What's the best way to handle a beach ball?

I'm editing a 5GB text file and I only have 8GB RAM. Textastic didn't like it. I've been waiting on a beachball to disappear for over 30 minutes now.

On Windows, I'd hit ctrl-alt-delete, bring up Task Manager and then kill the program. How can I do that on the Mac? (And is that the best way to deal with this?) The way, I tried to access Force Quit, but I can't click the Apple in the corner because the cursor stays as a beach ball.

Also, what is the best way to edit this file?

bdurfee said:

How can I do that on the Mac?

Click to expand...

There are a number of reasons for getting "beachballs" on a Mac. Since you have 8gig of ram…that helps. But there are other factors that can cause beach balls. Please give the "beachballs" link in my signature a read for some of the reasons.

- Nick

The way I remember it is C-E-O for Command-Option-Escape. That brings up the Force Quit window. (Similar to Windows Task Manager)

I seem to remember that C-E was set to something else, so it might be picky about the sequence.

Or Option-right-click on the app in the Dock, select Force Quit.

cradom said:

Or Option-right-click on the app in the Dock, select Force Quit.

Click to expand...

Do you mean Option-Click or Right Click? (I cant' test it right now, but I seem to recall a simple Right Click will do it.)

Right-click gives you Quit.
Option-right-click gives you force quit.
It also changes Hide to Hide Others.

And to complete the options for Force Quit; Click on the Apple Icon in the top left Menu Bar. From the drop down, choose "Force Quit".

Ian

cradom said:

Right-click gives you Quit.
Option-right-click gives you force quit.

Click to expand...

I think if an application is not responding, you get Force Quit with a simple right click. Can't force something to hang, so I can't test that, even though I'm at my Mac.

toMACsh said:

I think if an application is not responding, you get Force Quit with a simple right click.

Click to expand...

Yes, that's correct.

Now my puzzle is why Safari was even open, much less not responding. Firefox is my default browser. I had downloaded a Google document from Firefox as an Excel file, so maybe that did it somehow. I wasn't paying attention to the Dock.

i also have difficulties with this colorful swirling ball on my macbook purchased march 2015.

Yosemite 10.10.5-
>I choose not to upgrade to el Capitan until I know for sure issues with Office2016 have been rectified.
8gb ram 1600 MHz DDR3
proc: 1.6 GHz Intel core I5
graphic: intel HD graphic 6000 1536mb

My hard drive is have 30gb free of 120gb space. Mostly movies which I am going to remove and keep on external drive.

I purchased additional 4gb ram and thought that would be sufficient (as suggested on line when I was purchasing) for emailing, pictures and minor applications.
I do not do any major usage on my Macbook (that I am aware of).
I do not work with editing music or stream videos etc which I understood uses up lot of Ram.
Only have Office 2016, Rosetta Stone, Heredis and firefox and chrome browsers on as additional products.

I still get that annoying twirling coloured ball indicating system overload. I keep history and open docs/site closed after each session on Mac so that is not the problem.

Can’t figure out what I am doing wrong to get this ball quite often and sometimes very difficult to get it to stop….gets stuck in preview and word sometimes.

maybe someone can give me some ideas to check out.

lori5060 said:

i also have difficulties with this colorful swirling ball on my macbook purchased march 2015.
… … …
Can’t figure out what I am doing wrong to get this ball quite often and sometimes very difficult to get it to stop….gets stuck in preview and word sometimes.

maybe someone can give me some ideas to check out.

Click to expand...

Start by opening Activity Monitor in your Utilities folder and have a look at the various tabs and options as to what might be going on.

Also, when was the last time you shutdown and rebooted or even tried booting into Safe Boot Mode?? Press and hold down the shift key when you hear the boot chime on a cold boot for a Safe Boot.

PS: Doing any of the latter will help purge a lot of old junk and surplus stuff.

Normally when you get a beach ball, something else is running in the background and needs to finish before it will give up the CPU.
Check what all you have running and see if you can quit some things. Or just wait until whatever is running is finished.

thank you ..... i shall look into those options.

Also, I believe the issues with Office have all been worked out between updates from MS and the latest update to El Capitan. All is working well here.

"What's the best way to handle a beach ball?" I find using both hands is good

Sawday said:

"What's the best way to handle a beach ball?" I find using both hands is good

Click to expand...

Always knock it up the stands behind you so it doesn't end up on the field of play.

cradom said:

Normally when you get a beach ball, something else is running in the background and needs to finish before it will give up the CPU.
...

Click to expand...

A persistent, recurring beach ball (officially called the "spinning wait cursor") normally does not happen solely due to background processing. E.g, you can start an extremely CPU or I/O-intensive process, then while it's running switch to Safari and Safari will not become a beach ball. OS X uses preemptive multitasking so the background process need not finish -- the dispatcher will give each runnable process a time slice.

The beach ball is caused when the foreground process does not handle its events within a few seconds. Several factors can cause that including programming errors in the app or an overloaded system or hardware problems. Of those a programming deficiency in the app is the most common. This is generalizing across all apps, many of which could use improved event processing. The programmer should never allow his app to have a spinning wait cursor under normal conditions. Rather a separate thread should be used to handle those events and indicate to the user via a progress bar or other UI construct that the app is busy doing something. More details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_pinwheel

However in this particular case lori5060 said it happened even with Preview and Word. Those are generally well-written so it more likely indicates a system-wide problem, e.g, intermittently failing hard drive, memory leak consuming page file space, out of disk space, etc. She already checked disk space.

The other advice is good about using Activity Monitor to see what's running, reboot the system, running Disk Utility to verify the disk volume, etc. A persistent, recurring beach ball is not normal and usually indicates something else than the system is a little busy.