Q: Mountain Lion freezing

Chrome and Norton are not relevant to the problem, if we're having the same trouble (and I assume so).

I started up in safe mode, hoping that that at least would help, but after a few minutes, after only having checked my email, I wanted to use a program so I opened Launchpad with the pinch gesture on my touchpad (not having Alfred in safe mode). The result was interesting: I got a freeze of the kind with being able to move the cursor, but looking at my desktop, I saw a faint 'ghost' image of all the Launchpad icons behind!

Seems something with the graphics or the window manager. But I hate it !!

My stone-age 1999 IBM thinkpad with Windows 2000 I still have lying around is far superior to my iMac at the moment...

going back to lion, as for the moment "the most adanced operating system" plays with the beach ball.

just tried a 10.8.1 release from imzdl and it works just like before.. freezing all around

Can somebody try and confirm this workaround. Unfortunately I'm on Lion now so I cannot play with this but it should work. As I understood so far SSH connection to freezed mac should work. Go to System Preferences -> Sharing and enable Remote login. Test your connection from another machine with command:

ssh username@ip-address-of-freezed-mac

When freezing occurs SSH to your mac and run command:

sudo killall -HUP WindowServer

what do you mean? You have the 10.8.1 and still freezing?

yes, I downloaded the 10.8.1 sent to developers to test and no change. It takes ages to boot, like a minute and a half with no apps installed... can't believe this.

I am having no more problems at all on my MBP, after Repair Permissions, a full shut-down and a reboot later.

I have no idea why it fixed the freezing and the infernal beach ball, but it did. It's been several days now and I use my iMac during the day and my MBP in the evening. It's been a delight to use with Mountain Lion.

Have any of you tried the fix that I used? Could the solution be so simple?

Nice idea. It had also occurred to me that SSH might still work after a freeze. I now installed and configured a good SSH client on my iPad (Remoter VNC with SSH addon) and enabeled remote login (SSH server) on my iMac.

But, after my 'interesting' safe mode  (clears out some cashes etc) session that freezed, I have not seen a further freeze (yet...).

I had done a Repair Permissions earlier, with no beneficial effect, though. After a freeze I found no wrong permissions.

Thanks for the tip. Ive updated to 10.8.1 amidst my desperation to swipe off the freezing. And I think it may have solved the problem. Ive been playing around my macpro, launching apps etc just to spike up activity monitor for half a day now. And so far, no freezing has occured. Moreso, i no longer see the java permission error whenever i do permission repair.

I do hope this resolved the issue. Im still keeping my fingers crossed though.

I called AppleCare and got through eventually and was asked to try a few more things after I had already done PRAM, SMC, permissions, re-install once, deleting all my apps that I dont really use anymore.  Tried the test logon all those things.

One of the last of them was to clear the cache, emtpy the trash and reboot.

Whilst I was waiting for a senior techo, my time machine said it needed to verify my drive again.  After spending too long on the phone and almost doing my block after I was told to partition my drive and re-intstall (for the 3rd time), all once the time machine had finished its verification (20 hours later).

I thought I would give it one final go on restart after time machine had finished so the cache could get re-built.

Well to my surprise (and it has been about 5 days now) it works fine.  Not one spinning beach ball.  Even been hammering a large excel file with loads of graphs (which crashes our Wintel machines at work) and all is OK (for now).

Not sure what fixed it, but I am calmer and the wife is no longer blaming me for having to restart every few hours.

Forgot the mention that I turned off the Airport on my iMac, as it is cabled into my Airport Base Station.

So I've been dealing with an issue that has the same result...essential at some point Mountain Lion becomes totally unresponsive and freezes up with the only the point animation functioning.

What I've found is that it gets triggered by pretty much anything that puts a load on the graphics processing i.e. video playback streaming and local playback, games (i.e. Starcraft 2), etc.. Essentially you'll running your video or game for a time (seems to be random) and the system locks up. In my specific instance the freezing can be triggered sooner the more I tax any portion of the graphics system.

Based on the activity monitor no single process/application takes up a significant amount of CPU or RAM before the freeze occurs. Essentially one application becomes no responsive and it continues to every application you attempt to switch to or interact with.

I've cleared the local and system library cache, forced a reset of the PMU and didn't see any unexpected extensions running on my OS. As of this writting I have not found a good reason for this lock up other than a prossible issue with the OS layer that handles any of the extra rendering. It almost looks like some weird dead lock scenario that has a direct tie with what ever window manager service/application that mountain lion runs.

I should mention prior to this weekend I've been running mountain lion since release in a very stable configuration on a MacMini mid 2011 (core i7) with an SSD and 8GB of RAM. The only software updates that I'm aware of that could have impacted this an update to parallels 7 but these crashes occur with out parallels running.

I've been trying to execute a sysdiagnose instruction to execute when I notice the issue but by that time the system is no longer accepting instructions. For the time being I can't spend any more time attempting to resolve this issue and plan to work on back up laptop, but I'd like to know if anyone has any suggesions about either collectiong information about this issue or possible solution fixes. FYI I haven't tried a clean re-install and would perfer not to have to go with that option without assuances that the issue is installation based and not systemic to the current release build.

I use smcFanControl to push up the fan RPM's, but that's because I don't trust the high tempertures inside my iMac (especially my internal HD). Might also improve GPU reliability. I don't like the noise, but decided to live with it for now.

A safe mode boot was the last I did before things improved for me. As far as diagnostics I suggest the SSH route described earlier (did not have a freeze since I prepared that option so I don't know yet if you really can still login remotely after a freeze).

The only other thing (apart from Repair Permissions) I can think of is that maybe the automatic updates of chrome removed a bug (it runs in the backgound looking for updates I gather).

I also do not want to do a clean install, as it does not seem to help much and is a lot of work.

Interesting info: I got a freeze again and indeed SSH from my iPad still worked. The bad news is that the command 'sudo killall -HUP WindowServer' only managed to change my normal (if frozen) desktop into a vertically-striped mainly white pattern and repeating the command had no further effect.

So I would need to reset the GPU probably (I wish I could underclock my Radeon GPU).

Anyone who knows how to do that under Mac OSX? Windows has better tools but I have only Mac OSX. And even with Windows, I wouldn't dare to flash the ROM of my GPU...

For now, I have increased the CPU fan (which also cools the GPU, I believe) even further, because it is starting to appear like a heat issue.