04-28-2011, 04:14 PM

I bought a MacBook Pro about 2 months ago and I have been mostly satisfied with it's performance until about a week ago.

Lately my itunes has been randomly pausing (even when it's the only program running) and I often get the beach ball while I'm browsing the internet or using pretty much any program.

My hard drive is 250gb (141gb remaining) and I have 4gb of memory. You probably know the specs, but I'm running OSX 10.6.7 on a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor.

I feel like most of my problems/slowness started after installed Transmission, but not immediately. I have been slowly ripping all of my cd's to itunes as well and the problems seemed to have started after hitting about 55gb of music in itunes. First itunes randomly started pausing (almost consistently at 15-19secs into a song, with more sporadic pauses throughout), and then all programs became noticeably slower.

What is going on here???

(I'm sure you need more information from me. I'm just not sure what exactly, so please ask.)

04-28-2011, 05:37 PM

try uninstalling transmission or use time machine

04-28-2011, 11:58 PM

try running your activity monitor and see where your RAM is going.

get a screenshot of it if you can and post it here so that people can see and help you out more further.

cheers!!!

04-29-2011, 01:23 AM

iTunes shouldn't have an issue with a 55GB library. I have a 70GB library and know people with libraries much larger.

Once we see what is happening in Activity Monitor we should be able to diagnose more.

04-29-2011, 04:23 AM

So I don't see anything that seems to be out of the ordinary. I noticed that when I first pulled up the activity monitor that cvsmcomp.... was running but was using 0 disk space and no longer appears in the list. I have been watching the activity monitor and my Itunes pauses and there is no spike in memory usage. I have no no idea what's going on.

04-29-2011, 12:53 PM

It's possible you've hit a bad block on the drive. I've seen a number of drives that work beautifully until you get to a certain capacity, and then act flaky as all get out. Does the issue persist if you boot to other media? Do you have a backup of your data?

04-29-2011, 01:28 PM

Sorry for the stupidity, but how do I/what do you mean boot to other media?

I don't have a backup yet, but I have an external HDD I could backup to. Do I just use Time Machine for this (haven't explored that yet)?

04-29-2011, 01:49 PM

Correct... boot the computer normally, plug in the external hard drive, and launch Disk Utility from your /Applications/Utilities folder. Erase the drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Once the erase is complete, Time Machine will most likely launch automatically and ask if you would like to use that drive for backups. Click OK, and in a couple of minutes, your backup will begin.

As far as booting to other media, you can boot to the system CD that came with your computer, running disk utility and verifying or repairing the drive. You can also choose to install the OS to your external drive so you can boot to it for testing. On startup, if you hold down the Option key, you'll be presented with all options for boot devices.

04-29-2011, 01:57 PM

In Activity Monitor, where is says "My Processes", change that the "All Processes" and sort by %CPU to see if anything is occupying your CPU. Do the same for memory. Does anything look out of the ordinary (any "weird" processes)?

04-30-2011, 03:16 PM

Nothing looks out of the ordinary, here are a couple more screenshots. My computer was definitely acting up during these screenshots. However, I did notice that Itunes jumped up to around 60% cpu usage for a quick second, and then went back to ~10. All the while it was pausing and playing randomly.


Haven't tried booting to other media yet. That's next...

05-02-2011, 01:27 AM

So I just booted from the system CD and ran a repair on both the hard drive and permissions. Disc checked out ok but I had many errors in the permissions. One said "Open error..." and the rest said "Permissions differ...".

What would cause this/what does it mean?

I ran the repair and so far so good, no itunes pausing and Safari running well. Hope this solved my problem.

Thanks for the help.

05-02-2011, 01:36 AM

Just when I thought it was fixed... My Itunes just paused twice in less than 30 secs. I currently have 4 safari windows open and am running Itunes (obviously). I was simply reading a safari page, and none of my safari windows were loading. I don't understand it. Maybe if I was trying to load 4 web pages at once and run itunes I could understand (but I would still think it should be able to handle that).

Help!!

05-03-2011, 12:21 AM

Any other ideas??