1
0
I've started seeing the beach ball cursor on my Mac a lot lately, and I haven't been able to track down the cause.
- It happens even after restarting, with only a few applications running (basic stuff like Mail and Chrome, no complex web pages open)
- I've let Spotlight indexing and Time Machine backups finish.
- Activity Monitor doesn't show any memory or CPU hogs.
- There is 92.3 GB free on my hard disk
- Disk Utility said I needed to reformat my hard disk and restore from backup. I did, and now Disk Utility is happy, but the beach ball persists.
What else should I check? I wonder if my hard disk is getting flaky even though Disk Utility now reports no problems. This is an early 2011 15-in MacBook Pro with a 750GB disk and 4 GB RAM running OS X 10.10.
Bad hard drive? You might want to check for reallocated sectors using a SMART utility. – bwDraco – 2014-11-20T22:57:58.550
SMART Utility shows zero reallocated bad sectors. – Uncommon – 2014-11-26T16:53:10.317
SMART Utility's "long" test also completed without errors. – Uncommon – 2014-11-27T21:18:48.093
What does the "All Messages" log stream say just before/during/just after the beachballs happen? – Spiff – 2014-12-05T18:00:50.107
Reallocated bad sectors are ones that have been successfully neutralized and can't cause beachballs anymore. It's the pending bad sectors and read error counts that you really need to look at. – Spiff – 2014-12-05T18:03:58.797
1Try running without your antivirus. – harrymc – 2014-12-06T07:51:31.970
Could this be related to the moment you installed OSX Yosemite (10.10), or did you experience this before Yosemite too? This gives us a clue as to weather or not to relate it to Yosemite. – agtoever – 2014-12-06T09:54:28.203
I have no antivirus installed. The problem started before I installed 10.10. – Uncommon – 2014-12-06T14:40:59.667
The range of possible problems is too vast for us to analyze by remote pilot. It might be simpler to Clean Install OS X Yosemite, but first format the disk using full (slow) format (if you have bad sectors this will "fix" then by rewriting, or flag them as hard errors).
– harrymc – 2014-12-06T15:05:44.737I've watched the system log for a while, but didn't see anything notable. I have considered doing a clean installation of OS X, but I worry that the problem will return after I reinstall my other software. I'm hoping that identifying the actual problem will help avoid that. – Uncommon – 2014-12-10T06:26:58.447
plenty of free memory? Does activity monitor -> memory tab -> page ins/outs show low numbers? – rogerdpack – 2018-01-08T13:26:47.567