Stupid Rainbow Ball/Activity Monitor

My computer has really been getting hung up a lot lately and it is driving me nuts. I have a 1.33 ghz powerbook g4 with 768 Ram. I am really new to troubleshooting this mac, so I'm not sure what to do. I have performed the disc utilities and mac janitor (which seemed to help slightly). However, it still gets hung up. For example, it just got caught on running word, firefox and activity monitor at once. This doesn't seem like it should be such a big deal!
I don't know if this is relevant, but according to activity monitor, under system memory, there is around 85 mb 'wired', 342 'active' and 278 'inactive', leaving me with 60 free mb (obviously much less if I open one more program). Does the inactive actually affect performance? If so, how do I fix this? Is 768 no longer enough memory to perform basic operations?
Thank you.

This Apple note tells you about each type of memory: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107918
While in the activity monitor, on the system memory tab, note the page ins/outs. If page outs are 10% or greater of your page ins, you can use more memory for what you run. The numbers reset when you reboot.
I had issues with Safari using a gaggle of memory, so I switched to Firefox, which seems to be more behaved when using system resources.

Similar Messages

Spinning Ball 4 1 App. + No Activity Monitor!?

So I'm having some issues with my G4, running 10.3.9. It is having real problems accessing a certain file and program. I haven't quite been able to reason it down to some corrupt application or file...I believe the problem is bigger than that.
Not sure what I did, but I can't download anything with my download manager Speed Download! I get the spinning-ball-of-death when I try to open or run S.D. I get the same spinning-ball when I try to open the folder where S.D. stores it's downloaded files.
I've unistalled the application and deleted/changed the download folder that S.D. uses. I figure this would cancel out any corrupt files within the app; however, when I try to open the new version of Speed Download it starts the process and then just spins. I can't click on anything to do with the app. But everything else on the machine functions as normal.
Other issues: I have no ability to open Activity Monitor to find out more about the computer's processes. And I get the same spinning ball when I try to open Console, so I can't look to the log files.
I've tried repairing permissions and optimizing the directories with Disk Warrior, but don't know which way to turn.
Any advice is good advice,
Thanks,
Ben
800 MHz Powermac G4 Mac OS X (10.3.9) 1.25 GB RAM + Multiple drives

Question regarding this continuing problem...
It seems that it is a font corruption problem. I would love to be able to root out the corupt fonts and keep the rest. I can temporarily remove the fonts, or move them to another folder, but this is temporary!
I have tried to resolve duplicate fonts, and disable fonts (even delete) fonts within Font Book. I have used Font Finangler to "clean the cache" of my fonts.
But Speed Download is back to not working. And Word lists corrupt fonts whenever I open it, new ones each time. I've tried deleting the listed fonts from within my main library with Font Book, and erased theOffice font cache before rebooting.
Any easy programs that would allow me to keep the majority of my collected fonts? Do they continue to infect other fonts; spreading like a virus?
Thank you,
it is frustrating,
Ben
800 MHz Powermac G4 Mac OS X (10.3.9) 1.25 GB RAM + Multiple drives

Rainbow wheel when open activity monitor

hello, my laptop has been working fine, up until a month it's a bit slow when opening applications...but now, as i started reading, i can check the processes on the memory by checking the activity monitor...but when i open it, it only shows the beach ball of death...and i have to close it by force quitting it...any ideas? thanks

the.,
If you have hard drive corruption that requires a repair every third day you most likely have some hardware acting up. Bad RAM is the usual cause or your hard drive is failing.
I would try running the extended version of your Apple Hardware Test.
It's not perfect but may flag something.
A more thorough test for RAM is the free Rember.
Use the extended test also.
Here's a nice faq on RAM testing.
I don't use Drive genius. I've owned another utility for years.
The only one I would recommend is DiskWarrior. It is the best at directory repairs. It rebuilds then actually replaces your old directory. I feel every Mac owner should have a copy.
It also has File System repair now and hard drive S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics.
I use DW once a month to try and catch errors in my system from getting too far out of hand. It has repaired every little and big issue I have ever had with my three Macs.
I'm not saying Drive Genius is not up to par...wouldn't know, I just have had such great success with DW that I see no need to use another utility.
DALE

HT1338 My Mac book Pro is running very slow and the rainbow ball is appearing all the time. Any suggestions for clean up??

My Mac book Pro is running very slow and the rainbow ball is appearing all the time. Any suggestions for clean up?? I have the OS X Lion system.

As well as what a brody asked :
- do you need more RAM? (run Activity Monitor and see how much free RAM - green - is available)
- do you Restart fairly regularly, e.g. at least once a week, to clear out any swap or temporary files?
- do you need to do maintenance, e.g. clearing out caches and unused logs, etc?

Rainbow Ball of Death (Lightroom Hangs)

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

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!!)

Activity monitor shows Logic CPU use @ 100% randomly

I'm running a light session (6 audio, 2 instruments) and after I initiate playback, the rainbow ball appears and the activity monitor shows high CPU activity. The problem seems to occur particularly if I click anywhere in the arrange window while playing. Any ideas?

unresolved, isolated condition

No data in the activity monitor

All of a sudden I don't have any data in the activity monitor. Here's what happened. I was using safari viewing online pictures. I kept getting the rolling ball between pictures and noticed that safari was using 100%+ in processor usage and safari seemed slow. So I rebooted and opened the activity monitor and no data shows up. I run a quick hardware test and all pass. I havn't gone back to the pictures yet but normal browsing seems to be fine. I watch a few 1080P trailers and they work fine too.
All ideas on why the monitor doesn't show data?
Ray

Hmm...let's try this:
Go to User/Library/Preferences and drag the com.apple.ActivityMonitor.plist file to your Desktop. Then try launching Activity Monitor again to see if that makes anything show up. If so, then it was a corrupted preferences file, and you can then trash the one on your Desktop.
If that doesn't solve the problem, the only thing I can suggest is to Trash the application and the preferences file, then reinstall it from your 10.4 DVDs.
Mulder

Macbook Pro is freezing with the spinning rainbow ball of death constantly going. Can someone review my Etrecheck and tell me what to do?

My macbook pro is constantly freezing with the rainbow ball of death spinning all the time. I ran Etrecheck. Any help would be much appreciated!
Problem description:
Running slow; constant spinning rainbow ball
EtreCheck version: 2.0.11 (98)
Report generated November 12, 2014 at 2:08:28 PM CST
Hardware Information: ℹ️
MacBook Pro (13-inch, Early 2011) (Verified)
MacBook Pro - model: MacBookPro8,1
1 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5 CPU: 2-core
4 GB RAM Upgradeable
BANK 0/DIMM0
2 GB DDR3 1333 MHz ok
BANK 1/DIMM0
2 GB DDR3 1333 MHz ok
Bluetooth: Old - Handoff/Airdrop2 not supported
Wireless: en1: 802.11 a/b/g/n
Video Information: ℹ️
Intel HD Graphics 3000 - VRAM: 384 MB
Color LCD 1280 x 800
System Software: ℹ️
OS X 10.10 (14A389) - Uptime: 2:40:10
Disk Information: ℹ️
Hitachi HTS545032B9A302 disk0 : (320.07 GB)
S.M.A.R.T. Status: Verified
EFI (disk0s1) <not mounted> : 210 MB
Recovery HD (disk0s3) <not mounted> [Recovery]: 650 MB
Macintosh HD (disk1) / [Startup]: 318.84 GB (115.79 GB free)
Core Storage: disk0s2 319.21 GB Online
MATSHITADVD-R   UJ-8A8
USB Information: ℹ️
Apple Inc. FaceTime HD Camera (Built-in)
Apple Inc. Apple Internal Keyboard / Trackpad
Apple Inc. BRCM2070 Hub
Apple Inc. Bluetooth USB Host Controller
Apple Computer, Inc. IR Receiver
Thunderbolt Information: ℹ️
Apple Inc. thunderbolt_bus
Gatekeeper: ℹ️
Mac App Store and identified developers
Launch Agents: ℹ️
[not loaded] com.adobe.AAM.Updater-1.0.plist Support
[running] com.adobe.AdobeCreativeCloud.plist Support
[loaded] com.oracle.java.Java-Updater.plist Support
Launch Daemons: ℹ️
[loaded] com.adobe.fpsaud.plist Support
[loaded] com.microsoft.office.licensing.helper.plist Support
[loaded] com.oracle.java.Helper-Tool.plist Support
[loaded] com.oracle.java.JavaUpdateHelper.plist Support
User Launch Agents: ℹ️
[loaded] com.adobe.AAM.Updater-1.0.plist Support
[invalid?] com.citrixonline.GoToMeeting.G2MUpdate.plist Support
[loaded] com.google.keystone.agent.plist Support
[running] com.microsoft.LaunchAgent.SyncServicesAgent.plist Support
[invalid?] com.nero.HSMMonitor.plist Support
User Login Items: ℹ️
iTunesHelper UNKNOWNHidden (missing value)
Microsoft Database Daemon Application (/Applications/Microsoft Office 2011/Office/Microsoft Database Daemon.app)
VMware Fusion Start Menu UNKNOWN (missing value)
„Google“ diskas Application (/Applications/Google Drive.app)
Internet Plug-ins: ℹ️
AdobeAAMDetect: Version: AdobeAAMDetect 2.0.0.0 - SDK 10.7 Support
FlashPlayer-10.6: Version: 15.0.0.223 - SDK 10.6 Support
Default Browser: Version: 600 - SDK 10.10
Flash Player: Version: 15.0.0.223 - SDK 10.6 Support
CouponPrinter-FireFox_v2: Version: 1.1.10 - SDK 10.6 Support
QuickTime Plugin: Version: 7.7.3
SharePointBrowserPlugin: Version: 14.4.5 - SDK 10.6 Support
DirectorShockwave: Version: 12.1.3r153 - SDK 10.6 Support
JavaAppletPlugin: Version: Java 7 Update 51 Check version
User Internet Plug-ins: ℹ️
CitrixOnlineWebDeploymentPlugin: Version: 1.0.105 Support
3rd Party Preference Panes: ℹ️
Flash Player Support
Java Support
Time Machine: ℹ️
Time Machine not configured!
Top Processes by CPU: ℹ️
      23% firefox
      9% Microsoft Outlook
      3% WindowServer
      1% mdworker32
      1% mds
Top Processes by Memory: ℹ️
258 MB firefox
155 MB mds_stores
137 MB Microsoft Outlook
133 MB softwareupdated
94 MB Microsoft Excel
Virtual Memory Information: ℹ️
169 MB Free RAM
1.38 GB Active RAM
1.19 GB Inactive RAM
1.15 GB Wired RAM
6.52 GB Page-ins
37 MB Page-outs

Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Console in the icon grid.
The title of the Console window should be All Messages. If it isn't, select
          SYSTEM LOG QUERIES ▹ All Messages
from the log list on the left. If you don't see that list, select
          View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar at the top of the screen. Click the Clear Display icon in the toolbar. Then take one of the actions that you're having trouble with. Select any messages that appear in the Console window. Copy them to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.
The log contains a vast amount of information, almost all of which is irrelevant to solving any particular problem. When posting a log extract, be selective. A few dozen lines are almost always more than enough.
Please don't indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Please don't post screenshots of log messages—post the text.
Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

Activity Monitor question please...

A while ago I read about using the Activity Monitor to tell if I don't have enough ram or if a program is using lots of resources...i forget though, what am i looking for?...is it the reads in and writes out numbers?...I did a search and couldn't find anything...
I also remember reading something about 'pages' or excessive pages?...but I can't recall what to look for...
I'm asking because when using Firefox i get a beach ball when i simply click on bookmarks in the menu looking for an address...I never had that happen before...I have the max of 2gb of ram on my 'puter so I'm not sure what's happening...
thanks for advice...
M

You can use Terminal (Applications/Utilities) to determine the amount of page in and page outs if that is what you are referring to, using the command;
top
Note page ins and page outs. If page outs are 5% or less than page ins, that is considered quite minimal. 10% is borderline; extra RAM may be beneficial.
20% or more you would benefit from more RAM.
Press Q when you are finished looking at top in Terminal.
Note that this data is renewed on start up, so have your system running for a several hours or wait till the end of the day, to gather a sufficient amount of data.
From what you have said, having 2GB of RAM I would expect that you have sufficient RAM for your purposes, and using the top command should verify that.
Try cleaning out your browser;
delete all cookies.
Firefox > Preferences > Privacy > Show cookies > Remove all cookies.
Also
~/Library/Caches/Firefox/Profiles/-----.default/Cache select all of those files and drag them to the trash also.
Empty the trash
See if that speed things up.
Message was edited by: roam

My G4 (OS 10.5.8) is gradually going slower (getting a lot of rainbow balls) and finally freezes.

My G4 (OS 10.5.8) keeps going slower and slower after boot-up and eventually start getting beach balls after every action, even scrolling until it finally freezes. The CPU is constantly grinding.

Very Important, how much Free Space is on your Hard Drive first of all? Click on the Macintosh HD on the Desktop, then do a Get Info on it.
At the Apple Icon at top left>About this Mac.
Then click on More Info>Hardware and report this upto *but not including the Serial#*...
Hardware Overview:
Machine Name: Power Mac G5 Quad
Machine Model: PowerMac11,2
CPU Type: PowerPC G5 (1.1)
Number Of CPUs: 4
CPU Speed: 2.5 GHz
L2 Cache (per CPU): 1 MB
Memory: 10 GB
Bus Speed: 1.25 GHz
Boot ROM Version: 5.2.7f1
Open Activity Monitor in Applications>Utilities, select All Processes & sort on CPU%, any indications there?
How much RAM & free space do you have also, click on the Memory & Disk Usage Tabs.
In the Memory tab, are there a lot of Pageouts?

Bug found in Activity Monitor app

Hello,
I think I've found a bug in Activity Monitor.
If you move the app from Applications/Utilities to Applications it will start up but the rainbow disk will spin forever, and the window will not be populated with data. Put it back into Utilities and it works again.
The issue is that the location of activitymonitord seems to be hardcoded to be in the Utilities folder.
The following steps are repeated endlessly:
com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.ActivityMonitor[3061]): posixspawn("/Applications/_Utilities/Activity Monitor.app/Contents/MacOS/activitymonitord", ...): No such file or directory
com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.ActivityMonitor[3061]): Exited with exit code: 1
com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.ActivityMonitor): Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds

Hello,
Thank you very much for your comment.
Well, I think those apps and utilities are probably not designed well then. It goes against UI expectations if you aren't allowed to make a subfolder in Applications or Utilities folders.
And, I have enough apps now that I need to make subfolders to keep it sane and quickly navigable.
The only app I've found so far which dies is Activity Monitor. In my case, I have been launching it often to figure out why the Mac crashes and hangs so often. Badly behaving apps like this (just crash, not retry endlessly!) and apparently a lack of a supervisory system to kill them is a problem I think with the Mac.
Thanks anyway, I lost this round I suppose!
Matt

Activity Monitor: useful for diagnostics?

According to the Mac Activity Monitor, the computer's CPUs are doing all the heavy lifting while the graphics card sits around eating bon-bons during Motion's various operations. This don't seem right.
Is the Activity Monitor accurate/useful in trying to troubleshoot Motion's numbingly slow performance? Is this an indication that I haven't configured my system properly? I have tried many of the performance-enhancing suggestions I've found here and at Apple, but am still getting nothin' but beach ball.
Anyone? Thanks.

3-4 particle emitters? One emitter can send out hundreds or thousands of particles. One mistake I've seen is to set the life of the particle so it is kept alive (thus must be calculated) long after it has left the screen...
As to the override settings, I've never tried them, but I don't think there's any advantage to be had...
Patrick

Time machine space questions, not the same as Activity Monitor

Hello
I am new here and kindly ask your thoughts on what I am seeing.
I have a 13" MacBook Pro early 2011 with OS 10.7.5
Earlier this year I tried an upgrade to a new OS and experienced a failure that required me to make a visit to the Apple store.
I believe they reinstalled the OS and if I remember correctly I just did a recovery with the Time Machine backup I had.
While that backup was not very recent, yea OK I get that was stupid, what was odd was that not all my files were backed up.
I lost a significant number of files from April 2013 until the time of the failure in 2014, for reasons I have no clue as to why.
My Time Machine does not have any excluded files as far as I can tell.
So my first question is: Can anyone help me understand what may have happened and how to counter that?
Then yesterday I decided to invest in a new backup external drive.
During the process of setting it up and doing the 1st Time Machine backup on that, I noticed the following:
In Activity Monitor under the "Disk Usage" tab shows the Macintosh HD as using 258 of 319 GB, and then selecting my user name it shows using 578 of 639 GB.
When I did the backup with Time Machine it backed up approximately 250GB.
I thought Time Machine backed up the entire HD.
What is the difference between the Macintosh HD space and the user space in terms of usage and total?
Should I be worried or visiting the Apple store again?

OK, done.
I created a text.txt document containing the words "Version 0". I saved it to the Desktop, closed it and selected "Back Up Now" from the Finder.
Waited for that to complete, opened the test.txt document again, modified it by adding the words "Version 1", saved it, closed it and selected "Back Up Now" again.
Repeated that twice more, so the end result was a Text.txt containing the words "Version 0", "Version 1", "Version 2", and "Version 3".
I expect that I should now have three versions from which to choose to restore, all from different times, plus the latest one still on the Desktop.
Creation and backups now complete, so the next step was restoration:
From the Finder, I used "Enter Time Machine" and verified that I had four different recent times from which to choose. I chose the original text.txt document and elected to "keep both files". It restored the original, which I opened and verified it contained nothing but the text "Version 0".
I repeated this for the subsequent version. I opened that one and confirmed it contained the words "Version 1".
I repeated this for the subsequent version. Now I have three restored text.txt documents, plus the one on the Desktop.
I opened all four text.txt documents and stacked them as shown in the following screenshot:
Conclusion, no surprises that I can determine.
Is this what you had in mind, or was there something I did that was different from what you need?

Test Activity Monitor Utility on Aperture: Results

Activity Monitor Utility gives the memory details of
Aperture use. Interesting that its use on simple tasks
are nearly 2GB of total memory.
For those having stalling problems, there is a good way
to see how your computer is using the memory.
Opened Aperture:
Idle use:
Memory: 550+
Virutal Memory: 850+
While moving full Zoom
Memory jumped to: 840+
Virtual jumped to: 1.3 GB
Watching Activity Monitor really tells the story. Aperture is a
program for those with well over the 2GB memory. It is constantly
running close or higher in its general use.

Terminal freaks me out. Spooky stuff, can't look.
I haven't run into any RAM issues yet but my experience is not nearly as extensive as some of the rest of you guys.
Curious, though, are you seeing beach balls when the paging starts to ramp up? That virtual memory must get in and out of the swap file and that takes a long time. If you've got physical drive issues or the drive is getting crowded, the swap file gets fragmented and slower and slower.
bogiesan

Interpreting Activity Monitor graphs

I have installed an Activity Monitor icon in my dock in the hope that it will enable me to reduce or prevent the reoccurrences of "rolling beach balls" (Spinning Wait Cursors) on my screen. I have also installed a "Floating CPU Monitor" on my desktop to make it even easier. The problem is that I'm not getting as much as I could out of the graphs, because I don't completely understand them. Is there a place where I can get information that will enable me to get the most benefit from them? If not, I'd at least appreciate explanations for the following:
(1) Floating CPU Monitor: There are two vertical side-by-side columns on my desktop.They operate independently. What activity does each of the two sides reflect?
(2) CPU History: There are two stacked rows of moving bar graphs. The bars move from right to left. There are green bars and there are red bars. What does the top row show? What does the bottom row show? What do the red bars and the green bars show?

WZZZ wrote:
Have a look at these Apple articles.
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH5148
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4180
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1342
Thanks, but I went to Google for an answer and found what I needed there. In case you're interested, I have two columns on my Floating CPU Monitor because I have two Intel processors. Thanks for your contribution.

Stupid Rainbow Ball/Activity Monitor

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