The Color Wheel is NOT my FRIEND

1. You are referring to the spinning beach ball of death, the SBBOD, not the color wheel.
2. a lot of things can cause this:
   1. not enough ram for what you are trying to do
   2. not enough free space on your hard drive
   3. perhaps some process is open that is using too much processor power or memory
   4. screwed up software in some other way
   5. a hard drive that is starting to fail
3. the first thing is, you should make sure you have a backup of any important files
4. how much RAM do you have?
5. how much free space is on your hard drive?
6. how many apps do you have open when you see the SBBOD?
7. Activity Monitor IS your friend

   open Activity Monitor (it's in Applications > Utilities)

   1. do All Processes, up at the top, and sort by % CPU descending, and see if there is something that is hogging CPU that shouldn't be. Typical suspects are haxies and antivirus programs. It may take some detective work and thought to figure out what a particular process is.
   2. Take a look at the options down at the bottom, like CPU, System Memory, Disk Activity, and so on. In particular the System Memory part, the Page ins and Page outs. This tells you what's going on with virtual memory.
8. All this info will start to point you towards a diagnosis.
9. If there's nothing obvious going on, like you're trying to do some huge video editing project in the background with 2 gigs of RAM and you just need more RAM, then I'd do some simple maintenance maneuvers like repair my hard drive and permissions.

Message was edited by: arthur

My suggestions:

(a) your hard drive is nearly full and the computer can't find enough space in which to process the things it needs to process. WARNING! If this is the problem you need to urgently trash some stuff, or your HD may crash

(b) you need more RAM

(c) possibly both.

(Oops - Arthur posted his comment just as I was clicking to post mine. We're both saying the same thing.)

Message was edited by: Tom in London

Back up all data immediately as your boot drive may be failing.

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

Triple-click anywhere in the line below on this page to select it:

syslog -k Sender kernel -k Message CReq 'Channel t|GPU D|I/O|n Cause: -' | tail | open -ef

Copy the selected text to the Clipboard (command-C).

Launch the Terminal 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 Terminal in the icon grid.

Paste into the Terminal window (command-V).

The command may take a noticeable amount of time to run. Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign (“$”) to appear.

A TextEdit window will open with the output of the command. Normally the command will produce no output, and the window will be empty. If the TextEdit window (not the Terminal window) has anything in it, post it — the text, please, not a screenshot. The title of the TextEdit window doesn't matter, and you don't need to post that.

First, back up all data immediately, as your boot drive might be failing.

There are a few other possible causes of generalized slow performance that you can rule out easily.

• Reset the System Management Controller.
• If you have many image or video files on the Desktop with preview icons, move them to another folder.
• If applicable, uncheck all boxes in the iCloud preference pane.
• Disconnect all non-essential wired peripherals and remove aftermarket expansion cards, if any.
• Check your keychains in Keychain Access for excessively duplicated items.
• Boot into Recovery mode, launch Disk Utility, and run Repair Disk.
• If you're booting from an aftermarket SSD, see whether there's a firmware update for it.

Otherwise, take the steps below when you notice the problem.

Step 1

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 icon grid.

Select the CPU tab of the Activity Monitor window.

Select All Processes from the menu in the toolbar, if not already selected.

Click the heading of the % CPU column in the process table to sort the entries by CPU usage. You may have to click it twice to get the highest value at the top. What is it, and what is the process? Also post the values for % User, % System, and % Idle at the bottom of the window.

Select the System Memory tab. What values are shown in the bottom part of the window for Page outs and Swap used?

Next, select the Disk Activity tab. Post the approximate values shown for Reads in/sec and Writes out/sec (not Reads in and Writes out.)

Step 2

If you have more than one user account, you must be logged in as an administrator to carry out this step.

Launch the Console application in the same way you launched Activity Monitor. 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.

Select the 50 or so most recent entries in the log. Copy them to the Clipboard (command-C). Paste into a reply to this message (command-V). You're looking for entries at the end of the log, not at the beginning.

When posting a log extract, be selective. Don't post more than is requested.

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

Important: Some personal information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting. That should be easy to do if your extract is not too long.