Mountain lion randomly beachballs

How much RAM?

Have you tried starting in Safe Mode and see if the problem still occurs?

Restart holding the "shift" key.

(Expect it to take longer to start this way because it runs a directory check first.)

igotsnomoney wrote:

Ever since i Upgraded to Mountain lion i have been getting randomly getting the spinning beachball. they last from 20 seconds to 2 minutes and happen every couple of hours.

first the app im in gets the beacball (usually safari), then i open spotlight and type activity monitor. The keyboard responds but spolight just keeps searching for it. then the desktop beachballs and i cant do mission control, launchpad or dashboard. after the beach ball all the gestures i did before register all at once.

upgraded to 10.8.1 and the freezing is still there but is lower frequency. Running a early 2011 macbook pro 13" with intel 240gb ssd.

went into the console and the only message that stands out to me is every time after the freeze it would have:

PM Dock : no information back from LS about running process

I am amazed this is happening with an SSD. When I moved to SSD, the beach balls just went away. Both the early and mid-2011 13inch MBP came with 4GB memory. If you can, upgrade to 8GB, as ML will appreciate it, and your HD3000 allocated memory will go up to 512MB.

Here are the specs for your Intel SSD and accompanying firmware page. You will notice Intel has not updated the firmware since fall 2011. Might want to verify you are on latest drive firmware via System Information. If not, the usual backup caveats apply.

My Vertex advises that it would invoke a slower drive algorithm when storage capacity exceeds 50%. The Vertex also advises against enabling TRIM support via third-party enablers.

Spotlight auto-indexes anything that is mounted, not just your boot drive. The Spotlight preference has a privacy tab that allows you to exclude drives that you do not want indexed, same as TimeMachine backup exclusions. Your beach balls may come from an over-zealous Spotlight.

I'm getting exactly the same - same machine but with a Samsung 830 SSD, and 8GB of Crucial ram.

Exactly the same error message and freeze/beach ball.

I did not find strange error messages, but I did experience a blue spinning ball accompanying the regular beach ball from time to time. Also experienced sluggish transitions across spaces. From a forum post at MacRumors I took the advice to disable Java in the Safari preferences (which I needed enabled for VPN client purposes) and that seemed to have helped right away. It's only been a short time since then, mind you, just thought I'd share in all the tabs I have open looking for a solution.

Same problem.

I have an early 2011 MBP. I have a Samsung 830 256GB SSD with 16gb of RAM.

Randomly beach balls for 1-2 minutes and then comes back and is fine.

My battery life is also around 1:30 now. Used to be 5-6 with moderate use.

I may just need to format and install Lion.