Readers continue to contact us with questions about their Macs and iDevices, so we’ve decided to run Ask MacRx more frequently during the week. Today we address one of the most common questions for a Mac consultant, why do I get that spinning beach ball all the time?
It seems like there is never a day goes by that I am not confronted with the Spinning Ball of Death, most often while in Safari (although granted, that is the application that I use most frequently). Lately (post Lion installation) I have even been getting a message “Browser is Not Responding.”
MacBook (mid-2007) 2.16 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo 2GB
OS X Lion 10.7.1, Safari 5.1I’ve taken it into an Apple Store and they reset a few things and reinstalled the OS, but it continues to happen each and every day. Sometimes when it stalls out and crashes, I get a “You computer stopped working because of Error YYYHHRRNR. Do you want to send a report to Apple?” I always do, but have a suspicion that some programmers are sitting in Cupertino laughing with one another, “Hey, Error YYYHHRRNR nailed that fool again! Ha, ha, ha.”
Jan
Hi Jan,
There are lots of things which can cause the spinning beach ball, it’s the “long wait cursor” under Mac OS X. Common culprits are not enough RAM or not enough disk space. You have 2GB of RAM in your MacBook, that model can be expanded up to 3GB which will make some difference. If you have less than 10GB hard drive space free this can also cause problems. Deleting files can solve that problem.
Another possibility is a program which has crashed or is running poorly with memory leaks. When you have some time, try a few tests running just one program at a time for a while, see if that causes the problem. Add more slowly and see what breaks the bank. If you get a specific error message enter the exact text into Google and see what you find, that often gives clues as to where the problem is.
For more info see Why Is My Mac Running So Slowly? [MacRx]. Let me know if that helps.
Adam-
Thanks for the swift and thorough response. Hadn’t expected “personal service” but do appreciate it. I’ll take a pass at testing out the various possible culprits sometime very soon and if I learn anything, I’ll be happy to share it.
Many thanks.
Adam Rosen is an Apple certified IT consultant specializing in Macintosh systems new and old. He lives in Boston with two cats and too many possessions. In addition to membership in the Cult of Mac, Adam has written for Low End Mac and is curator of the Vintage Mac Museum. He also enjoys a good libation.
17 responses to “Why Do I Get the Spinning Beach Ball Daily? [Ask MacRx]”
Another possibility is your hard drive may be going bad. Most of the time, AppleCare can’t do much about the drive if it’s dying and not dead yet. If your OS is having a hard time reading what’s on the drive and it’s taking longer than necessary, you can get the spinning beach ball. Most frequently if this is happening you can hear loud and/or rhythmic clicks and other noises from the hard drive. Every drive makes noise and that’s normal, but some noises can be red flags especially if they coincide with a drop in performance on the machine at the same time.
In this situation, there may not be much you can do aside from trying to run off another hard drive for a day to see if it speeds things up. But you WILL want to have several backups of your data just in case the drive fails. I’d recommend at least a local backup, usually with Time Machine, and an online remote backup like Mozy. What would you do if you lost your work, family photos, and other important documents? Scary thought, huh? Back up!!!
Yes that’s right, a failing drive can also cause lots of beachballs. If the drive is clicking or squealing that’s a definite red flag. If the Mac’s pauses occur every time you try to open or save a file, and/or application launches take much longer than usual, the hard drive may be the culprit.
Low RAM or a full hard drive is unlikely to be the problem. OS X is really good about managing both. Something is blocking an operation.
A dying hard drive will definitely cause this.
Too many open files is more likely though. And files includes open network connections, so a torrent downloading with 400 connections (not-unheard-of) is the same as having at least 400 open files. Windows, visible or not are files as well, and every icon on your desktop (at least up until Leopard, I haven’t tested with SN or Lion) is another “file.” Tabs in your browsers.
I hate to blame flash, but, my experience has been a browser that has loaded many flash files (even after the windows or tabs have been closed) is still using resources including files associated with Flash. A quick fix for the random beach ball is to remove flash from your system. If you must have flash, quit and restart your browser after using flash a few times. That should do wonders for your system. And remember a lot of ads are flash too.
I would be interested to know if there is anything to do about Safari’s resource hogging, and if this is related to the original post. Between Safari, “Safari Web Content” and Flash, it doesn’t take long for my early 2011 iMac to bog down with over 1GB devoted to memory for these processes. The “Flash Player (safari plugin)” process actually uses up the least amount of memory between the three. I “restart” Safari 5-6 times every day, but this is only a temporary fix.
if there is anything to do about Safari’s resource hogging
er, use Chrome or Firefox?
The spinning beach ball was killing my 2009 MBP with 4 gigs of memory after I upgraded to Lion. Brought all apps that permit it down from default 64 to 32 bits (cmd-I on app in Finder, check ‘Open in 32-bit mode’). Has mostly been smooth cruising since – although Safari still wants to play on the beach from time to time, but far less often than it did in 64-bit mode.
In my mind it is Lion, whenever it is there.
I have had no spinning beach balls on Safari under Snow Leopard. Lion gives it to me all the time in Safari.The Apple forum is full of that.
In my opinion, Snow Leopard was worse. Beach Ball Bango always happened In Safari and with JavaScript on. If I shut off JavaScript I NEVER had a spinning beach ball. of course I couldn’t load all of my web pages. Now that I have OS 10.7 and a new MB Air with full banks of Ram (4Gig) and plenty of “disk space” and clean installed app(s), I still get the beach ball but usually when the auto spell check is doing its stuff. Even if I spell the word correctly, it may take two seconds for the word to appear on my screen. So, in my experience, two problems have made my beach ball bingo go bongo: Java Script and Spell Checker. Looking back to the series of OSX’s, I can’t remember having so many problems with BBBongo. In fact, BBBongo has been a later problem starting two builds ago prior to Snow Leopard. It is annoying and apparently not going away any time soon since I think that not everyone has the problem AND it is not reproducible. In other words: it sucks.
Hi. i just got a new mac 3 days ago.
am running word and tried to look at a new notepad feature.
it lets you take audio recordings so i clicked record.
Now word will not respond and i have a document open that has not ben saved. all other programmes are still working though.
what can i do to avoid loosing any data?!
Any help would be SERIOUSLY APPRECIATED MORE THAN I CAN DESCRIBE!