App Store hanging with beachball

I repaired permissions and restarted = problem solved. Maybe it's enough to restart, don't know

Nice catch! How did you figure this out?

I'm glad somebody figured it out - an Apple "Genius" thought my hard drive was going out and recommended replacement - yikes!

odysseus wrote:
Nice catch! How did you figure this out?

I observed the process activities and watched out for irregularities. While the App Store is unresponsive the ocspd (OCSP daemon) shows some heightened activity. I remembered that i had just recently activated the OCSP check and so on...

However, i´m not very happy with the situation. I hope Apple gets this certificate problem fixed asap. Such critical security issues must be dealt with much faster.

So you have to chose between security and the Mac App Store.

Pfff, Apple when will you take security serious?

btw: All other browser vendors updated their browsers already.

Thanks for the fix with the certificates settings. I did it too because of the Comodo issue.

I can't believe Apple did not update Mac OS X/Safari yet. I'm pretty concerned with the Max security lately.
Windows, Firefox, Chrome - are already updated, days ago.

I tried the following (in the order written):
• unmounting my Bootcamp partition
• repairing permissions
• disabling CRL

The Mac App Store still hangs when accessing the "Updates" tab. Even letting it run for >1 hour does not get me beyond endless beachball spinning.

Any other ideas?

that worked what you told me but I am afraid of the security hole there is with disabling that OCSP

Thank you so much for posting this fix! I had updated my new MacBook Pro to 10.6.7 and also turned on the OCSP and CRL due to the Comodo hacking. The App Store was basically unusable on it due to the ever-present beachball.

Turning off the CRL again fixed the App Store.

I hope this issue gets a better fix in the long-run as it seems the CRL is now necessary for security in light of the new certificate hacking schemes.

Oh damnit. That solved it for me too. Thanks a lot, although this is not a solution that I am happy with.

I had the same issue, setting the "Certificate Revocation List (CRL)" to "Off" has fixed the issue. I'd set it to "Best Attempt" a few days ago when I read an article explaining the higher security it provides. There are two things that should be done given that this bug exists and so I'm wondering if anyone has done them yet:
1. Comment on whatever article that was we all read that made us change this preference to warn future readers of the bug, I honestly don't remember where that article was posted myself
2. Submit a bug report to Apple using bugreport.apple.com, only registered developers (which includes myself) can do this. I can submit a bug report directly to Apple right now, but would like to know if anyone else has yet.

I just noticed this behavior yesterday. One of the things I most appreciate about these forums is that they're filled with people who have the great qualities of being very intelligent, nice, and eager to help. I see them here in this thread. Thanks for the work you've already done investigating this issue. I'll see what the suggested fixes do for me.

For what it's worth, I'm also uncomfortable with the security downgrade that results if the corresponding suggested fix does improve performance of the Mac App Store on one's machine.
(Just to be clear: I have no problem with the suggested fix, +per se+ —thanks, in fact, and good work tracking that down—but rather that Apple (I think indirectly, to be fair) created this problem where some have to choose between better security on the one hand, and a usable MAS on the other.)

My meager contribution is aimed at anyone reading this thread that would place themselves more toward the "novice" end of the spectrum: if you have apps that become unresponsive, that beachball often, etc., you can do some simple detective work like I did.

First, in your Utilities folder, open up Activity Monitor and Console. To begin with, I'll usually click on the CPU column in Activity Monitor to sort descending, which will show the apps with the most CPU usage at the top.

In Console, I'll leave "All Messages" selected in the left-most Log List column, at least to begin with. If you don't see the vertical list of logs, click the "Show Log List" button in the toolbar.

Then I'll launch the app: MAS, in this case, but then immediately go to the dock and click on Console and Activity Monitor to watch what was going on.

Right away I saw the error messages in Console. I thought that "CGBitmapContextGetBitsPerComponent" would probably be a string that was specific to this problem, so I searched for that string, plus "Mac App Store", which brought me here: a thread with some possible fixes to try. I'm not a programmer, and I don't even know what "CGBitmapContextGetBitsPerComponent" is, but it's great that I could use it to locate some possible solutions.

I hope that helps someone. My apologies for the length.

[Keep calm and carry on.|http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7869458.stm]

There is a German article saying that Safari 5.0.4 is still vulnerable

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heise.de%2Fsecurity%2Fm eldung%2FSafari-Anwender-durch-kompromittierte-Zertifikate-gefaehrdet-1215718.ht ml&sl=de&tl=en&hl=&ie=UTF-8

but one of the comments states that this is not right:

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heise.de%2Fsecurity%2Fn ews%2Fforen%2FS-Mit-Verlaub-Herr-Beier%2Fforum-196765%2Fmsg-20032193%2Fread%2F&s l=de&tl=en&hl=&ie=UTF-8

Turning off CRL worked. Since I had contacted Apple Support and had a case number, I called them to follow up and they told me that turning off both certificates should not be a security problem. Their default in the support group is to have both turned off. Thought you would like to know.

The security bug is fixed with the latest Mac OS X update (Security Update 2011-002)

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4608

Message was edited by: The_Patcher