I've been getting a run of programs becoming unresponsive in Leopard. Seems to always happen when I'm changing from one app to another by clicking in the Finder. Instead of an app window coming forward, it'll beachball. And then there's no getting into it.
In the "Force Quit Applications" window, it'll be red and unresponsive.
That happens once in a while to me, but today it's gone on and on, with different apps quitting. I lost iTunes, Mail, Acrobat, and a few others that way. No idea what's going on. I'm not doing anything differently than I do every day. Why should Leopard start misbehaving?
Could be any number of things. Network troubles? Problem memory?
Could be a a bad sector on a disk. A bad sector on a Firewire disk will certainly cause any application that tried to read it to hang. It is probably time for disk maintenance anyway. Use TechTools or Speedtools or some other app to detect and map out bad sectors on your disks. This should be done periodically anyway and it may fix the problem.
I ran Disk Utility and it said no repairs were necessary. I restarted, and thought that might have cured the problem, but then I got a similar episode today. About three different apps died on me. Always when trying to click on the app window when it was in the background.
Weird.
My only guess right now is that my main hard disk is getting kind of FULL. There's only about 30GB free on it. But to me, that's a ton of space. Guess because I remember the days of 20 MEGABYTE hard drives.
Yes. I sleep most of the time, and restart only when I get weird behavior, or if I'm going to be away from the office for a few days in a row.
I don't really have wake from sleep troubles, this seems much more like a window manager issue. Oh, also, I've been getting the alert after the program dies, something like "the application <whatever> quit while unresponsive, do you want to report to Apple?" And the generated report seems to consistently give some kernel bad access/address/exception thingie. That's why I ran disk util.
I would suggest you do not use sleep. I could put my MDD machine to sleep with Tiger but with Leopold sleep is a no go. I even shut down all application before putting the machine to sleep. In Leopold waking from sleep every thing seems fine at first. But within a few minutes I get all kinds of weird shit happening exactly as you are describing.
At the end of the day shut down. When you go to lunch leave the machine running. You can have the display go to sleep. You can even set up a hot corner to put the display to sleep if you are leaving for a few hours.
Originally posted by thalo: I ran Disk Utility and it said no repairs were necessary.
That's something different than a surface scan and mapping out bad blocks. Disk Utility is only checking on the volume structure not the viability of the disk.
Thirty gig remaining on a hard disk is not a full disk. You could easily run OS X from a 30 GB hard drive alone. What may be happening is that you have gotten to a point on the disk where there are some bad block that have not been mapped to spares so there is no way to access the data the app thinks is written there. The result is the app hangs.
In the past we had a choice of doing a regular format that included a full surface scan and a "quick format" that just wrote the volume structure and did not include a scan. These days because disks now map out bad blocks on-the-fly and because disks are so large disk utility programs don't give you the option of doing a surface scan. For that you need Techtool or SpeedTools. I'd recommend TechTool Pro because it includes a memory testing routine and SpeedTools does not.
I think the work around for this is using the Disk Utility to write zeros in all the blocks on a disk. This will cause the on-the-fly bad block mapping to kick in and repair the disk. If there are no more spare blocks I think the zeroing will simply fail.
From what you describe it does sound like the apps are trying to access data that isn't there. It may be missing from the disk or maybe missing due to a bad address in memory. Maybe it's simple timing problem where the application is trying to read data from a hard disk that hasn't spun up from sleep yet.
HH isn't there something like a 10% free space rule for HD's. There should always be 10% free space to total capacity for a given drive. In principle it makes sense in practice in real world environments it is hard to keep in place.
I feel like I've bought TechTool ten times at full price, so I basically said screw them. Micromat pisses me off.
I thought about it being a drive spin up issue, but I gave it plenty of time. Remember, the application goes RED in "Force Quit Applications" which means it's toast.
I just did an experiment. I haven't used sleep on my machine at home since early on when Leopald was released. Before I went out earlier instead of shutting down I put the machine to sleep.
Hours later I woke the machine up. Everything seemed peachy keen for a few minutes. Then the beachballs came a rollin. Each app I opened seemed fine at first but windows would hang beachball 10 seconds or more then the window would catch up with the mouse action.
Only cure restart. Sleep no workie in Leopald on an MDD G4.
