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10.7.2 Lion freezing / apps lock up, must hard reset 2-3 times daily

I've seen several posts on this -- oddly, some of them are archived even though there has been no resolution...

Would love to hear people's experiences and especially if you have a fix. Would REALLY love it if Apple would get off their duff and give us a working O/S.

Ever since upgrading to Leopard I've been having problems with system stability and, specifically, with lockups. Usually this starts out with a few applications get "hung" (beach ball). Again, usually, I can force quit them, restart and continue for at least a little while... but, it always marks the beginning of a downward spiral. The final straw seems to be when Finder locks up. Once Finder locks, the system becomes unresponsive overall and I can't shut down without doing a hard reset (either cmd-opt-power or, more often, just hold power until a get a hard reboot).

Some of the behaviors I'm seeing:

Apps start to lockup. Best option at this point is to quickly shut everything down and restart. On occasion I get a software restart if I'm prompt about it.
Finder locks up... forget it. Hardware restart is in my future... will generally try to save work, but it seems that anything involving disk / file system access is completely frozen.
About one out of two times, the login screen is very slow to appear (about a 2 minute boot), and then it fails to respond to my wireless keyboard &/or mouse. Sometimes the mouse works, keyboard doesn't. If I wait for 1-2 minutes, it will usually "wake up" and suddenly gets all of the input in one blast... but usually I lose patience, open up the laptop, do another hard reset.
Sometimes the screen saver won't release control of the machine (much like login screen). I can move the mouse, tap keys, etc., screen saver just keeps right on running blithely along...
On rare occasion, even the force quit panel (cmd-opt-escape) refuses to appear.

Of late, I've taken to launching Terminal on login so that it's available (because after the lockups start, I won't be able to launch it). Then, I can issue a "shutdown -r now" which, most of the time, seems to work pretty well. I hate doing a hard reset, always worried it will lead to a damaged file structure or lost work.

I've tried a number of fixed, including (at the height of it) reinstalling 10.7.2, which I did a few days ago. It made no difference at all... Also tried resetting NVRAM, etc. About the only folklore I haven't tried yet is switching to Chrome or Firefox. A lot of people are blaming Safari for all of this, so perhaps I'll try that next...

I'm suspecting that Time Machine is making the situation worse, but turning it off (and disconnecting the drive) does NOT solve the problem. It seems to go a little longer in-between system lockups. Same symptoms... apps become unresponsive, one after the other starts to beach ball, eventually the whole system locks up... I'm wondering if it has something to do with disk access, as posted in other threads. I've been trying to minimize disk access wherever possible, for one, just plugging in my Time Machine drive about once a day, let it backup, then unplug. Not really sure if it's helping or not though.

Currently, I'm running into this on average 3 times daily (worst day was 6 times, best day was just once, yay...) Yes I've been keeping track. By my count I'm also losing up to two hours a day, because the shutdown / reboot process is so baby-sitting intensive (and I have to do it several times a day).

Very, very frustrating. This is definitely the worst O/S release Apple has ever put out there. I'd like to go back to Leopard, but worried about the downgrade... arrrgggh. (Wish Mr. Jobs was still around, somehow I think he would never have tolerated this...)

MBP 4GB, PM G5, iMac, macMini, Mac OS X (10.5.1)

Posted on Nov 21, 2011 1:23 PM

37 replies

gumsie

Level 4

2,179 points

Dec 31, 2011 3:16 PM in response to Royden Kading

You're running Lion?

The Top level Library should be visible and is at the follwing path;

/Library/Logs

The User Library will be at;

~/Library/Logs

You should be able to get to them in the Finder by either a). Navigating through or b). copying the above text of whichever you want to get to and pasting it into the window that pops up when you press Command-Shift-G.

Jan 1, 2012 7:51 AM in response to gumsie

Happy New Year.

Thanks finally got to the Library and logs. I have been reading through them but honestly don't understand them.

I haven't activated iCloud on the Mac Book yet. Will do that.

The Mac Book has the same apps, files, etc as my desktop. On both we use Mail and Safari, so can't understand why this is happening. Will keep looking and testing.

Thanks for all your help.

gumsie

Level 4

2,179 points

Jan 1, 2012 7:56 AM in response to Royden Kading

No problem. What you need to do is copy and paste the Safari crash log.

It'll start with a line that says something like;

Process : Safari [7534.52.7]

Somebody clever will be along to diagnose......

isbyrne

Level 1

0 points

Jan 12, 2012 1:35 PM in response to gumsie

Hi folks,

I seem to have solved my freezing issues but unfortunately I am not sure how.

I removed all powerpc files and also went through the libraries and manually removed all remaining help files etc from old or trial software.

I then discovered that my itunes library was corrupt so I restored it from a time machine backup, this worked fine.

I suspect the intiial problems may have been caused by a corrupt file but cannot verify this.

May 1, 2012 12:22 PM in response to Zacharias Beckman

Hi all,

I've been experiencing similar issues on my mid-2010 MacBook Pro 15'', ever since I upgraded to... 10.7.1 (or was it 10.7.2)?

The last message in the /var/log/system.log before the machine becomes unusable is always an invocation to backupd, the backup daemon that I presume is used by Time Machine.

At which point, the file system deadlocks on write access.

(I verify this by running a simple command on the terminal that requires file system write access, like "touch ~/foo" and seeing if it ever returns) So: Of course there are no further log entries of what may have gone wrong (after all, you can't write to a log if file system write is blocked).

To sow further confusion, other currently open apps _seem_ to continue working right up until they need to write something to disk (reading from disk is fine, as are all other aspects of the OS as far as I can tell).

The infuriating thing is that this is intermittent: Sometimes Time Machine does its thing just fine. Others, it freezes as described above and the ONLY thing I can then do is a hard reset.

May 14, 2012 11:14 AM in response to Zacharias Beckman

I have the same problem. I am going to try a clean install of Lion today.

If I get "no joy" from that, I will try to reinstall 10.6

May 14, 2012 12:11 PM in response to billegates

The overwhelming majority of Lion issues are due to taking over older, outdated apps, which start up at login or intefere with the system. The same occurred with practically all new generations of Mac OS X. The issue is perhaps more frequently with Lion, because default installation of Lion is to upgrade SL, but not other apps, of course. Upgrading has its advantages, of course, nevertheless may have negative results. All may be better if Apple introduced a script to deactivate all non-Apple apps starting up at login to be later activated under a certain control. In most cases, creating a new user, loging out and reloging into the new system proves that all is OK.

10.7.2 Lion freezing / apps lock up, must hard reset 2-3 times daily