Spinning pinwheel of death

I have no idea what is going on, but I get that spinning pinwheel all the time now. I have had an imac at home for 3 years and an imac at my office for 1 year. They have both been just amazing. Never one crash, no viruses, etc., etc. They do what I ask them to do and they do it every single time with lightning quick speed....until now.

I dont know if it was an update or what, but now I get what I call "The spinning pinwheel of death" It just spins and freezes up the computer for seconds and sometimes minutes. I can't do anything on the computer until it stops spinning. I have tried restarting, turning off all applications so only safari is running, etc.., etc., but to no avail.

What can I do to correct this?

iMac

Posted on Jun 12, 2014 9:19 AM

17 replies

notcloudy

Level 4

1,258 points

Jun 5, 2015 12:39 PM in response to poikkeus1

poikkeus1 wrote:

drbchilds,

Your system looks fairly healthy, all in all. But one thing caught my attention:

Top Processes by Memory:

1.50 GB Safari

483 MB com.apple.WebKit.WebContent

106 MB systemstats

57 MB com.apple.WebKit.Networking

49 MB Finder

Virtual Memory Information:

40 MB Free RAM

1.39 GB Active RAM

1.36 GB Inactive RAM

1.04 GB Wired RAM

9.41 GB Page-ins

308 MB Page-outs

The VM information suggests that your 8GB RAM is getting overtaxed. I don't know why, but it seems that Safari is being queried aggressively (hence the high amount of page-ins) - or that some process is keeping your machine from processing the page-ins as quickly as it should. Citrix is one process that jumps out to me immediately as a possible cause.

OP is on Mavericks - Page outs is the number that says there is activity moving out of VM back to RAM. The Page ins at 9+GB depend on how the software is loading - for instance if I look at activity I have 300mb Paged into VM and 0 Pages out. B4 Yosemite - you can see that applications loaded some portion of their programs into VM on initiation -- 0 pages outs means they are not needed.

If the OP decides to go to Yosemite they will definitely need double the RAM to run the same applications with getting processes killed on a regular basis.

Nov 3, 2016 12:21 PM in response to drbchilds

I Have had this problem as well. I would recommend going into activity monitor and see if anything is highlighted in red, meaning that it is not responding.

In my case it was dictation. So I just had it force quit. It solves it for a while, but it will come back later. I don't know why it keeps happening

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Spinning pinwheel of death