Snow Leopard Server running extremely slow all of a sudden!!

Question

Snow Leopard Server running extremely slow all of a sudden!!

Hi, I'm not a qualified server technician but am currently trying my best to run a server in a Secondary School! Please help, need to fix ASAP.

So basically we've got a Mac Pro running Snow Leopard server which has become incredibly slow in the past week. Nothing has changed in our department to trigger this. Here's everything I know so far...

- If I try to log on to the admin account when "Some Network Accounts Are Available", log on will take under a minute. If I try to log on to the admin account when the light goes green and "Network Accounts Are Available" log on will take forever and eventually just crash and which point I have to just force a shutdown and try again.

- When I can log on, some aspects of the computing seems fast and other aspects are really slow. For example, a few programs open as soon as I log on no problem, however a simple spotlight search or trying to open Sytem Preferences will crash the computer completely.

- Have tried booting in Safe Mode, and everything ran fast and how it's mean to but once restarting and booting normally the problems remained.

Sorry for the lack of knowledge!!

Thanks in advance.

Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on Mar 20, 2014 5:32 AM

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Answer 1

Mar 20, 2014 11:08 AM in response to Jack McCarlie

Your comment indicates "crash the computer"? Do you mean that OS X Server itself fails, and you have to reboot? Or that the application crashes, and you have to restart it?

The following are some general approaches toward gathering some data:

Launch Console.app from Applications > Utilities and see if there are blocks of repeating errors.

Launch Terminal.app from Applications > Utilities and issue the following harmess, diagnostic command:

sudo changeip -checkhostname

After entering an administrative password and possibly seeing a one-time informational message about sudo, you should see some network configuration information and then an indication that no changes are required, or that there are DNS or network errors.

Boot from the Snow Leopard installation DVD and run a volume verification pass using Disk Utility, this from the Utilities menu of the installation disl.

FWIW...

If the applications or OS X Server are crashing, then you're generally heard toward either a reinstallation of the software, or a hardware repair, or quite possibly a combination of the two.

Forcing a hard shutdown can lead to corruptions, depending on exactly what's going on when the power drops out; that's probably best left as a last-resort approach and one best avoided.

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Answer 2

iToaster

Level 3

739 points

Apr 14, 2014 4:52 AM in response to Jack McCarlie

To add to MrHoffman's excellent advise

Forcing a shutdown is a last resort, your playing Russian roulette doing that

You might have a process that's running away

Have a look at activity monitor and see if anything is at 100% CPU

Check the server logs

Check you've got free hard drive space

Shut it down and back it up, before the situation deteriorates , you've got backups right

In all honesty I think your going to have to call in someone with experience

Servers are a complicated beast. I don't recommend fiddling about if you don't know what you're doing

Especially on a live system Doubly so on one that's playing up That's a fast track to **** in a hand basket

Gather as much information as you can and

get someone in who knows what they are doing

Otherwise it's going to be tears before bedtime

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