Rainbow Ball of Death (Lightroom Hangs)

Question

O Learned Denizens,
I find myself, not unusually, somewhat befuddled.
Basically, when importing a lot of JPEGs during a specific event shoot, LR will often hang during import and display the rainbow spinning ball (Mac OSX). Under these circumstances I can leave it as long as I like, it absolutely will not recover. "Force quit" doesn't touch it and even "kill -9" has to be applied to it twice. I've been using Unix for 20 years and never, ever, ever, ever (*ever!*) seen kill -9 not work. That it works the second time is something of a mystery to me.
It always happens during the same event shoot, in a portakabin on a test track. I've swapped memory cards and swapped from card reader to USB camera cable in a hunt for some "hardware" pattern, but still the rainbow ball of death hunts me down.
When LR finally dies and gives the Mac(Book Pro 15" 2GHz OSX 10.4.9 2GB DRAM) back to me, the little black triangle remains under the LR logo in the dock and I have to restart the machine.
It never loses any pictures from the card, the database isn't corrupted, it always gets there in the end...and it never does it anywhere else, but it does it fairly repeatably in this particular venue if I'm importing more than about 70 JPEGs. The camera is a Nikon D200 and the cards are 4 GB SanDisk UltraUberExtremeMegaWhizzer III, not usually full.
The only other time I had this happen to me was once with the beta with a database approaching 2000 RAW pictures shot over three days and towards the end of the third day, LR did the same thing. After that the beta did it on a regular basis, even with new databases.
I use a new database for each event.
So, my questions are, in this order:
- anyone know a cleaner way to kill LR and not have to restart the machine?
- anyone got a clue what's going on and how to avoid it?
Thanks in advance,
Damian
www.damianharty.com

Answer 1

I use the Mac equivalent to Task Manager: Activity Monitor
I use it to check how much demand is placed on the system (RAM & CPU), which programs are demanding what, which have hung, and kill those that have.
I can see a realtime graph of CPU or RAM usage on the dock (which does use some resources, but nothing compared to LR!)
It will also tell you who owns the application (user / root etc), and whether it is an intel or powerpc app.
I cannot remember if it comes with OSX (tiger), or whether I downloaded it (if so, it is free, and from the Apple website - it is a genuine Apple application).
If you are not using this app, I strongly recommend it. There are times when I think the system has hung, and it turns out (when I check Activity Monitor), that it is LR using 110% of the CPU (ie it has chocked the system, but it hasn't actually crashed - I leave it, and it does recover), or it is the $%##$% virus checker using the harddrive just as I am doing something file-intensive. Killing the virus checker is a nice ability!
Occasionally, you can see an app that isn't currently doing anything has all the resources allocated, and hasn't released them, so again killing that app and restarting it frees the resources up, and all without having to succumb to a reboot.
It is equal to control-alt-delete on the PC, (or the better shortcut - control-shift-escape - if you are a PC user - give it a try!!)