Frequent Spinning Beachball Of Death (SBBOD) with no pattern

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Level 1

12 points

Frequent Spinning Beachball Of Death (SBBOD) with no pattern

I'm running High Sierra on a mid 2011 iMac 3,4 GHz i7 with maxed RAM (32GB) and an SSD as the startup disk. It's a relatively new installation of the OS.

I'm getting frequent SBBOD at random and inconsistent intervals in many if not all applications - everything from very basic tasks such as previewing an image, copying a file in finder, opening a new tab in a new Safari window, searching in Safari, to launching and using heavier applications.

At no time is the memory showing maxed (using iStat menus) and no one application appears to be the culprit (monitoring with Activity monitor permanently open).

I've run Onyx and full maintenance scripts multiple times. No help.

Reset PRAM & SMC several times. No help.

Console logs are filled with Errors and Faults but this is apparently normal. So trying to trawl through those to identify a common factor seems futile.

Any suggestions as to what I can do to try and pin down the issue - hardware or software...??

iMac 27″, macOS 10.13

Posted on Sep 9, 2021 10:20 AM

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Answer 1

BobHarris

Level 9

57,503 points

Sep 9, 2021 12:27 PM in response to a.goodwin

Start with EtreCheck

https://etrecheck.com/

You can use the Free version to see what 3rd party kernel extensions you have, it you have anti-virus packages installed. If you post the EtreCheck output, someone here may be able to help analyze it.

Post EtreCheck output in an Additional Text box

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Answer 2

BobHarris

Level 9

57,503 points

Sep 9, 2021 12:04 PM in response to a.goodwin

The spinning beach ball indicates that the app is not responding to events, such as the cursor passing over its window, or clicking on the app's window or an app button.

The cursor driver looks at the app's event queue to see if the app it is hovering over has old events that have not been removed from the queue in a timely manor. When the cursor driver sees this, it switches the cursor to the spinning beach ball.

This can happen because the app has entered some single threaded code and is blocked, such as it has made a I/O request that is stalled for an extended period of time. On older rotating disks, this sometimes happened when the disk was failing and performing too many read retries making I/O take too long. Or a network request where the remote server is not responding in a timely manor can also cause this.

Another possibility is that some other software is hogging the CPU and preventing the app from getting CPU time so it can process its event queue. I've seen this with 3rd party kernel extensions that can refuse to give up the CPU.

I've also seen anti-virus packages that intercept I/O operations to scan the buffers for viruses, and get so bogged down they they become a bottleneck for all I/O on the system.

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Answer 3

a.goodwin Author

Level 1

12 points

Sep 9, 2021 12:12 PM in response to BobHarris

Ok, all interesting input Bob, so thanks for that. But it doesn't really help me try to pinpoint the root cause(s).

What can I do as practical steps?

Is there any way of using the Console logging to analyse the cause? If so, what do I look for?

Are there any advanced diagnostic tools I can use to do a deeper analysis?

How can I track the apparently random instances of CPU hogging?

Is a "sledgehammer" fix the simplest approach? i.e. new partition & new install of the OS?

If the symptoms persist on a new install with no other applications, is that indicating hardware issues? If so, what? Bad RAM? Is the SSD failing?

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Frequent Spinning Beachball Of Death (SBBOD) with no pattern

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