12" MacBook beach ball

Question

12" MacBook beach ball

I'm on an early 2016 12" retina MacBook, 1.3 GHz m7, OS 10.11.6. >25% of the hard disk is free.

I've experienced the spinning beach ball of death every week or two since I got it. Always happens when I am multitasking (i.e., video in Google Chrome or sometimes Safari, Google Drive open, Apple mail open, + PowerPoint, Excel, or Python at a minimum). But I'm virtually always multitasking. Always accompanied by maxing out CPU usage per the Activity Monitor dock icon. Not triggered by any specific activity or while using a certain app. Always, one app will become unresponsive, and attempts to force quit it via dock icon or Apple menu lead to the beach ball. Once the beach ball appears, I can't access any other apps, the dock, the menu, or the desktop and I always have to do a hard restart.

I've placed many calls to Apple in the past several months and followed all their instructions: update OS (done), update Google Chrome (done), run Disk Utility First Aid (done x a million, it's always fine), reset PRAM and SMC (done), open brand new user account and do all work there (done, problem still happening).

After restarting following the latest beach ball incident, I looked through the console messages around the time the beach ball appeared. I found some messages referring to my 650 MB Recovery HD (along with a bunch of stuff about Sandbox and Google Chrome that I don't understand):

10/13/16 10:10:55.000 PM kernel[0]: disk0s3: alignment error.

10/13/16 10:10:55.000 PM kernel[0]: hfs: mounted Recovery HD on device disk0s3

10/13/16 10:10:55.000 PM kernel[0]: hfs: unmount initiated on Recovery HD on device disk0s3

Does anyone know what an alignment error of the Recovery HD is and if it could cause my beach ball problem? Or any other ideas?

Thanks!

MacBook, OS X El Capitan (10.11.6), Early 2016 MacBook Retina

Posted on Oct 14, 2016 9:06 PM

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Answer 1

notcloudy

Level 4

1,258 points

Oct 14, 2016 9:16 PM in response to andbeonetraveler

How much Ram do you have?

You may not have enough memory to run all of the apps at the same time.

Yosemite and above tries to keep everything in Ram either by killing inactive processes - or compressing them before using VM.

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Answer 2

Stuart423

Level 6

9,264 points

Oct 14, 2016 9:25 PM in response to andbeonetraveler

It's been my general experience that when you max out the CPU, additional commands will start a domino effect where the CPU tries to catch up with each command until you finally get to the point where it has an unmanageable number of tasks to accomplish and starts the beach ball in an effort to catch up.

This can be exacerbated by not having enough memory. The scenario you describe - running a browser, Google Drive, Excel, Powerpoint, Python, etc at a minimum - strikes me as a good way to lock up the computer. I'm guessing 8 gb of memory or more would be needed to make this work the way you're using the computer.

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Answer 3

Oct 14, 2016 9:42 PM in response to Stuart423

8 GB RAM, standard in the new MacBooks. Was assured when I bought it that for my purposes this would be fine. With the level of multitasking I described, I can't get the memory used above 6.7 GB, even if I try. The memory pressure graphic in Activity Monitor is always green.

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Answer 4

notcloudy

Level 4

1,258 points

Oct 15, 2016 4:31 PM in response to andbeonetraveler

andbeonetraveler wrote:

8 GB RAM, standard in the new MacBooks. Was assured when I bought it that for my purposes this would be fine. With the level of multitasking I described, I can't get the memory used above 6.7 GB, even if I try. The memory pressure graphic in Activity Monitor is always green.

If you browse help for Activity monitor and how to find out why a system is slow - apple (at least in snow leopard) admits your hard drive may be fragmented.

Its a long term - since the beginning of OSX problem with macs freezing -- and probably is an issue with the actual disk handling kernels -- I have the problem because I purged many little files - you may be having the issue because everything you are doing is overloading the finder/spotlight or other part of the finder.

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Answer 5

John Galt

Level 10

156,062 points

Oct 15, 2016 10:07 PM in response to andbeonetraveler

In the absence of any other problem, the "alignment error" might be disregarded as spurious. However, you already correlated its appearance to slow performance. I suggest you create a Time Machine or equivalent backup, then boot macOS Recovery and completely erase the Mac's internal storage, followed by restoring its contents from your Time Machine backup. I recommend the creation of two or more redundant backups before contemplating that action.

There is no reason you cannot simultaneously run as many programs as you want to run. I have tried and failed to induce the kind of failures you describe by running literally every program installed on my Macs, simultaneously. If available memory is insufficient at any time, performance degradation will be accompanied by Activity Monitor's unitless "Memory Pressure" graph becoming "red" at least temporarily. If that does not occur, then memory is not a limiting factor.

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