Spinning beachball

[jeffcp]

I run a IMAC Snow Leopard 10.6.8. A few weeks ago the "beachball" started spinning only just every so often but it's getting more and more. Now it seems like every time I click or scroll with the mouse it starts and lasts for around 10 seconds. I've used onyx to clean the caches etc. My system memory on the activity monitor is VM 132.65gb. size free--9.3mb and active 915mb. wired 673 mb inactive 461mb. The page ins 1.39gb page outs 1.41gb. swap used 2.82gb. I'm not really sure what all that means. Spinning beachball came on a few times as I typed this message. Thank you

[LauraR]

Hi...hopefully someone with a Mac can give you a better answer, but I did find this on a search:

http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/sbbod.html

The Spinning Beach Ball of Death

The spinning wait cursor or spinning disc pointer — where your mouse pointer becomes the rotating color wheel or "spinning beach ball" seen above — generally indicates that your Mac® is engaged in a processor-intensive activity. For example, applying a Gaussian blur to an image in Adobe® Photoshop® is a processor-intensive activity.
In most cases, the "beach ball" disappears within several seconds. However, there are cases when the "beach ball" spins protractedly, a condition colloquially known as "The Spinning Beach Ball of Death" (SBBOD).

http://www.macworld.com/article/1151...llofdeath.html

The most basic reason the beach ball appears is because your Mac's hardware can’t handle the software task at hand. It’s not unusual to see the occasional beach ball when you Mac is performing complex computing tasks. Even everyday activities—such as syncing with iTunes—can temporarily overtax the CPU.
To find out if the CPU is a bottleneck on performance, use Activity Monitor (/Applications/Utilities) to monitor CPU usage.


Software causes

Even if your hardware is adequate, an application or process can still monopolize your system. Perhaps an application is hung in an infinite loop or it’s simply inefficient. Maybe a background process is running amok, hogging CPU cycles. An errant third-party plug-in can turn a fast application into a slug. Whatever the reason, the program takes over the CPU and up pops the Ball.

[Colemanguy]

Have you tried rebooting or anything? to see if it gets worse or may even improve. Chances are you make need open your disk utility and verify and repair your disk permissions. Thats always a good basic trouble shooting step to take first.

[harmless]

the only other thing to check is the amount of free disk space on your hard drive. if you have less than 10% free space, ie: 25GB free on a 250GB hard drive, that can cause, as some say, erratic system performance. good luck with it.

toodles,
harmless

[Colemanguy]

Originally Posted by harmless

the only other thing to check is the amount of free disk space on your hard drive. if you have less than 10% free space, ie: 25GB free on a 250GB hard drive, that can cause, as some say, erratic system performance. good luck with it.

toodles,
harmless

Wrong, this is a mac, not a windows pc

[harmless]

uummm, well, true, he does have an imac, not a pc. but imacs only have one hard drive which is never large enough... i was always running out of room with my imac, so i upgraded myself to a mac pro.

Small Dog Electronics have good newsletters, in one of them, http://blog.smalldog.com/techtails/tt689/
they list : 10 Tips for Dealing with Unexpected Computer Slowdowns
tip # 1 is -> Any Mac will slow down when its hard drive is almost full, regardless of processor speed. Simply moving some of your data (especially media files like movies, video podcasts, etc) to an external drive can greatly improve a Mac’s responsiveness.

the main page for their newsletters

a more technical page is at the X lab :
Problems from insufficient RAM and free hard disk space

and if one searches the apple forums or googles -> recommended free disk space on startup disk -> the number thrown around is usually 15%

anyway, it's just a thought, and something to check in the process of troubleshooting.

++++++++++++++

here is something i found a long time ago that always makes me smile

How many forum members does it takes to change a light bulb?
1 to change the light bulb and to post that the light bulb has been changed
14 to share similar experiences of changing light bulbs and how the light bulb could have been changed differently
7 to caution about the dangers of changing light bulbs
1 to move it to the Lighting section
2 to argue then move it to the Electricals section
7 to point out spelling/grammar errors in posts about changing light bulbs
5 to flame the spell checkers
3 to correct spelling/grammar flames
6 to argue over whether it's lightbulb or light bulb ... another 6 to condemn those 6 as stupid
2 industry professionals to inform the group that the proper term is lamp
15 know-it-alls who claim they were in the industry, and that light bulb is perfectly correct
19 to post that this forum is not about light bulbs and to please take this discussion to a lightbulb forum
11 to defend the posting to this forum saying that we all use light bulbs and therefore the posts are relevant to this forum
36 to debate which method of changing light bulbs is superior, where to buy the best light bulbs, what brand of light bulbs work best for this technique and what brands are faulty
7 to post URL's where one can see examples of different light bulbs
4 to post that the URL's were posted incorrectly and then post the corrected URL's
3 to post about links they found from the URL's that are relevant to this group which makes light bulbs relevant to this group
13 to link all posts to date, quote them in their entirety including all headers and signatures, and add Me too
5 to post to the group that they will no longer post because they cannot handle the light bulb controversy
4 to say didn't we go through this already a short time ago?
13 to say do a Google search on light bulbs before posting questions about light bulbs
1 forum lurker to respond to the original post 6 months from now and start it all over again.
1 mod to lock it down after it goes off-track for the nth time...


toodles,
harmless

[Colemanguy]

http://www.macworld.com/article/1151...llofdeath.html This says less then ten gig free on your drive, idk, but would definitly suggest repairing your disk/file permissions as a first step. Then following the rest of the steps in the article.