem was solved by removing the plugins from Webkit. This process also involved a reboot and did indeed remove my beachball problem.

I've since re-installed the same plugins, and am going on 2 days now without a freeze, pointing to the reboot, not to the removal of plugins, as the part of the process that actually fixed things.