Getting a lot of beach balls Application not responding

Question

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

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Answer 1

T5GP5Ox32

Level 3

590 points

Apr 12, 2011 8:47 AM in response to Bill Plunkett

I would suggest checking Activity Monitor. Go to your Applications folder and then into Utilities.

Essentially check how much System Memory (RAM) is available and how much you have installed.
You should also check the CPU and what the Idle % is.

Maybe try creating a new user (Apple menu -> Accounts) and see if the issue happens there. May just be too many applications or settings that is causing the issue.

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Answer 2

kisuke3

Level 3

914 points

Apr 12, 2011 8:50 AM in response to Bill Plunkett

In addition to what has been suggested above. Try downloading iStat, a 3rd party application which also monitors the CPU usage in a much friendly way.

there's a lot of way to monitor the CPU usage: activity monitor, terminal and 3rd party

I agree, you must've have been running out RAM for running multiple heavy apps.

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Answer 3

Apr 12, 2011 10:05 AM in response to Bill Plunkett

Ok, I have installed the iStatMenu app and have been checking the activity monitor.

With Lightroom and PS 5, plus mail, safari, address book, and calendar loaded, I'm showing system memory as
free 118 mb
wired 532 mb
active 3.45 gb
inactive 3.92 gb
used 7.88 gb
vm size 256
8gb total memory.

of course everything is okay with these numbers. I will monitor for problems,

thanks for help
bill

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Answer 4

TildeBee

Level 7

31,917 points

Apr 12, 2011 12:33 PM in response to Bill Plunkett

Hi Bill !

+I run VirusBarrier X6 with scans each night.+

Well, that'll slow your Mac down quicker than anything else I can think of.
Why are you doing that???

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Answer 5

Apr 12, 2011 1:19 PM in response to TildeBee

That would certainly slow everything down DURING the scan. But it runs at night, when the machine is other wise idle.

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Answer 6

kisuke3

Level 3

914 points

Apr 12, 2011 4:40 PM in response to Bill Plunkett

Just a suggestion maybe its time for you to do maintenance on your machine not necessarily a reformat

Download onyx and run caches removal,maintenance scripts etc

Run safe mode as well. Do check if you have anything in loginitems under accounts preferences that may be running automatically in the backgroudnd that you dont need, remove it. Do a repair permissions repair via disk utility.

My solution may not fully resolve your issue but it should significantly improve the performance

Message was edited by: kisuke3

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Answer 7

Apr 12, 2011 7:23 PM in response to Bill Plunkett

Personally I don't trust any of the AV software. I have seen supposedly deactivate one bring Macs to their knees. IMHO the only safe AV software is one that has never been installed.

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Allan

___________________

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Answer 8

TildeBee

Level 7

31,917 points

Apr 12, 2011 7:31 PM in response to Allan Eckert

I agree, Allan.

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Answer 9

Apr 13, 2011 8:49 AM in response to Bill Plunkett

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. Is that what you're on? Your profile says 10.6.6, but I'm wondering if that's just because you haven't updated it. I've tried a few things but with no success. I was wondering if one of my disks was corrupt, now I see other people are having this issue I'm not so sure. Is the problem still there?
My MacPro is unusable at the moment!

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Answer 10

Apr 13, 2011 10:03 AM in response to Louiecypher

I know yo0u are asking Bill but I will let you know that neither my Mac Pro nor my MBP are suffering from beach balls and they are both running 10.6.7.

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Allan

___________________

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Answer 11

Apr 13, 2011 1:01 PM in response to Louiecypher

As a matter of fact I am running 10.6.7 Can't really say if that when the problems began but it could have been.

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Answer 12

Apr 13, 2011 1:02 PM in response to Allan Eckert

Problem is, I'm a photographer and it's kinda hard to do without photoshop....

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Answer 13

Apr 13, 2011 1:07 PM in response to Bill Plunkett

What does that have to do with your running AV software which serves absolutely no useful purpose on a Mac.

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Allan

___________________

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Answer 14

Apr 13, 2011 1:49 PM in response to Bill Plunkett

I was also wondering about login items as well, but mine takes forever to restart before it even reaches the login screen, so I'm thinking it isn't a problem with that. Unless some login items start initiating before the actual login is done. My MacBook Pro is running 10.6.7 as well, but it seems fine. I attempted an installation CD startup, checked for disk repair (ok), disk permissions (ok), then tried re-installing Snow Leopard. It got so far then couldn't finish the installation.
Ok, so I just tried it again just now and it seems to be running fine again. The only thing I did was get rid of two unknown files in login items (buttonhelper or something) using ( - ), not just hiding them. Time Machine does appear to be doing some strange things, so I erased that disk and initiated a fresh TimeMachine backup.
Don't know about you, but I'm baffled...

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Answer 15

Apr 13, 2011 7:28 PM in response to Louiecypher

2 things

check your system.log look for any info that may cause a delay and check your dns. make sure your host has forward and reverse dns.
turning off multicast ( bonjour ) can help clean up your queries.
-j

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