Solving Beachball ****

I have been a Mac user since 2011, now have 1 MBP, 1 Mini, and 1 Air.
The MBP is my personal machine and the most heavily used.
It is a 2.3ghz, 8GB Ram, 128GB SSD with 70GB free.
I back it up with Time Machine every day, to HD attached to Airport Extreme.

I began getting frequent 15 - 30 second beachballs, to the point that it was
very irritating.
I was running Mavericks. I decided to install Yosemite as a potential solution.
I did a clean install, reloaded my data and settings, and began using the system.

I immediately had the same frequency of beachballs.
I then went in to try to cut back on anything that was running consuming resources.

While I was reloading my data from backup, I had noticed the
resources that Spotlight was taking, so I unloaded it.

I also had previously run Activity Monitor from startup.
I turned Activity Monitor off.



My Beachballs are gone.
I have been running for 5 days now without a single ball.

I do not have any idea whether it was Spotlight or Activity Monitor.
I just know that I am so happy with no BB, that I am not touching anything.
Hopefully, they are solved, and didn't "just go away".

John

MBP, 2.3 ghz, 8GB, 128GB SSD Yosemite
Mini, 2.3 ghz, 8GB, 500GB Disk Mavericks
MBA 1.4 ghz, 8GB, 256GB SSD Mavericks

I can answer the beach ball issues see mac os x yosemite on mbp takes more ram and processes

You have 8gig of ram…which is pretty good & usually will keep the beach-ball problem to a minimum.

But believe it or not…the occasional restart of the computer helps big time with beach balls.

- Nick

How long was it between the time you changed OS and when you shut down Spotlight? Spotlight has been known to hog resources until it finishes indexing the drives. That can sometimes take longer than expected.

I've always suspected that when Spotlight took a really long time to index one or more of the drives was having directory issues. Have you checked them to see if that is what was giving Spotlight problems?

What happens if you create a new user and run from there as a test?

I restart quite often. At least 1 time every 2 or 3 days.
The SSD makes restarting pretty quick, so no reason to avoid.
I have also noticed that Yosemite shuts down quicker, so another reason
for more frequent shut downs.

That is a good idea with the separate user for testing.
I will experiment with that some.
Spotlight running is an all users or no users, isn't it?

I shut Spotlight off after it had indexed all of the data reloaded after the
Yosemite install.


I would really like to get a feel for the situations and conditions that invoke the
beachballs. I think that they are the single biggest problem difference
between OS/X and Windows. I have never missed the Windows foibles,
but the random nuisance of the BB takes some of the luster off of OS/X

Thanks for the suggestions.
John

Only the MBP is causing this problem?

Next time you boot start up in Recovery Mode and under Utilities, run Repair Disk and see what is reported.

I booted from recovery disk.
Ran Disk utility
Last messages were
Volume appears to be OK
File system check exit code is 0
Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required

No further message from repair disk.

Ran repair permissions.
It found lots of repairs to do.
all of them in the library/printers area.

Not sure how this could have gotten whacked in the 6 days this operating system
has lived on this computer?

John

You can read this:

Mac OS X: Disk Utility's Repair Disk Permissions messages that you can safely ignore - Apple Support

Probably most of those errors are in the "safe to ignore" category.

MacInWin said:

Probably most of those errors are in the "safe to ignore" category.

Click to expand...

What a silly document for Apple to publish. If it had been something like 5-10 messages that could be ignored…ok. But I counted them all…and the list contained approx. 150 things that could be ignored. This article reads like the "fine print" of a legal document that took 20 lawyers too many to write!

It's great that Apple made this info available…but it clearly is not an easy article to read. It almost borders on being as unreadable as a "wall of text". Apple usually is all about making things easy (not this time).

Anyway…still good info if someone has the patience to read thru it…and not fall asleep!

- Nick

This reminds me of an article I came across a while ago and wondered if would still work for some proper permissions repairs etc.???
Want to really Repair Permissions on your Mac? Try this. - TechBlog

But I have no idea why I always seem to get some permission "errors" about some printer stuff that keep reoccurring and nothing has been changed, and they were "fixed" when DU was last run.

It really is something that Apple should address, but I'm not going to hold my breath, especially as a Mavericks user and I won't even mention Snow Leopard.

EDIT:
Here's more of a GUI description of the process:
http://pondini.org/OSX/Password.html

Macworld's website did an article some time ago that listed some Mac maintenance myths that had evolved over the years. I think there were five with permissions repair being one of them.

Their conclusion regarding permission repairs was as follows:

But contrary to popular belief, repairing permissions—a procedure which simply resets permissions to a known state—works only on a particular subset of OS X system files. It doesn’t affect user files, nor does it affect third-party files or programs. In other words, it’s unlikely that regularly repairing permissions will prevent problems.

Click to expand...

They did concede that as a troubleshooting tool it can be useful. There are a few links to other good info regarding permission repair in the article. http://www.macworld.com/article/1133684/maintenance_intro.html

Slydude said:

Macworld's website did an article some time ago that listed some Mac maintenance myths that had evolved over the years. I think there were five with permissions repair being one of them.

Click to expand...

I haven't investigated enough to agree or disagree with what MacWorld wrote.

But one thing I can say is...that "Repair Disk Permissions" button in Disk Utility certainly would be a great place to begin if someone were looking for how such a "maintenance myth" got started!

- Nick