G5 Mac with 4G ram, about 3.5 years old.
The computer pauses, with the little rainbow thingy spinning, for anywhere from 5 to over 30 seconds. It can happen at any time, regardless of what I’m doing or what application I’m in . . . typing, opening a file, scrolling, moving something on the desktop . . . or even if I’m not actually doing anything but reading what’s on the screen. It used to happen occasionally, now it’s happening more and more frequently. What’s going on here?
How much free hard disk space do you have? Are you file sharing with any other computers?
Have you tried running Activity Monitor to see what your free RAM / HD status is?
I have 122G free hard disk on my primary drive, 1.44G free ram, and I’m not file sharing.
Have you checked your drive’s SMART status (use Disk Utility)?
The SMART status is: verified.
I ran the disk utility “repairs,” and it said no repairs were necessary.
These sort of problems can be very difficult to troubleshoot - especially remotely.
If you have the screen real estate, I would keep activity monitor open, and see what is going on (especially with disk I/O) when this happens.
Do you have FileVault turned on? That could cause a performance hit. Is any of the RAM new? Might be bad RAM. If not, download the latest standalone combo updater from Apple and install it. Some people swear by the combos over using Software Update. I would have thought the culprit was low free hd space.
Another thing to try would be creating and using a fresh user account for a while and see if the beachballs come back.
Just so you know, the SMART status report as ‘verified’ may well be useless. I had a hard drive that I knew was failing just a few months ago that always reported ‘verified’.
Smartmontools can give a little more information with a scan, and I think there’s some shareware that is built on it.
Not that that’s what your problem is. What version of the OS are you running?
When I had problems with random hangs, the culprit was bad RAM. YMMV.
UPDATE: Strangely, the problem that had been worsening for months . . . has disappeared. I think what did it was running the Disk Utility. Even though it said, “no repairs were necessary,” it nevertheless did something that eliminated the problem.
Thanks to all for your help.