Another upgrade, beach ball still here!

relicrelic
Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
Can someone please explain what causes the ?Spinney Ball of Death?? It always comes at the most inopportune times. Is this on anybody?s programming Queue to fix? I see updates after updates for OSX but I never see this problem being address. You guys on this board must notice this as a problem, or am I the only one who apparently stresses out his computer by playing a QuickTime movie and surfing at the same time. I was hoping by purchasing a 1ghz Powerbook with 1gig of memory and an upgraded HD to 5400rpm would be sufficed. Don?t get me wrong the computer seems fast enough, however this beach ball needs to be deflated, cause it?s making me batty.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 8
    relicrelic Posts: 4,735member
    Talking about things being annoying, what's with the question marks????????
  • Reply 2 of 8
    costiquecostique Posts: 1,084member
    You can always load the fastest CPU and strain the fastest disk. The b*tch ball appears when one thread (or the active process?) grabs the processor for more than approximately 2 seconds. You can't escape it for ever.
  • Reply 3 of 8
    relicrelic Posts: 4,735member
    Ok, got it. However sometimes when the applications are playing team tag with the CPU I notice the system will not relinquish control until I kill the process manually. Why isn?t there an auto kill, CPU talking, ?I see this program is not allowing the user to do anything I better kill what?s ailing me?. I keep a terminal up just so I can, ps auxwww, kill <pid>. I use OSX because I?m a UNIX user who likes to have it pretty and easy. If Sun, IBM or HP had this problem their UNIX business would be none existent. Maybe this bug will be fixed when Apple goes to 64 bits. Here?s hoping sooner then later.
  • Reply 4 of 8
    costiquecostique Posts: 1,084member
    [quote]Originally posted by Relic:

    <strong>Why isn?t there an auto kill, CPU talking, ?I see this program is not allowing the user to do anything I better kill what?s ailing me?.</strong><hr></blockquote>

    A single-thread application won't let you even click the menu bar when it's busy. Sometimes it's normal (heavy calculations), sometimes it's bad design (Finder often halts on CD insert/eject). Anyway autokill might erroneously kill a process which is simply very busy.

    [quote]<strong>If Sun, IBM or HP had this problem their UNIX business would be none existent.</strong><hr></blockquote>

    OS X is still young and a great dead weight of legacy stuff is holding it back. One fine day we won't have these problems.

    [quote]<strong>Maybe this bug will be fixed when Apple goes to 64 bits.</strong><hr></blockquote>

    64-bit support has nothing to do with task scheduling, one-threadedness and developers' lazyness.



    And fix these question marks already! <img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" />
  • Reply 5 of 8
    rodukroduk Posts: 706member
    The spinning beach ball means the application hasn't responded to system events for a certain period of time. It could be because the applications crashed, or because its busy doing other things. I'd have thought it's an application problem rather than an OS problem, unless the application is busy waiting for the OS to do something, like service a file open request.



    [ 02-21-2003: Message edited by: RodUK ]</p>
  • Reply 6 of 8
    rogue27rogue27 Posts: 607member
    I always thought it was equivalent to the hourglass cursor you get on windows and it just means that the particular application getting the beach ball is just busy, probably waiting on IO or something. I normally get the beach ball when clicking the add button in print center and sometimes when opening certain system preferences panes. If I wait long enough, it will go away and finish what it is doing. I would guess that OS X still needs some improvements to it's scheduler.
  • Reply 7 of 8
    torifiletorifile Posts: 4,024member
    [quote]Originally posted by Relic:

    <strong>If Sun, IBM or HP had this problem their UNIX business would be none existent. Maybe this bug will be fixed when Apple goes to 64 bits. Here?s hoping sooner then later.</strong><hr></blockquote>



    It's not a bug. As others have said, it's an indication that an app has been busy for over (I think) 2 seconds.



    I'm inclined to say that you're trolling because most people don't have trouble with the SBOD on way slower systems than yours. Maybe you need to start from scratch on your system. Something sounds wrong, either with your intentions or your installation.
  • Reply 8 of 8
    ghost_user_nameghost_user_name Posts: 22,667member
    Important note:



    The spinning disc cursor is not a system-wide problem. When it pops up it only affects the single stalled application (almost always). In fact, you can actually see this when you move the cursor around the screen. Take this example. Here we have Finder and iTunes in the background with QuickTime Player in the front.







    Let's say QuickTime Player freezes up for some reason and you get the spinning cursor. Only when the cursor is over QTP's windows will it be the spinning cursor. Specifically, only over the yellow area seen here:







    If you switch to another available app, you can work just fine as if there's no problem at all. In this example, I switch to OmniWeb here. Now, QuickTime Player is still stuck in the background, but I can go about working in my other apps just fine. When I move the cursor over the background window (note the yellow again), I'd see the spinning disc again, indicating that the app it's over is still not responding to system events.







    I think it's very important to make this distinction here because before I pointed this out, some of my colleagues thought that they just had to sit and wait when that cursor popped up. Not true for good multitaskers!



    [ 02-21-2003: Message edited by: Brad ]</p>
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