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Getting a lot of beach balls Application not responding

I have a fairly complex system with 4 internal 1tb drives, 1 external 1tb drive, 1 external 1.5tb drive and an external 2tb drive used by time machine. The system drive contains 2 partitions. The partition containing the OS is 322gb with 72gb free. I havedual cinema displays and literally 100s of applications.

My system has gotten very "sluggish" with a lot of freeze ups, apps not responding and other beach balls. I've been through a couple of OS upgrades currently at latest release of snow leopard.

Do I need to format my disk and do a clean install? If I do, can I just clone the System drive and then copy apps back? Main applications are Photoshop CS5, Lightroom 3 Microsoft Office, Real Studio, Filemaker 11, and all the associated plug-ins and support apps that go along. Reinstalling them would be a nightmare.

I run VirusBarrier X6 with scans each night.

any help is appreciated in advance.

bill

Mac Pro Quad-Core Intel Xeon, Mac OS X (10.6.6), 3.2 GHz 8GB RAM

Posted on Apr 12, 2011 8:40 AM

21 replies

kisuke3

Level 3

914 points

Apr 14, 2011 10:00 AM in response to Bill Plunkett

have u tried my suggestions?

Also launch console app which can be found in /Applications/Utilities. Perform a clear display then replicate the issue, console will then be populated with logs. Post it here

Message was edited by: kisuke3

Apr 14, 2011 10:04 AM in response to Bill Plunkett

Well the good performance was short lived. It started beachballing again after about twenty minutes (midway through performing a TimeMachine backup I stupidly initiated). I've got another OS on one of my drives so I booted from it and there were no problems. I'm thinking it's a failing drive (my main bootable drive is on a 1TB partition, raid striped across two 500 GB disks). I've taken out the drive I use for a Bootcamp Windows partition, replaced it with a new 1.5TB drive and am restoring my original disk image to it (using Disk Utility from the booted installation CD). This it taking forever as well, looks like I might be here a couple of days...
Hope you're having better luck, Bill.

T5GP5Ox32

Level 3

590 points

Apr 14, 2011 8:22 PM in response to Louiecypher

Got a couple other suggestions for you based on the Activity Monitor showings.

First off the information you got last time was great so let's keep that as a baseline and get a couple others. Use the format below (these are your previous numbers).

Free 118 MB
Used 7.88 GB
CPU % NA

Then also give the Free/Used with the following setups and collect the top 5 listed under the "Real Mem" category. Sort it by ascending and make sure you're set to All Processes and not just My Processes.
A: A clean boot. Shut the Mac down completely, wait a minute and turn it on. Without opening anything besides your autostarts grab the same info.

B: Log out of the account via the Apple & Logout then login and hold down the Shift key after doing so. Related article

C: Create a test account via System Preferences -> Accounts and do the same. Log into it and collect the info.

D: Start into Safe Mode by holding down the Shift key when you first turn the computer on. Go ahead and only collect the info from your main account after logging in.

To me it looks like you're just running out of RAM. The cause of it though is yet to be determined. These tests shouldn't take more than 20 mins and can help isolate it to a cause, hopefully.

Apr 14, 2011 9:41 PM in response to Louiecypher

+“You've got the same MacPro as me, Bill. I'm getting exactly the same as you. I'm wondering if it started with 10.6.7. "+

Hi Louiecypher, I can confirm you that some applications on my Mac tends to run slow since the update to 10.6.7. I have some blu-ray ripping programs I bought from Pavtube. Previously on 10.6.6 they ran flawlessly with ripping a blu-ray movie within 1.5 hrs, but since the update to 10.6.7 the ripping time doubles.
I also noticed my other applications like PS, Adobe tend to response slow too.
Could it be a bug in 10.6.7?

Apr 20, 2011 1:07 PM in response to CaptainCook

Well I've just had a helluva week sorting this out. I reckon my problem was, indeed a failing disk. I had 10.6.7 installed on a Raid striped volume across two 500GB HDs. I ordered my new 1.5TB disk and installed 10.6.7, although by the time I got it on there it was the recent update. Everything seems ok now (for the last four days, anyway). I'm still not convinced 10.6.7 hadn't something to do with it though. Hope you get yours sorted CaptainCook, I'm afraid my experience won't be of much help!

Apr 20, 2011 5:19 PM in response to Louiecypher

Thank you Louiecypher for sharing! I appreciate. Lucky you got the problem settled.

Really hope I could also settle the problem by replacing the HDD. I don't mind paying extra for that if it works.

But, alas, this does not seem to be the case for me. I've reluctantly downgraded one of my two computers the iMac to 10.6.6. Now everyting works flawlessly as before including my Pavtube applications.

I think my iMac will stick to 10.6.6 till I could find good reasons to upgrade again.

Getting a lot of beach balls Application not responding