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Beach ball is not necessarily a low memory warning (or memory related). It's showed (only) when a GUI application fails to respond to UI events. Sometimes it's
by pooriaazimi 14y ago
Beach ball is not necessarily a low memory warning (or memory related). It's showed (only) when a GUI application fails to respond to UI events. Sometimes it's because of bad threading in applications or things like that.
- mgkimsal 14y agounderstood they're not always the same thing - I often see a beachball with 6gig free, which used to perplex me a bit, now it just bugs me. :/
- Zr40 14y agoIf you're interested in seeing what's happening, fire up Activity Monitor and hit Sample on the app when you see the beach ball. It records the call frames of all threads a couple of thousand times over a few seconds, so you can see what that app is waiting for.
- mgkimsal 14y agogood idea - upvoted! :)
- stephencanon 14y ago... and report the bug to the app's developer! Be sure to include the sample.
- mikeash 14y agoIf the entire system has ground to a halt such that it's difficult to actually get to Activity Monitor to do the sample, then it's likely to be a memory problem. If it's just one app, it's probably something else.
- stephencanon 14y agoIf the system is hung such that you can't get Activity Monitor to sample, use command-option-control-shift-period to run sysdiagnose. Attach the resulting /var/tmp/sysdiagnose_$(TIME).tar.gz to your bug report.
- pooriaazimi 14y agoI had never heard about it... Wonderful.
- jonhendry 14y agoAnd inside that tar.gz file is a spindump.txt file, which will have the samples of whatever application is spinning at the moment, just like if you used Activity Monitor to sample it.