Apple Event: May 7th at 7 am PT

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

Level 4

1,252 points

Mac OSX has been freezing since 2002

Have had my mac pro since 2008 - Snow Leopard since 2009 -- never experienced a freeze until November when I was cleaning up files and also adding text to pictures with Photoshop CS3.

I did al of the things apple and this help said to do with changing clock battery, resetting pram - etc - and still without doing much of anything problems on startup - finally found one poster who pretty much said let that frozen startup run.

I have an OSX book written by Bob LeVitus in 2002 -- with OSX freezing -- reset pram etc - but it did mention a Finder freeze (and after searching logs finder indexing did cause a memory leak)

In the End - let the slow powerups run - then restart I pretty much shutdown Spotlight/indexing by moving my time machine drive into private along with my folders and my Cache in my Library -- and also deleting what turned out to be 1 corrupt Iphoto library from both the desktop and my time machine -- reselected the time machine drive.

In letting the long startups run and removing the iphoto libraries both my Time Machine and Hard drive are now less than 50% filled. - and only letting spotlight look at folders - nothing else -- my Mac is now totally back to a quick startup.

The problem as I see it with the freezes is somewhere in the base Unix and OSX handling of the disk drives and memory -- Finder/Spotlight if indexing everything can cause major freezing when you drive is getting filled (or possibly fragmented). The more stuff you are running at the same time - the more likely you are to get a freeze and as you cannot see what is going on not much you can do about it -- so its up to those of you with the latest versions to start shouting at apple to start fixing the underpinnings.

Posted on Apr 2, 2016 12:22 PM

18 replies

notcloudy Author

Level 4

1,252 points

Sep 20, 2016 6:27 AM in response to notcloudy

The freeze is between Finder and Unix disk handling -- as the freeze happened after I deleted old files and only after same.

Found that its only the finder as I was doing a long download and the screen froze about halfway through but the download completed (was not watching it)

After trying safe mode - went back to regular where system had long boots so walked away on one - system shut itself down at some point & all startups after are okay.

I now keep an eye on the activity monitor - disk activity - until it flatlines -- after startup and before shutdown -- and while deleting or renaming old files -- as noticed the get info gets dodgy after a few files -- I just wait until the disk activity is finished.

Hazard a guess that this happens on macs that have fragmented drives and at some point unix is trying to consolidate free space - apple may not be able to replicate it because they have all new machines with less activity than some users.

Sep 20, 2016 7:33 AM in response to notcloudy

Hazard a guess that this happens on macs that have fragmented drives and at some point unix is trying to consolidate free space - apple may not be able to replicate it because they have all new machines with less activity than some users.

That is the behavior you would see if trying to access a file with a bad block. The mac would appear to halt while the disk drive re-tries, and re-tries, and re-tries. It it succeeds in less than about 10,000 re-tries, it proceeds. If it fails after that many re-tries, you get an I/O Error.

notcloudy Author

Level 4

1,252 points

Sep 26, 2016 3:31 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Grant Bennet-Alder wrote:

Hazard a guess that this happens on macs that have fragmented drives and at some point unix is trying to consolidate free space - apple may not be able to replicate it because they have all new machines with less activity than some users.

That is the behavior you would see if trying to access a file with a bad block. The mac would appear to halt while the disk drive re-tries, and re-tries, and re-tries. It it succeeds in less than about 10,000 re-tries, it proceeds. If it fails after that many re-tries, you get an I/O Error.

Disk drive has tested out fine multiple times.

Since the safe mode - then multiple restarts without a good one - the last one being a long boot - and at some point the mac shut itself down -- the startups have been clean -- and waiting for disk activity to flat line after activity - sometimes 5 minutes -- seems the help.

I think the big issue is that apple does not give a message that that is what is going on -- so shutting down just makes it worse.

Mac OSX has been freezing since 2002