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Notification Centre Freezing Intermittently

Hello All.


I have been having a problem with notifications on 10.8, where the notication window freezes (mouse turns to beachball when over window) and the notication menu item does not work.


Apart from restarting, how would I force the notification system to restart.


Most recently, An App Store update notificationappeared, and now that corner of my screen is unsuable.

MacBook Air, OS X Mountain Lion

Posted on Aug 9, 2012 4:18 PM

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22 replies

Aug 9, 2012 6:22 PM in response to Peter Maddox

Launch the Activity Monitor application in any of the following ways:


Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)


In the Finder, select Go Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.


Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Activity Monitor in the page that opens.


Select My Processes from the menu in the toolbar, if not already selected. Enter the first few letters of the word "notification" in the search field. Select the process named "Notification Center" and click the Quit button. If it won't quit, force quit.

Aug 14, 2012 3:25 AM in response to Peter Maddox

Same problem.


I have 3 iMac's 1 Mini and a MacBook Air, 1 older 24" iMac but the rest are less than 12 months old and all running OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion.


I have the exact same problem on olny the newest and fully spect up 27" iMac. Notification Centre freezes, the rest of the computer runs fine. It is very frustrating as all the rest work fine and I have searched the web high and low and only found this post directly related to my problem. I have tried repairing disk permissions and a PRAM reset and a couple of other basic reset things.


Small problem but very annoying! I can reboot or kill it in activity monitor but that's not actually a fix, I would love a fix please.


Thanks

Jan 7, 2013 7:37 AM in response to Peter Maddox

I, too, am having this problem. I'm running a 2010 Macbook Pro (15") and just to be sure, did a complete backup of my stuff, reformatted the computer, installed Mountain Lion fresh, and manually replaced my apps (reinstalling them and copying over their preference files) and personal data. I have a system lacking any corrupt preferences, cruft, or anything else that I can tell might impact this. I've run OnyX to deep clean all the caches and repaired permissions. The disk is reported as healthy with no problems by Disk Utility.


Notification Center will (99% of the time) hang if I ever try to open it after the computer sleeps. In addition to notification center hanging, it will also cause the Dock process to hang as well. My mouse will be unable to interact with any windows (no clicking or ablity to scroll). Thank goodness for Alfred, wherein I can quickly launch terminal commands to restart things. As an aside, is there no keyboard shortcut to kill a process in Activity Monitor? Opening that, I can use the keyboard to shuffle through items, but since I can't click on anything, I can't seem to kill any processes.


If I manually kill Notification Center, I can finally interact with windows again, clicking, scrolling and typing all work fine. Unfortunately, I still need to kill the Dock process. When I run sudo killall Dock, instead of responding instantly, as it normally does, it can take up to 5 minutes before the dock process restarts, so I'm thinking there's something fishy going on betweeen NC and the Dock when invoked after sleeping. I'm not an expert in this stuff, though, so maybe Apple can take note of this.


Again, this is all happening on a clean install of 10.8.2. I seemed to notice the problem [i]after[/i] I linked my Twitter/Facebook accounts to OS X, but can't confirm that. Hiding the share icons and unlinking my accounts seem to make no difference. It would be interesting to know if all the people here have linked social networks and share buttons or not.

Jan 15, 2013 5:37 PM in response to bazokajoe_2k

The problem has stopped happening for me, and only one thing seems to have changed: I repaired my home directory permissions. To do so:


(Lion / Mountain Lion)


  1. Restart your computer and hold down Command + R to boot into recovery mode.
  2. From the menu bar, select Utilities -> Terminal
  3. Type in "resetpassword" without the quotes.
  4. In the window that pops up, there will be a button in the lower right corner labeled "Reset Home Directory Permissions and ACLs". Click on that. It will take a moment to complete.
  5. When it finishes, simply restart the computer from the Apple menu at the top right. Your computer will restart normally.

Since I did that (in order to fix a problem with iTunes), NC hasn't locked up once on me. It's a long shot, but it would be interesting to hear if anyone else with the problem fixes it through this method!

Jan 18, 2013 8:50 AM in response to bazokajoe_2k

Hi bazokajoe_2k,


I tried what you suggested, but alas, it did not work.

It was ok for a day, but it's back to the spinning beachball.


I'm convinced that it has something to do with waking up from sleep mode, because that seems to trigger it each each time.


I suppose I'll have to wait until Apple finally fixes it....


I'm a fairly new convert to Mac (iMac 27", iPAD, iPhone5) and was driven here by being fed up with Windows. I'm not convinced that OSX is less buggy.

Apr 18, 2013 12:21 AM in response to Peter Maddox

Until Apple fixes this irritating bug, I've created an AppleScript that kills the notification centre and relaunches it using this command:


do shell script "killall NotificationCenter"


It's much quicker than using Activity Monitor but does the same thing. Now I just leave it in my dock and click it whenever the Notification Center freezes.


You can download it from my public dropbox if you think it would be useful to you:


KillNotificationCenter.app

Sep 1, 2013 8:25 AM in response to Mike .

same thing with me! I have a MacBook Pro 2012 and it just started yesterday! I click tweet and 1 of 2 things happen:

1: it freezes, I have to go to Activity Monitor or restart to stop it

2: it works, until i type a tweet and click send

I have not yet tested this with any other notif. center features.


I was surprised to find so many people complaining even in August 2012, because this feature was awesome until yesterday. SOMEBODY HELP!

Notification Centre Freezing Intermittently

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