How often do you see the beach ball or have programmes 'unexpectadly quit' ?

[gekko513]

I just got a 1.42 GHz Mac mini with 512MB of RAM. I also have a 1GHz PowerBook 12" with 768MB of RAM.

The first couple of days on the Mac mini I thought it was a bit slow, and I saw the beachball a lot more often than on my PowerBook.

This was bugging me a bit, but my Mac mini and I adjusted after a while, and we're now friends most of the time. The trick seems to be to hit cmd+w or even cmd+q a bit more often to keep down the number of windows and applications.

 

[Floyd WHO]

What's a prebinding and how do I fix them

i get the beachball most often in safari, but i find that updating the prebindings regularly dramatically reduces any beachball action. and by dramatic, i mean i hardly ever see it anymore.

as for unexpected quits, mail sometimes quits, but lately ive been having a recurring problem with safari and yahoo. everytime i try to visit yahoo, safari unexpectedly quits. not sure what the deal is.

By reading MR I figued out what permissions were and how to fix them, but prebinding are a first for me. What are they and does disk utility fix them??
As for crashes Iphoto just quit on me trying to import a library across a wireless network but that's the first in a long time.

 

[IJ Reilly]

By reading MR I figued out what permissions were and how to fix them, but prebinding are a first for me. What are they and does disk utility fix them??
As for crashes Iphoto just quit on me trying to import a library across a wireless network but that's the first in a long time.

Here's a brief thread on prebindings:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/99943/

If you ask me, this is first order Mac voodoo. I can't imagine how it could fix a problem not related to a crash during an application installation.

 

[jkeithh]

I don't get that many beachballs, at least not many that last more than a couple seconds. But I get plenty of application quits, especially Word and IE. (No surprise there.) Among non-MS apps, Safari quits on me the most.

I have to agree that Safari is my biggest offender too. Yahoo Messenger ranks second.

 

[Mr. Durden]

I think I'm in the minority here. My G5 very rarely does the beachball thing or quits or freezes up. I do get the beachball for a few seconds every once in a while, but nothing that screws up my system. Over the past year it may have frozen once or twice, and maybe I've gotten the unexpected quit a handful of times (4-5 times). Mostly while using Final Cut.

I've got 4GB RAM, so that may help. (?)

 

[Apple]

I have 512 mb ram and the app that freezes up the most is Safari. Once, I had finder unexpectedly quit, and I had to do a force restart. But that happened like 2 months ago.

 

[IJ Reilly]

I have 512 mb ram and the app that freezes up the most is Safari. Once, I had finder unexpectedly quit, and I had to do a force restart. But that happened like 2 months ago.

You shouldn't have to do a hard shutdown if the Finder quits -- you should still have access to a reboot from the Apple menu. Are you sure that's what happened?

BTW, another useful tip: keep the Activity Monitor in the Dock. Even the Finder goes to la-la land as it does once in a while, you'll probably still have access to the Dock and be able to kill stuck processes. I've seen the WindowServer process get stuck on rare occasions. Kill it from the Activity Monitor and you're back in business.

 

[superbovine]

hey -first excuse my poor spellings.
the main thing, is as the title says - how often do you see the beach ball or have programmes, well, crash?
reading the forum it seems that this hardly ever happens for most people. having had my iBook for around a month, i would say i have programmes crash around 4/5 times, ok much less than my old vaio but still more than i would expect.
second, the beach ball! so annoying! i get this quite often! usually when i want to save an item, which is annoying as i dont see what could be slowing the comp down!? i press 'save' and it takes 10-20 seconds of beach ball to receive the save window. or, when i just tried 'adding photos' to my iPhoto library i had the beack ball for almost 2 minutes! its really annoying!!
is there anything i can do to stop these happening? i have 512 RAM so that should not be a big problem, any other ideas?
thanks, john

Your question is subjective an open to many different answers because you lack specifics program you are using. You problem is probably a function of the program(s) you are using, and what you doing rather than a broad poll of weather or not you get a 'beach ball' or not.

 

[bont]

I have 512 mb ram and the app that freezes up the most is Safari. Once, I had finder unexpectedly quit, and I had to do a force restart. But that happened like 2 months ago.

Sorry for going a bit of topic, but I'm amazed that the username "Apple" hasn't been used before now

 

[yellow]

is there anything i can do to stop these happening? i have 512 RAM so that should not be a big problem, any other ideas?
thanks, john

A lot of it has to do with what applications you're using that beachball.

A beachball is thrown up by the UIServer when an application isn't responding in a timely manner. There could be "legitimate" reasons for this, a slow network, a carbonized app, a poorly written app, no free CPU cycles..

 

[john_satc]

Your question is subjective an open to many different answers because you lack specifics program you are using. You problem is probably a function of the program(s) you are using, and what you doing rather than a broad poll of weather or not you get a 'beach ball' or not.

hi, ok ill be more specific.
i get the beachball when trying to save in iWorks mainly, however i do often see the beachball when using iPhoto. Crashing occurs especially with safari, ms word- which i have now uninstalled, and iWorks.

Some people have mentioned having too many aplications running. Most of my beach balls/crashes occur when iTunes, Mail, iWorks, safari and messenger is open. Is that a lot of programmes to have running???

thanks for the response everyone!

 

[Lord Blackadder]

I don't see the beachball too much, and have rarely had an app unexpectedly quit - I'd say it happened in Safari a couple times and once in Garageband to my knowledge. All incidents occured during heavy multitasking, so it's hard to pin down the source, though it happens so seldom I'm not concerned.

The beachball issue on an iBook is usually a RAM issue - you'd be better off with more RAM preferaby 768MB or more (the more the merrier). However, as others have stated, the beachball doesn't always indicate an inherent performance issue - something just might be stalled or working inefficiently (sloppy code or network lag).

 

[cheekyspanky]

My Mac mini arrived on Wednesday - a 1.42Ghz with 512mb RAM.

So far I've had Safari crash once and iPhoto crash once (asking do i want to send feedback to Apple etc). Mail has also closed of its own accord once. I've also had the beachball of doom or whatever it's known as..) quite a few times when using iPhoto. I do have 6000 photos, but Picasa2 coped okay with it on my PC with 256mb RAM!

Also when I transfer photos to the trash folder in iPhoto my mini makes a faint sqealing noise..but I've only heard this when moving photos..any ideas what it could be?!

 

[gekko513]

Some people have mentioned having too many aplications running. Most of my beach balls/crashes occur when iTunes, Mail, iWorks, safari and messenger is open. Is that a lot of programmes to have running???

Nah, I wouldn't say so, but some of those applications can use a lot of memory just by themselves, which could cause beachballs when switching between them.

I expect that iWorks will use a lot of memory if you work on documents that are high in multimedia content. Safari will use a lot of memory if you have lots of tabs or lots of windows open with flash ads and the like. If your iTunes library is huge, then iTunes will also use a lot of memory, as will Mail if your mailboxes contains thousands of mails.

If not, then it should'nt be a problem.

Side note: I just found out that my file permissions got a totally screwed up because I imported all files, settings and applications from my PowerBook to my Mac mini on first setup. Repair permissions fixed thousands of files. Also, an execution of update_prebinding said that it fixed 1370 prebindings, but I don't know if those were already fixed and was just refixed.

 

[gekko513]

... I do have 6000 photos, but Picasa2 coped okay with it on my PC with 256mb RAM! ...

That's quite amazing. How do you browse the photos in Picasa2? There must be some technique that lets it run smoothly with so little RAM.