I have been a Mac Owner since 2004, and I could count on one hand the times the whole computer has crashed, requiring a restart. Could until I installed Mavericks.
Now, in the course of a couple weeks, YouTube has crashed the entire machine about three times. WTF?!?! It has only happened when I have clicked on a YouTube video. It doesn’t load, I get the spinning beach ball, and then the whole thing freezes up.
Very un-Mac-like. Totally fucking unacceptable.
Has anyone else encountered this problem? Any fixes? Thanks for your advice!
This is a potential symptom of a failing hard drive.
Look in the Console, and see if you can pinpoint any obvious error messages.
Also, it might be worth running Disk Utility and verifying the drive.
Maybe Dropbox is to blame? What do you think of the following:
3/26/14 7:26:22.970 PM NortonAutoProtect[82]: dynamic_cast error 2: One or more of the following type_info’s has hidden visibility. They should all have public visibility. 10IDecObject, 7CDecObj, 19IDecContainerObject.
3/26/14 7:26:58.000 PM kernel[0]: process Dropbox[286] thread 3069 caught burning CPU! It used more than 50% CPU (Actual recent usage: 73%) over 180 seconds. thread lifetime cpu usage 90.470844 seconds, (82.315002 user, 8.155842 system) ledger info: balance: 90006284702 credit: 90006284702 debit: 0 limit: 90000000000 (50%) period: 180000000000 time since last refill (ns): 123099410315
3/26/14 7:26:58.468 PM ReportCrash[312]: Invoking spindump for pid=286 thread=3069 percent_cpu=73 duration=124 because of excessive cpu utilization
3/26/14 7:27:11.833 PM spindump[313]: Saved cpu_resource.spin report for Dropbox version Dropbox 2.6.20 (2.6.20) to /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/Dropbox_2014-03-26-192711_Macintosh.cpu_resource.spin
3/26/14 7:27:52.333 PM mds[54]: (Normal) Volume: volume:0x7f81ec08b000 ********** Bootstrapped Creating a default store:0 SpotLoc:(null) SpotVerLoc:(null) occlude:0 /Volumes/firmwaresyncd.0DSZf5
By using a different browser we are attempting to diagnose whether FF is indeed the problem. Only once that’s established can we look at why that might be.
Spinning beachball and then freeze can be symptomatic of a virtual memory issue. Hence the advice above to ensure there is enough free space on the boot disk. It could also be symptomatic of a device wait (possibly killing the VM system) , and thus the advice to check the disk is OK.
But it can be symptomatic of the application going nuts and taking all the available memory. Mavericks has some aggressive new memory management techniques that may have some issues when confronted with a brain dead application.
However there are a host of other possible issues. There were a bad batch of GPUs in some Macs a few years ago - they cause crashes and Apple replaced them. There can be interactions with other third party software you might have installed. The exact model of Mac, and configuration may matter, as well as any other software you have installed. Running the activity monitor where you can see it when you try to watch a video may help isolate what is going on. Not just CPU use, but memory can be important. The fact that you have a number of CPU burning programs detected does suggest there may be a more deep problem with your machine. I tend to have the activity monitor running constantly. The Dock icon turns into a CPU use graph, which makes for very easy detection of high CPU use.
Flash is a constant problem. So the suggestion to swap to HTML5 is good.
You may want to try using Safari as well to view a bad video, to isolate Firefox as potential problem.
About three days ago, while using my new(er) laptop, I found that the YouTube site looked completely different. Then, no matter which video I clicked on, I was told it couldn’t be played on a mobile device. I was presented two choices to click on, one of which was was something like “Save to replay later on a computer.”
I can still play videos on my older laptop — both Macs, both using Safari.
Go figure.
ETA: I just remembered that I did some kind of a system update the other day — possibly (probably?) just before the problem arose. Hmmmm.
Just as a data point, a log stating that DropBox has high CPU usage doesn’t necessarily mean the problem is in DropBox’s code. All programs call-out to shared libraries of code, most of which are managed by the OS itself, and the problem could be located there. The fact that the same problem is showing up in other applications backs this up.
It seems to me that the problem is certainly either hardware or driver related, in which case it’s time for a trip to the Apple Store to have them take a look at it. Even if you don’t have warranty coverage, they can usually give you good advice about how to move forward.