Re: OS slowdowns

In the last few days I've been getting many spinning beach balls,
sometimes for several minutes at a time. Activity Monitor sometimes
shows almost no significant activity, other times it shows (under CPU,
%
System) a lot of activity, but only in % System. There is no app that
is using the resources. Any idea how to track this down? It may be
related to the fact that Retrospect and Silverkeeper can't seem to
backup anything without errors.

I'm really surprised nobody has mentioned the console and system logs.
Have you taken a look at them around the same time you are experiencing
the problem?

Silly me. And after having sent you some before for our opinion.
Completely forgot about them. Will check it out. Should I have them
running or just look at them right after the slowdown?

Well since the problem is the computer becomes unresponsive, you may
want to just keep a terminal window open with this command running, so
the log is immediately visible when the problem occurs:

tail -f /var/log/system.log

That bring up this:
kernel[0]: disk0s2: 0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED).
and
/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/Metadata.fra
mework/Versions/A/Support/mdimportserver: ATSFontActivateFromMemory
failed: error -50. (Several times for this. This one came up in the
Console log as well.)

While 10.5's networking is much-improved compared with earlier Mac OS X
releases, there are still certain situations that can cause processes to
block when network resources become unavailable. This is high on the
list of suspects. So the next time this happens, it would be good to do
a little bit of network investigative work. Check your network
connectivity. If you are somewhere where you can obtain a wired
(Ethernet) connection, try switching locations to a wired connection to
see if the problem clears up shortly after. Etc...

I'm on a wired connection. Should I try unplugging the ethernet cable
from the Mac to see if it changes anything I wonder?

Well taking *wireless* out of the picture just removes a ton of
potential causes. So if you're already on a wired connection, I would
just verify that the network to which you are connected is truly
available, perhaps by pinging another machine over the network. If so,
then network connectivity probably isn't the cause, although it still
could be that a remote volume that is mounted has become unavailable. So
if you have network volumes mounted during this problem, you might try
ejecting them to see if the problem clears up after.

Just a single machine - no network.
.

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