Hourly beach ball (possibly time machine)

That doesn't sound like a Time Machine problem. It does try to back up hourly, but it won't be at the same minute of every hour for very long.

There must be something else scheduled to run at that time. Make sure by turning TM OFF well before the 47 minute mark (and being sure a backup isn't already running).

Post back with your results, and we'll see whether you need to investigate a problem with TM (or your USB drive), or something else.

It sounds like Time Machine's local snapshots. How much free disk space do you have? Are you running any software like virtual machines or Entourage that create very large files that frequently change and need to be backed up or exluded?

W.R.R. Farid wrote:

Ok, so restated again. And even before I could disable Time Machine I encountered the slow down again. I was actually just in Activity Monitor and saw that I had a huge disc activity peak at almost 40MB/sec. I cannot see what process is causing this. Any idea's how I could see the details on this?

See what's using the CPU. Sort the Activity Monitor list by highest % CPU. That's likely to change every few seconds as the display is refreshed, but see if one Process Name is among the top items consistently.

And/or, eject and disconnect the USB drive. If there's a problem with it, OSX may be trying to figure out what it is and/or fix it.

etresoft wrote:

It sounds like Time Machine's local snapshots. How much free disk space do you have? Are you running any software like virtual machines or Entourage that create very large files that frequently change and need to be backed up or exluded?

It certainly shouldn't be, unless it's having trouble deleting old snapshots.

In that case, the mtmd and/or mtmfs processes should be using a lot of CPU.

It's not clear whether you got Time Machine turned OFF (and any backup either finished or cancelled).

If not, do that. Wait a bit, as any Local Snapshots will be deleted, and that does take some time. If the problem persists, then you know it's not Time Machine (or Local snapshots).

You might also want to verify your internal HD (not permissions), just to rule out directory problems. See #6 in Using Disk Utility if you're not sure how to do that.

W.R.R. Farid wrote:

I actually only backup my documents folder using Time Machine. Nothing more.

Time Machine works best when you just turn it on and let it run. In theory, you should be able to exclude everything but your documents folder. In practice, people reporting problems with Time Machine have often made some changes to the default settings. I suspect that in many cases, those people may have made other, possibly command-line modifications as well.

W.R.R. Farid wrote:

. . .

I have already verified the permissions.

No, you need to run Verify Disk, not Verify Disk Permissions.

So basically still having this problem, and no real source found on what is causing it. I am more surprised (but also happy) that I am the only one having this problem. Since I seem to be the only one having this problem it is probably solvable by a clean install in a worse case scenario, which I would like to prevent

Doubtful; a clean install is a last resort, and rarely accomplishes anything good.

A clue may be lurking in your logs. See the tan box inOSX Log Files to locate your system.log, then the blue box there to decipher it. Look at the messages sent at about the time of the slowdown. If that doesn't help, at a few moments before you anticipate the slowdown, set a "Marker" per the Monitoring the log for a reproducible problem section.

I've got this same issue, running Lion, latest updates. TM off or on, doesn't matter. It beachballs hourly and my only recourse is to force shutdown the machine with the power button. I've worked with Apple tech support on the phone and repaired all persmissions, verified disks, removed startup items, all of that. What is the fix, there must be someone smart here to help me, thanks!

Have you tried looking in your system.log, per my previous post:

"See the tan box inOSX Log Files to locate yoursystem.log, then the blue box there to decipher it. Look at the messages sent at about the time of the slowdown. If that doesn't help, at a few moments before you anticipate the slowdown, set a "Marker" per the Monitoring the log for a reproducible problem section."

I did. Here's what's happening, right before every crash it's doing something with ws.agile.1PasswordAgent - and it doesn't find the file. I no longer have any 1P files on my machine (I use LastPass). I've searched for the folder /Users/Andy/Library/Application Support/1Password/Agent/1PasswordAGent.app and it's not on my Mac. Help... Link to log output:

https://img.skitch.com/20120710-qiamaf9c2y2hx6e5w7hp4jjaij.jpg

OK I did find a remnant file from 1P in my plists... and used the 1P uninstaller to remove them. But surely this can't be the cause, they've been there forever, and this beachballing started only 30 days ago....