Q: mac hangs when dock clicked

Apple menu->ForceQuit-> choose Finder, relaunch Finder.

bookmanjb wrote:

 

Running Yosemite 10.10.5.

 

Intermittently, when I click on a dock icon, my iMac hangs for anywhere from 10 seconds to a minute or more. Repairing permissions, zapping PRAM, and resetting SMC doesn't help. Any ideas?

Open Activity monitor from Utilities menu and watch active jobs for MDS MDsresponder - run by Finder or spotlight. - there may also be some jobs related to disk activity.

Apparently finder/spotlight indexing can take time - so all the zapping and resetting does nothing. 

After searching the web - finder has been causing freezes since Tiger through el-capitan and seems to never have been recognized by apple as something to fix - it may also be caused by UNIX housekeeping that now runs on wake-up if you sleep -- or apparently startup if you shutdown..   Work-Around is to wipe drive and re-install everything - in essence defragmenting the disk - and files loading one at a time getting indexed.

I have had issues since November with freezes since doing housekeeping on my drive - and other changes -- running snow leopard - first time issue.

If you do have a true freeze - as soon as you can get the apple menu to work - restart will clear it.

Try doing a Dock restart using the following Terminal command:

killall Dock

Log out/in and test. If that doesn’t work, you need to look in your user Library/Applications Support/Dock for the .db. Use the Finder “Go To Folder” command. Enter ~/Library/Applications Support/Dock.  Move the .db to your desktop.

Then try a dock reset.

Applications/Utilities/Terminal enter the command

killall Dock

Log out/in test. If it works okay, delete the .db from the desktop.

If the Dock is the same, return the .db to where you got them from, overwriting the newer ones.

If you prefer to make your user library permanently visible, go to Finder and select your user/home folder. With that Finder window as the front window, either select Finder/View/Show View options or go command - J.  When the View options opens, check ’Show Library Folder’. That should make your user library folder visible in your user/home folder.  Learned from leonie.

Have you solved it already?

if not do the Finder relaunch (this resets the Dock also).

bookmanjb wrote:

 

Well, it definitely helped, but did not cure. Thanks so much for your suggestion.

Something else you can try

change the drive and monitor to never sleep, disconnect from the internet, close all other apps, -- and let the system do its housekeeping.

This is based on if I knew in November what I know now - I would have let My mac clean itself up --  mine is a 2008 with only 50% of the drive filled bug I really don't know how defragmented it was - I also know now that playing a simple solitaire game that doesn't eat up ram - probably kept my mac tidy as the system was able to use that time to process whatever it was doing.

bookmanjb wrote:

 

Well, it definitely helped, but did not cure. Thanks so much for your suggestion.

You might want to review your widgets -- I just removed all of them - and deactivated the entire list - as a few minutes after accidentally popping them up - my mac while offline froze - and had to force restart after I could not get quit to come up on the keyboard - (had some stuff I had to take care of).

Other issue may be time machine - as I have mine disconnected because of issues but noticed that Tuesday night and Wednesday startup seem to have issues - and those are week end - week beginning dates on the time machine drive. 

Relaunch of Finder should do it normally.

Another "unrelated" try is re index Spotlight:

Spotlight: How to re-index folders or volumes - Apple Support