Spinning Beach Ball - Slow Running System

Question

My wife has had a very annoying problem on her MDD 1.25 for some time now and we're finally irritated enough to post. All too often while running Photoshop CS, Illustrator CS2, Quark Xpress 6 and Suitcase fusion this machine gets the beach ball. This happens when she may be opening a document, moving a document, applying an action, or anything within those apps at that matter. Sometimes it's so bad that she has to force quit and relaunch a particular app. Even opening the HDD sometimes seems like a chore as it sits and thinks. Things just don't seem to be as snappy as they once were. Suggestions?
I've maxed it out on memory and have run Disc Utility, Onyx, and Diskwarrior. Could it be Suitcase bogging this machine down? Other?
Thanks for any help,
Tony

Answer 1

Hi,
To determine if the amount of RAM is the issue, bring up Terminal in /Applications/Utilities, or your favorite terminal emulator, and type top at the command prompt. You'll be able to monitor the amount of allocated and unallocated RAM available on the system as each application is brought up and used.
I've seen similar beach balls from other apps, mainly Microsoft Office apps such as Word and Excel. What's probably going on is that the load average is going up to maybe 2-4, instead of 1-1.8, as the app write's it's temp files. If you try to do something else, while waiting for the app to finish, the OSX window manager then displays a spinning beach ball to you to indicate that the system is currently busy processing the given app at the top of the stack. Hence you wait.
As a rule, before getting new hardware, I'd check each of the software vendor's websites for updates to the software you are running on OSX. There may be an update from Adobe (for example) that indeed solved a particular issue with that application.
Then check for updates from Apple on the OSX version you're running on that particular machine. If it's already at the latest version of Tiger, then of course you're good to go on that front.
Finally, I agree with an earlier post, the amount of free space on the drive that the app will "work" in is critical. Especially apps such as PhotoShop, since they will create rather large temp files while they process a given file. So, if all you have is one hard drive with only 4-5Gb free out of 160Gb (say), then a second drive is called for. You will be able, via top to see PhotoShop swapping out to disk as it works on a file if you don't have enough RAM. Try to shoot for 20-30% free space, at a minimum, on the drive the main apps you use will work on, so that you have enough room for the temp files they will create.
Ed