Mini-Tutorial: The dreaded spinning pinwheel; Avoiding unresponsiveness/slow-downs in Mac OS X 




Patience may be a virtue, but in the case of Mac OS X's dreaded spinning pinwheel process indicator, even the most tranquil users can find themselves more than a tad anxious for the standard arrow cursor to re-appear and normal system operation to appear.
While virtually all users will experience a spinning pinwheel (and associated unresponsiveness from a specific application, a group of applications or the entire system) from time to time, there are a number of measures you can take to lessen the occurrence of these incidents and eliminate standstills. 
Add more RAM The primary cause for overall slowness in Mac OS X and unresponsiveness from applications is a lack of adequate memory. For most users, 512 MB is the amount of RAM at which most unresponsiveness and spinning-wheel sessions dissipate. In other words, 384 MB of RAM may leave you in a lurch, while 640 MB of RAM won't provide a huge speed increase over 512 MB. 
As an application uses up available RAM, Mac OS X's virtual memory system allocates swap file space on the root file system (your startup disk) for use by the application. With too little physical RAM, this swapping will occur more frequently resulting in two consequences: 
• Since all mass storage devices (hard drives, flash memory, etc.) are significantly slower at moving data in and out than physical RAM, applications will suffer a significant speed hit and stall more often. 
• Your startup drive will be more occupied with providing virtual memory services to Mac OS X than performing its normal functions (reading/writing files), resulting in slower disk activity and overall lackluster performance. This is also referred to as "disk thrashing." 
If you are buying a new Mac, make sure it is equipped with at least 512 MB from the factory, or purchase additional memory modules from a trusted vendor and install them once your system arrives. If you're currently running a Mac OS X system with less than 512 MB of RAM and experiencing frequent slow-downs, consider adding more memory. 
Make sure you have enough free space on your startup volume Mac OS X requires at least 10 percent of the volume it is contained on as free space in order to maintain the integrity of the file system. However, even with 10 percent free space, Mac OS X's use swap files - as well as extra data generated by third-party application caches, etc. - can quickly put you back into a position of possible directory/file damage and increased incidence of spinning pinwheels. 
Realistically, 20 percent of your Mac OS X startup volume should be kept clear in order to achieve best performance and avoid disk problems. 
Delete problematic .plist files Mac OS X uses .plist (preference) files to store various information about applications. Applications routinely interact with their respective .plist files, and when these small dockets become corrupt, individual programs may be more prone to the spinning pinwheel. 
If you are having these slow-down issues with a specific application, try deleting its .plist file. It will generally be located in the ~/Library/Preferences folder, and labeled as follows: 
com.(name of developer).(name of product).plist [For instance, com.adobe.Reader7.0.plist for Adobe Reader 7.0]. 
Simply drag the potentially offending .plist file to the trash, re-launch the hampered application, and check for continuation of problems. In some cases, applications will have several .plist files, so make sure you check for any that contain the product name. Also, note that you may lose some settings or other personal data used by specific applications when these files are deleted. 
Alternatively, if you're not sure which application is slowing down your Mac or you'd like to check for any existing, but unnoticeable issues, there is a freeware utility called "Preferential Treatment" that will check for some elements of .plist file corruption. 
Limiting the number of open applications If you aren't able to purchase additional memory, or if your system continues to experience routine slow-downs despite the presence of adequate RAM, try limiting the number of open applications. 
Every open application, even if it is not performing any noticeable tasks, uses a portion of the Mac OS X virtual memory block. Closing unnecessary or infrequently used applications can therefore result in a reduction of spinning-wheel episodes. 
More uptime, more stalls: Restart more often Although Mac OS X was designed to run 24 hours a day without a restart and does so well in most cases, some user set-ups may -- for varying reasons -- benefit from more frequent restarts. 
Dealing with most notorious culprit: Safari The application implicated in far more spinning-wheel stall instances than any other is Apple's own Safari. Since Safari is tied to so many critical and shared components of Mac OS X -- the WebKit, Java, QuickTime, etc. -- this is somewhat expected. That said, there are a few workarounds that can lessen this behavior. 
Disable AutoFill forms A number of user cases have shown that disabling the automatic form filling feature in Safari's preferences can dramatically reduce the number of stalls. In order to do this, open the preferences pane in the "Safari" menu, click on "AutoFill" and de-select all of the available options. 
Use keyboard shortcuts instead of mouse clicks For reasons unknown, Safari is sometimes more prone to stalls when mouse clicks are used to perform actions like closing windows or moving to different text boxes on Web forms. Using keyboard shortcuts instead (Command-W to close a window, or the tab key to move between form fields) has been shown to avoid this particular type of problem. 
Perform an Archive and Install process As a last resort, performing an Archive and Install process will sometimes eliminate inexplicable stalls that may be due to file corruption. 
The process will remove all of your current Mac OS X version's vital (and potentially problem-causing) components, and replace them with the components of a fresh copy provided by the Mac OS X disc that shipped with your system, or a retail Mac OS X disc. Unfortunately, this means you will lose some system settings and some or all third-party system add-ons. 
To begin the process, insert your Mac OS X CD or DVD, as indicated above. Restart your machine and hold down the "C" key to boot from the newly inserted disc. Follow the on-screen instructions, and after accepting the license agreement, click "Options." Select "Archive and Install," and check the "Preserve User and Network Settings" option if you'd like to do so. 
After the installation process is complete, you will be left with an earlier version of Mac OS X. However, you will likely want to bring your installation back up to the current version of Mac OS X. 
Various updates, back through Mac OS X Combo Update 10.2.5, are available from Apple's Support Download page. 
Restore your settings and appropriate third-party software, and you will find your system with approximately the same status as prior to the Archive and Install 
Your old system will be stored in folder called "Previous Systems" at the root level of your startup volume. If you would later like to delete this folder, you may need to change its permissions.




 

Mini-Tutorial: The dreaded spinning pinwheel; Avoiding unresponsiveness/slow-downs in Mac OS X | 19 comments | Create New Account 
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Mini-Tutorial: The dreaded spinning pinwheel; Avoiding unresponsiveness/slow-downs in Mac OS XAuthored by: GP_Racer on Thursday, March 10 2005 @ 07:14 AM PSTHere at work we call it the Spinning Pizza of Death.
[ Reply to This ]Mini-Tutorial: The dreaded spinning pinwheel; Avoiding unresponsiveness/slow-downs in Mac OS XAuthored by: 605dave on Thursday, March 10 2005 @ 08:22 AM PSTBoy this couldn't be more timely for me. I have two identical dual 2G G5s,
one office and one in the studio. The studio one has slowed to a crawl, and
the office one is fine. Tons of ram in both. I will follow advice on this page
and post my results.
[ Reply to This ]Mini-Tutorial: The dreaded spinning pinwheel; Avoiding unresponsiveness/slow-downs in Mac OS XAuthored by: kennedye on Thursday, March 10 2005 @ 10:50 AM PSTIt's also worth mentioning that upgrading to a faster hard drive can help to eliminate beachballing as well. Upgrading your laptop to a 5400 or 7200 RPM drive, or adding a Raptor S-ATA drive to your G5, can result in a significant speedup for all operations.
[ Reply to This ]Mini-Tutorial: The dreaded spinning pinwheel; Avoiding unresponsiveness/slow-downs in Mac OS XAuthored by: jkmscott on Thursday, March 10 2005 @ 01:11 PM PSTThe last step in the Archive and Install process, "restore your settings and
appropriate third-party software", sounds prohibitively difficult. Does it really
mean that you have to reinstall all software products and updates that are not
part of OS X?
[ Reply to This ] • Mini-Tutorial: The dreaded spinning pinwheel; Avoiding unresponsiveness/slow-downs in Mac OS X - Authored by: dementia13 on Monday, June 27 2005 @ 08:15 PM PDT 
• • Archive & ReInstall - Multiple users - Authored by: Notaclone on Thursday, June 30 2005 @ 04:31 PM PDTMini-Tutorial: The dreaded spinning pinwheel; Avoiding unresponsiveness/slow-downs in Mac OS XAuthored by: cheapFanDave on Thursday, March 10 2005 @ 02:49 PM PSTWhat about using Activity Monitor and killing unnecessary processes?

I had disconnected my radioSHARK and Wacom Tablet, but I noticed that the radioSHARKServer, TabletDriver and InkServer were all still running. I killed them all with no ill effect (I didn't notice any positive effect either).

But what about the other ones? Are multiple copies needed?

Here's a great assignment for MacFixIt:

Create a reference of the processes that run in OS X. At least the ones used by Apple since third-party processes are usually self-explanatory. This reference would include a brief description of each process' function, what the appearance of multiple copies means, what the consequence of killing the process is, what normal running parameters (CPU %, real and virtual RAM) are and under what conditions should you consider kiiling an out of control process.

This would be great information and would be a worthy resource in the tradition of the MacFixIt site.

Oh, you're welcome for the brilliant idea -- I got a million of 'em.
[ Reply to This ]Mini-Tutorial: The dreaded spinning pinwheel; Avoiding unresponsiveness/slow-downs in Mac OS XAuthored by: MeherallyM on Thursday, March 10 2005 @ 04:32 PM PSTWhat has worked best for me on this issue is file system check. Shutdown
your mac, restart and press cmmd-s when you hear the start up chime.

keep holding until you see white on black gobbeldy gook scrolling down. at
the end of the line type in fsck -y, hit return.

if at the end of the run it says file was modified, then run it again untill you
get an 'ok'.

type reboot, the mac will boot as before. this works everytime and my
recommendation is that this shoudl be done as a routine maintenance.
[ Reply to This ]Mini-Tutorial: The dreaded spinning pinwheel; Avoiding unresponsiveness/slow-downs in Mac OS XAuthored by: scotty321 on Thursday, March 10 2005 @ 10:14 PM PSTHere's a great tech info article on running fsck:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214
[ Reply to This ] • Mini-Tutorial: The dreaded spinning pinwheel; Avoiding unresponsiveness/slow-downs in Mac OS X - Authored by: MacUnikørnâ„¢ on Friday, March 11 2005 @ 10:52 AM PSTNetworks and spinning pizzasAuthored by: jholman on Friday, March 11 2005 @ 10:54 AM PSTWhen browsing files on my work network in column view, I have
inadvertently clicked on aliases that are attached to files on volumes that no
longer exist or are no longer share points. Doing so will initiate a two-minute
pinwheel, as the Finder fruitlessly searches the network for the missing
volume. Very frustrating. Clean up those obsolete aliases, but do it in list or
icon view.
[ Reply to This ]How to check whether you're low on RAM or disk spaceAuthored by: hamarkus on Friday, March 11 2005 @ 12:45 PM PSTUsing Activity Monitor to look at the memory usage:
- if the red and yellow part take up almost the whole circle, you are absolutely at the limit (for me the red and yellow part is usually around between 400 and 700 MB).
- if you often have more than let's say 15% in green, you are not really using your Mac to it's full potential, just keep a few more apps open in the Dock, there is no need to quit them (if the are not processor hogs like Word)

About low disk space:
- check the sum of all files in /var/vm (2 GB in my case), your free disk space should be always higher than it. If you want to burn CDs or DVDs, you should add the ~700 MB or 4.2 GB to that number.
[ Reply to This ](null) process eats cycles: what is it?!Authored by: Gib Henry on Saturday, March 12 2005 @ 08:32 AM PSTI have a process named (null) that appears in Activity Monitor and appears to
cause or contribute to the spinning pizza wheel. It eats up 5-45%
of CPU time, 38MB of real memory, 1.14GB of virtual, and 31MB of
shared memory. Its parent process is WindowServer, it has 14 threads and
232 ports, CPU time since I restarted 2 days ago is 53:42, 44790482 context
switches, 27513 faults, 1970 pageins, and gazillions of Mach Messages In/
Out and Mach/Unix System Calls. What the hell is this? Is it a virus or worm?
I can't quit it, I have to force-quit it from Activity Monitor; nothing bad seems
to happen, but it comes back after a while. Weird! What is it???

---
Gib Henry
[ Reply to This ]Why has this PERSISTED FOR 3 Generatons of OS X ???: The dreaded spinning pinwheelAuthored by: CounterPoint on Sunday, March 13 2005 @ 09:02 PM PSTOK, I'm gonna be the contrarian and protagonist on this issue, well .... because I'm pretty damn fed up with it.

I've been in IT for more than 15 years, I administer UNIX and Linux based Servers, we also have Macs and PCs in the office and I've used Apples since my ][e Pro. I also run Linux on both Macs and PC's at home along with OS X on a few of my old and new Macs. I've used OS X since the Beta 10.0.

I want to know exactly WHY Apple continues to allow (or maybe they created it) this "dreaded spinning pinwheel" of death to perpetuate through FOUR GENERATIONS of OS X, and it seems that it's only far gotten worse in Jaguar and Panther?!

This problem DOES NOT exist on any Mac I've installed Linux on and it certainly doesn't happen with UNIX, even installed on a plain-ol x86 based desktop! (First off, ANY UNIX admin knows you always create a "swap partition #1" on ANY UNIX install, something I also do for Linux installs). Why hasn't Apple endorsed this, if OS X is so UNIX based? Apple even stupidly put OS 9 on the same partition as OS X on new computers till recently! I always separated them on office Macs and on my Macs at home.

I don't "buy" the 512MB RAM solution either. As a test a while back, my YDL 2.0 and 3.0 (Yellow Dog Linux) installs ran happily on as little as 128MB and great with 256MB on a G3 350 and G4 400 Power Mac! If 512MB is so necessary, WHY is Apple only putting 256MB of RAM (128MB until recently) in most new G4 and G5's ??? (Although I suspect greed is part of the reason). I have a G4 Dual 1.42GHz PM with 2GB of RAM ... and I still get the "dreaded spinning pinwheel" of death.

I'm not a "coder", only an IT Admin, so I can't tear apart OS X to the guts, but I do know Linux and UNIX, and I postulate that OS X is a poorly written version of UNIX with too much fluff, not enough headroom and poor coding. We've certainly seen the "brilliant" job Apple has done on some botched updates.

OS X 10.0 was purer, but had bugs. OS X 10.1.5 was very clean and VERY speedy compared to snail slow 10.2 and 10.3. I never had a serious problem with 10.1.5 and it's too bad Apple went down the wrong path with 10.2 and up.

Personally, I'll take Yellow Dog Linux over OS X anyday, except that there just aren't the Apps that X has .... too bad. So I still ask, looking for a few legitimate reasons, "why has Apple let this problem perpetuate?"

Course it's still better than all the Viruses, Trojans and Spyware on Windoze.
[ Reply to This ]Mini-Tutorial: The dreaded spinning pinwheel; Avoiding unresponsiveness/slow-downs in Mac OS XAuthored by: WhiteDog on Monday, March 14 2005 @ 06:52 PM PSTIf you want to save yourself some time and confusion reinstalling and
updating some third party items when you do an archive and install, you can
use Alfred to move many of them from the local domain (admin) to your user
domain. They will then be preserved in your user folder through the achieve
and install and subsequent system updates. Alfred lists things like Preference
Panes, Application Enhancers, Palm Conduits, Desktop Pictures and many
others. Items that are part of the system are locked and cannot be
manipulated by Alfred. It’s also a great tool for finding duplicate items and
weeding them out.

---
Don't anthropomorphize computers.
They hate that.
[ Reply to This ]Mini-Tutorial: The dreaded spinning pinwheel; Avoiding unresponsiveness/slow-downs in Mac OS XAuthored by: swross on Saturday, March 26 2005 @ 07:46 PM PSTPerform an Archive and Install process As a last resort, performing an Archive and Install process will sometimes eliminate inexplicable stalls that may be due to file corruption.

The process will remove all of your current Mac OS X version's vital (and potentially problem-causing) components, and replace them with the components of a fresh copy provided by the Mac OS X disc that shipped with your system, or a retail Mac OS X disc. Unfortunately, this means you will lose some system settings and some or all third-party system add-ons.

In the last sentence above, what is meant by "third-party system add-ons" please?

I have been intermittently getting the spinning ball, sometimes right after booting, when only finder is running. so far i've beeeen able to restart and get passed it- after deleting caches (MacJanitor, fonts), restarting it seems to be ok. i also repair permissions and run disk warrior 3.02 a lot (which seems to point to something not good).

i wanted to run the combo 10.3.8 update over the same OS version but have been nervous to do so. will it even work? and if i do the "archive and reinstall" I am afraid to lose too much. I have been thiking I'll wait for Tiger. And i am about to buy a laptop (powerbook 17) so i have a back up if things get really bad. (i keep my data on external drives).

Depending on what, and how much, I lose it may be a real bummer to reinstall the OS. I feel as if I've been making some progress by looking for possibly issues and making small changes that seem to work somewhat.

BTW: I personally believe that fonts may play a part of my particular problems, although they seem to have started at the 10.3.6 or 7 update. One issue was font conflicts caused by having fonts in several folders. This seems to affect duration of boot time, MS office launches and has affected certain applications starting, and even caused the installer to hang, and the dock - and finder - to malfunction. I've tried a lot of things. Today I moved all my fonts from my "user | library | fonts" folder into the main library | fonts folder. Many were duplicates. After a reboot my boot time was 30% faster. When I launched MS Word - which since the 2004 upgrade took a long time - with the "optimizing font menu performance" hangup, I saw a warning indicating a corrupt font (which I deleted).

I knew i had problems with fonts, and tried to fix it with Font Book, which turned out to be very scary. I suggest anyone doing this first check not to delete system fonts, or fonts required by certain apps, which Font Book will not ot prevent. In fact, some of the Safari issues I've seen may be related to fonts (Optima was one, I think). And I notiticed the app names in my dock, at one point, were missing characters until i moved fonts, clear font caches and rebooted.

however, i am thinking of a clean update to resolve possible corruption. What apps andsettings am i likely lose? I can't afford to be down for even a day. I am about to buy a P 17 which will take the pressure off, but still it's a lot of work. Or maybe I'll wait for Tiger.

seems like I spend an awful lot of time these days checking, repairing persmissions and running DW.

thanks.

The basic system's a dual 800 G4 (quicksilver) with 1.5 GB RAM, two internal ATA 80 GB drives (one has my OS and all my apps and the other has libraries of audio samples and efx, itunes, iphoto images, etc.)and two external FW drives (120 and 300) for my data. Hope this helps someone.
[ Reply to This ]The 10% IssueAuthored by: Alex_6 on Sunday, May 22 2005 @ 06:33 AM PDTI take issue with the following statement:

"Mac OS X requires at least 10 percent of the volume it is contained on as free
space in order to maintain the integrity of the file system."

This -- or something similar -- has been aggressively asserted on several
Mac-oriented boards and discussion lists. What does it really mean? It means
that, if you run Mac OS X from a 250GB drive, and your free space falls under
25GB, you are very likely to loose data.

Let's get one thing straight. This is not a small thing. It implies that HFS+, the
Mac OS X filesystem, has a major flaw, a basic bug of huge proportions.

Now, here's the problem. So far, no-one has been able to produce a single
book, a single serious magazine article, a single published technical paper or
report which discusses this issue.

Consider what this means. The Mac OS X filesystem, HFS+, is over 5 years
old. Its precursor, HFS, is almost 20 years old. During this time, they have
been subjected to fairly close scrutiny, of both the friendly and the unfriendly
kind. Reams of books and articles have been published on every aspect of the
Mac (the Library of Congress catalogue lists over 1400 titles!), and among
them there are several titles dedicated specifically to Mac hard disk
management. How come none of them mentions this problem?

But, wait, there's more. I searched the manuals of several reputable Mac disk
utilities (DiskWizard, TechTool, Drive 10, Drive Genius), and, again, no
mention of such a problem. Why?

The _only_ reference which has been mentioned in connexion to this problem
is a post by MMT3 on the Mac OS X Tips & Hints forum on this board. I
severely criticised the original version of this post, which contained a number
of factual errors which suggested that the author hadn't actually read Apple
tech note TN1150, the most detailed specification of HFS+ available to the
public. The post has been replaced by a revised version, but the revised
version still contradicts TN1150. Strangely enough, although this post is
presumably authored by a MicroMat technician, and although it begins with
"MicroMat strongly recommends...", I have been unable to find any such
recommendation or discussion in the manuals of either TechTool Pro or Drive
10.

Compare this issue to the Panther Firewire bug, and consider how quickly the
latter was caught, reported, and eventually acknowledged by Apple (if only to
blame it on others).

Since I couldn't find any reliable reference on this issue, I did a little test. I ran
a G4 on a little less than 0.1% free space for 48 hours. As expected, quite a
slow-down -- but no catalogue corruption. I created in Terminal a loop which
ate up disk space until I ran out of it. At first there was a warning from Mac
OS X, then Terminal reported the device had run out of space -- but, upon
restart, again, no filesystem corruption.

Of course, I can't prove that such a bug doesn't exist in HFS+ -- it is usually
rather difficult to prove a negative. But I think that it is incumbent on those
who claim, like the author of this tutorial, that it does exist, to provide
adequate support for such a statement. Until then, I think it should be
regarded as, at best, a speculation, if not an urban legend.

Note: I have no affiliation of any kind with Apple, or indeed with anyone else
in the computer industry. I am simply a Mac user who wants to know whether
he is using a reliable operating system or not. And I did try to get in touch
with both the person mooted to be the author of this tutorial, and with the
MacFixIt editors, but neither have replied to my messages.


Thursday, March 10 2005 @ 03:30 AM PS 

Posted: Mon - September 12, 2005 at 09:22 PM        

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