Ideas for causes of iMac Running Slowly

Question

Level 1

12 points

Ideas for causes of iMac Running Slowly

My iMac shows symptoms of spinning beach balls (sometimes rainbow, sometimes blue - does that mean anything?) on a number of applications. In addition the machine will sometimes stop completely for 10 secs or more and then resume whatever it was doing. While this effects a number of application Safari and Dragon Dictate are the big problems.

So far I've looked at the following, although I don't know that my analysis has been exhaustive.

1. Caches etc.

I installed Cocktail and have it run everynight when I log out of the account.

2. Age of the Machine (Its a 2007 iMac)

One developer was kind enough to run some tests for me. He had an identical machine and he ran the same test file. His setup showed no delays. File opening and use of the file was all relatively instantaneous. Mine frequently encounters long delays when opening the same file and using the file.

3. Permissions

This was the first thing I looked at. I did a manual repair and now its being done with Cocktail.

4. Reinstall the OS

I did a reinstall of the OS. There was no difference after the installation.

5. Utilities

I have a few untilities running in my menu bar. These were all removed and the machine was restarted without them. No difference in performance.

Additional Information

1. I ran the activity monitor.

When I get a spinning beachball an application/utility called "ScopedBookmarkAgent" is often consuming 95% of the CPU resources. If the spinning beachball lasts a couple of minutes then this application will be consuming large amounts of CPU resources for most of the time. When the machine stops completely I get the impression that the Activity Monitor stops as well. I cannot find any useful information on "ScopedBookmarkAgent" (I'm not a developer) that would suggest why it might be a problem or more importantly how to fix any problems with it.

2. Disk Drive Space

I have approximatly 100GB free on a 500GB drive. The drive is not the original drive, that was replaced by Apple under Apple Care sometime ago.

3. RAM

I have 4GB of RAM, the maximum possible on this machine.

4. OS

I'm running 10.8.4

I'd appreciate any thoughts on possible causes of my problem and suggestions on how to fix them. In particular with regard to "ScopeBookmarkAgent", since it would appear to be a culprit in the problem.

iMac, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)

Posted on Aug 22, 2013 5:23 PM

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Answer 1

Kappy

Level 10

361,741 points

Aug 22, 2013 5:30 PM in response to dorich

Select ScopeBookmarkAgent in Activity Monitor, click on the Quit icon in the toolbar then click on the Force Quit button. I'm not sure why it's running on your computer, but if you do a Google search for "ScopeBookmarkAgent", then you will find some helpful links.

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Answer 2

dorich Author

Level 1

12 points

Aug 22, 2013 6:33 PM in response to Kappy

Thx. This is helpful but its going to take me some time to check this completely. Just before I read your post I restarted my machine. It appears that SBA is not running at the moment and the machine is behaving itself, which it does off and on. So I'm assuming that SBA must be getting triggered at some point because I've seen it so many times just hogging resources. Anyway I'll monitor and report.

Re: Googling. yes I started there but for the first few pages I found discussions on Sandboxing and problems with the keychain - no explanation for the 'lay' person. Anyway I guess I'll probe deeper.

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Answer 3

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,547 points

Aug 22, 2013 8:09 PM in response to dorich

The next time you have the problem, note the exact time: hour, minute, second.

If you have more than one user account, these instructions must be carried out as an administrator.

Launch the Console 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 Console in the icon grid.

Make sure the title of the Console window is All Messages. If it isn't, select All Messages from the SYSTEM LOG QUERIES menu on the left. If you don't see that menu, select

View ▹ Show Log List

from the menu bar.

Scroll back in the log to the time you noted above. Select any messages timestamped from then until the end of the episode, or until they start to repeat. Copy them to the Clipboard (command-C). Paste into a reply to this message (command-V).

When posting a log extract, be selective. In most cases, a few dozen lines are more than enough.

Please do not indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.

Important: Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

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Answer 4

dorich Author

Level 1

12 points

Aug 22, 2013 9:20 PM in response to Linc Davis

Thx. One question for clarification. I normally work in a User account. Based on your response regarding the type of account - do I need to be working in the Admin account when the problem occurs or can I just switch to the Admin account if I see the problem from my User account?

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Answer 5

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,547 points

Aug 22, 2013 9:38 PM in response to dorich

A standard user account is probably OK.

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Answer 6

dorich Author

Level 1

12 points

Aug 22, 2013 10:40 PM in response to Linc Davis

Following is one of the cases where I see spinning beachball. In this case I'm attempting to load a Curio file. The file takes several minutes to load. In fact it should load in secs. The progress bar is stuck in the same place for most of the duration. I took the following from the console, with All Messages as the header. Hopefully I've santized the data.

8/22/13 10:21:14.874 PM DictationIM[3473]: Exception in proxy <IMKTextInput> respondsToSelector: inputSessionDoneSleep

......

8/22/13 10:21:14.876 PM DictationIM[3473]: IMK Exception in client(wrapper):[0x7fd67c05b5c0] InputController:[0x7fd67c07a1c0]

8/22/13 10:21:22.781 PM Curio[1040]: *** -[NSMachPort handlePortMessage:]: dropping incoming DO message because the connection is invalid

8/22/13 10:22:14.472 PM assistantd[3486]: <Error>: Session - Assistant Loaded refId does not match our saved assistant command

8/22/13 10:22:15.760 PM assistantd[3486]: <Error>: Session - Assistant Loaded refId does not match our saved assistant command

8/22/13 10:22:16.048 PM assistantd[3486]: <Warning>: Daemon - Ignoring unrequested SASyncGetAnchorsResponse

8/22/13 10:22:40.410 PM com.apple.launchd.peruser.502[173]: (com.apple.mdworker.lsb.01000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000[2942]) Exited: Killed: 9

8/22/13 10:22:49.441 PM Mail[1443]: unsupported header criterion todocompletionstate

8/22/13 10:22:49.441 PM Mail[1443]: unsupported header criterion todatedue

8/22/13 10:22:49.442 PM Mail[1443]: unsupported header criterion todatedue

8/22/13 10:26:02.047 PM iCalExternalSync[2797]: [0x7fd5a340e550] |Miscellaneous|Error| SyncServices precondition failure in [ISyncConcreteSession pushChangesFromRecord:withIdentifier:]: you can't change the record's entity name from com.apple.calendars.AudioAlarm to com.apple.calendars.MailAlarm in {

"com.apple.syncservices.RecordEntityName" = "com.apple.calendars.MailAlarm";

owner = (

"Event/p1343"

);

recipients = (

"data removed"

);

triggerdate = "2010-09-27 18:17:36 -0700";

}

8/22/13 10:26:02.048 PM iCalExternalSync[2797]: [ICalExternalSync ]Encountered exception: [ISyncConcreteSession pushChangesFromRecord:withIdentifier:]: you can't change the record's entity name from com.apple.calendars.AudioAlarm to com.apple.calendars.MailAlarm in {

"com.apple.syncservices.RecordEntityName" = "com.apple.calendars.MailAlarm";

owner = (

"Event/p1343"

);

recipients = (

"data removed"

);

triggerdate = "2010-09-27 18:17:36 -0700";

} withStack: (

0 iCalExternalSync 0x0000000104b6da60 iCalExternalSync + 125536

1 iCalExternalSync 0x0000000104b5cac9 iCalExternalSync + 56009

2 iCalExternalSync 0x0000000104b6c694 iCalExternalSync + 120468

3 libdyld.dylib 0x00007fff8bc7b7e1 start + 0

4 ??? 0x0000000000000007 0x0 + 7

)

8/22/13 10:26:02.049 PM iCalExternalSync[2797]: [ICalExternalSync ]NSException name:ISyncInvalidArgumentsException reason:[ISyncConcreteSession pushChangesFromRecord:withIdentifier:]: you can't change the record's entity name from com.apple.calendars.AudioAlarm to com.apple.calendars.MailAlarm in {

"com.apple.syncservices.RecordEntityName" = "com.apple.calendars.MailAlarm";

owner = (

"Event/p1343"

);

recipients = (

"data removed"

);

triggerdate = "2010-09-27 18:17:36 -0700";

}

8/22/13 10:26:02.052 PM SyncServer[3523]: [0x7fa97ac0bde0] |Server|Warning| lost connection 0x7fa97b819ca0 to com.apple.iCal

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Answer 7

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,547 points

Aug 22, 2013 10:45 PM in response to dorich

Was the ScopedBookmarkAgent process hogging the CPU during that time?

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Answer 8

dorich Author

Level 1

12 points

Aug 22, 2013 11:09 PM in response to Linc Davis

Linc Davis wrote:

Was the ScopedBookmarkAgent process hogging the CPU during that time?

No. Apologies I should have mentioned that. I'll run some more tests during Friday and report back if I find anything else that I think is significant or if SBA shows up hogging resources.

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