Infinite Wheel (Ithildin) Mac OS

The spinning rainbow wheel indicates that an application that is not responding. It could be a temporary failure from which the application will recover. In rare cases, the whole system freezes and then the only option is to press the power button until the computer is forced to shut down. Get more done with the new Google Chrome. A more simple, secure, and faster web browser than ever, with Google’s smarts built-in. Auto detected OS. Show All Downloads. Product Specific Phone Numbers. Main Phone Numbers. Was this article helpful? 0 out of 0 found this helpful.

Officially, it’s called the Spinning Wait Cursor or the Spinning Disc Pointer. Colloquially, it goes by many names, including the Spinning Beach Ball. Whatever you call it, the colorful pinwheel that replaces your mouse cursor is not a welcome sight.

According to Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines, “the spinning wait cursor is displayed automatically by the window server when an application cannot handle all of the events it receives. If an application does not respond for about 2 to 4 seconds, the spinning wait cursor appears.” (WindowServer is the background process that runs the Mac OS X graphical user interface.) Which is to say, the beachball is there to tell you your Mac is too busy with a task to respond normally.

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Usually, the pinwheel quickly reverts to the mouse pointer. When it doesn’t go away, it turns into what some call the Spinning Beach Ball of Death (also known as the SBBOD or the Marble of Doom). Puzzle sword mac os. At times like those, it helps to know why the thing appears and what you can do to make it go away.

Hardware causes

The most basic reason the beach ball appears is because your Mac’s hardware can’t handle the software task at hand. It’s not unusual to see the occasional beach ball when you Mac is performing complex computing tasks. Even everyday activities—such as syncing with iTunes—can temporarily overtax the CPU.

To find out if the CPU is a bottleneck on performance, use Activity Monitor (/Applications/Utilities) to monitor CPU usage. You don’t have to keep an Activity Monitor window open all the time; there are less obtrusive ways to use it. For example, open Activity Monitor then Control-click on its Dock icon and select Dock Icon -> Show CPU Usage. That will turn the icon itself into a CPU usage graph; you can then close the main Activity Monitor window. You can also Control-click on the icon and select Monitors -> CPU Usage, or Monitors -> Floating CPU Window. That will place a small activity graph in the corner of your screen.

The beach ball may also appear if you don’t have enough RAM. Virtual memory paging and swapping (freeing RAM by moving data to swap files on disk and back) consumes CPU cycles. Insufficient RAM means more paging and swapping, which means fewer CPU cycles are available to apps. If apps can’t get the CPU time they want, the beach ball appears. That’s why you want as much RAM as your budget will allow and your Mac can accommodate.

Similarly, if your startup disk is nearly full, less space is available for swap files. Again, that leads to more CPU cycles devoted to swapping and more beach balls. As a rule of thumb, keep at least 10GB free on your startup disk. Again, you can use Activity Monitor to diagnose RAM and hard drive shortages; open the System Memory or Disk Usage tabs. In the pie charts shown in these panes, more green is better.

If you can isolate a hardware cause, the solution is obvious: You need to upgrade. In the case of the CPU, however, that means buying a new Mac. If it’s the RAM or the hard drive, you can upgrade those individually. If upgrading isn’t an option for you, you’re just going to have to run fewer applications concurrently. Clearly, the more resource-intensive apps you work with daily, the fewer you should run simultaneously.

One other hardware-related reason the beach ball may appear: Your hard disk or optical drives may enter Standby mode, spinning down after a period of inactivity to save energy. If you try to access them when they’re in Standby (by opening or saving a file, for example), you may see the beach ball while the disk spins up. For some drives, that may take many seconds.

You can, if you wish, keep your startup disk from ever entering Standby mode. To do so, open Energy Saver preferences (in System Preferences) and deselect Put the Hard Disk(s) to Sleep When Possible. Note that all of your drives will still enter Standby mode when your Mac enters its own sleep mode; you may then see the beach ball if you wake your Mac and then immediately try to access a disk.

Software causes

Even if your hardware is adequate, an application or process can still monopolize your system. Perhaps an application is hung in an infinite loop or it’s simply inefficient. Maybe a background process is running amok, hogging CPU cycles. An errant third-party plug-in can turn a fast application into a slug. Whatever the reason, the program takes over the CPU and up pops the Ball.

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Infinite Wheel (ithildin) Mac Os X

If you suspect that the SBBOD is software-based, the first thing to do is simply to wait for a few minutes to see if the app starts responding again or crashes. While you’re waiting, you can find out which apps are hogging more than their fair share of system resources: Open Activity Monitor’s CPU tab and sort by the % CPU column in descending order; the apps at the top are the ones using the most CPU cycles.

If you are able to switch to other applications and the SBBOD appears in all of them, that could be a sign that one of your Mac’s system process is hung. In that case, try to shut down or restart the Mac by pressing Command-Eject or Command-Control-Eject, respectively. 10 gnomes in paris mac os. Otherwise, press and hold the power button to shut down the Mac, restart, then open the system log in Console (/Applications/Utilities) to see if you can determine the cause.

The SBBOD may also appear when you load a Web page containing a vast amount of data or a JavaScript that is either inefficient or incompatible. Most browsers recognize this situation and open an alert window stating that a script is slowing the browser. Gem rush mac os. Clicking on Stop in this alert should end the problem (though the page may then render incorrectly). Otherwise, you’ll have to Force Quit the browser. If you can, you should report the problem the site’s Webmaster.

Ad-blocking—whether it’s built into your browser or enforced by an add-on—may also cause a browser to hang. In this case, Force Quit the browser, then disable ad-blocking for that particular site.

The Bottom Line

While you can’t prevent every instance of the SBBOD—it is there to tell you your Mac is busy—a little patience and an occasional Force Quit or Restart should make those instances a bit more bearable.

Gregory Swain runs The X Lab, a site dedicated to troubleshooting Mac OS X. He also writes and publishes the Troubleshooting Mac OS X e-book series.

Read our full Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) review

A few days ago, after my 12-inch MacBook running the latest Sierra became sluggish, I restarted. After entering my account password, my Mac showed a white progress spinner that uses “spokes”—the kind of spinner you usually see at shutdown—would appear for several seconds, then disappear, replaced with a cursor that couldn’t be moved with the trackpad. This would recur over and over for hours.

I’d had a similar sort of problem crop up once during beta testing for software that I don’t want to mention the name of, as the issue was resolved for those of us on the cutting edge and the particular release of software is no longer in development. In that case, the spinner would appear and disappear, but no cursor, and much more rapidly. I contacted the former developer and followed his instructions to use Recovery and Terminal to remove all relevant files, but that didn’t solve this problem. Without the software installed, something else still triggered this slightly different behavior.

I went through a litany of options, including, after asking for advice on Twitter, ones I hadn’t considered:

  • I could boot into Recovery (Command-R after startup or restart), so I booted into it and ran Disk Utility. The disk checked out fine.
  • I booted into single-user mode and used the command-line tools to check for problems, and again, nothing emerged. After exiting into an interactive session, the same spinner issue cropped up. None of the errors I could find helped diagnose the problem.
  • Safe mode didn’t bypass the point after login where the blockade happened, so it wasn’t of use.
  • In Recovery, I reinstalled Sierra without erasing the disk. Same problem.

The one thing I didn’t remember to try, and wish I had, was attempting to screen share from another Mac—or even using SSH (remote secure Terminal-style access) to see if I could access the system while things were failing.

I began to wonder if it weren’t a video-card or GPU problem instead of a system problem. Apple and other computer makers engage a simpler mode in their graphics system at boot time, and then fire up the full power once the OS has initialized. Apple’s safe mode, for instance, disables accelerated graphics, for instance, which can cause video glitches.

To isolate whether it was hardware or the OS, I decided that since the disk was still reachable, I’d perform a full clone via Recovery using Disk Utility. Here’s how you do that:

  1. Connect an external drive.
  2. Boot into Recovery (Command-R).
  3. Click Disk Utility in the list that appears and click Continue.
  4. (Optional) If you have FileVault enabled, select your partition, and click Mount. When prompted, enter any administrative password.
  5. Select the startup drive and then choose File > New Image > Image from “Partition Name.”
  6. Choose the external drive as the destination.

This operation creates a mountable but not bootable clone as a disk image. Then I used Disk Utility to erase the drive. Unfortunately, this erased the Recovery partition, too! On restart, the Mac reverted to Internet Recovery, where it downloads the Recovery software and then installs and launches it. I used Disk Utility to restore my startup drive from the clone, figuring that might have cleared the condition.

(In Disk Utility, select the startup drive, click Restore, and then click Image to select the image. Some clones might not work in image form, but Disk Utility mounts them, and then you can select the mounted clone as the source for a restore.)

Restoring resulted in the same problem, so whatever the issue was, it was embedded in the particular system I had installed.

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I went back and booted into Recovery, and erased the drive again and installed macOS. Because of the age of the machine, its Internet Recovery partition loaded El Capitan. (If you have Sierra’s Recovery software installed, as of 10.12.4, you can force either the oldest compatible OS X/macOS to load or the very latest depending on whether you press Command-R or Command-Option-R. Because I’d erased the Recovery disk, Internet Recovery installed the version that the computer shipped with.) The Mac booted fine into El Capitan release, so I ran the Sierra update separately, which also worked. This made a hardware fault seem unlikely.

Instead of restoring again, I ran Migration Assistant, and selected my cloned disk image as the source. I selected everything offered for migration. Several hours went by, the machine rebooted, and…I was back again to cursor/spinner/cursor/spinner.

I decided to try one more thing before throwing myself on the mercy of the Genius Bar. (The next appointment when this all started was about five days later, so I hadn’t yet seen Apple.)

Infinite Wheel (ithildin) Mac Os X

Wheel

I erased the startup partition (not the drive) and reinstalled Sierra. Then I used Migration Assistant to import just Applications, my user account, and Computer & Network Settings. This time, I unchecked Other Files and Folders, assuming that this is where the trouble lay if it were system related. Since I had a full clone, I could resuscitate any missing items later if necessary.

This time was the charm. I had to re-login into various services (Apple and otherwise), retarget Backblaze to the “new” drive with the same name, and allow a bunch of system-level behavior through the Security & Privacy system preference pane’s Privacy tab. I also had to re-enable FileVault, which is not in effect after erasing a drive, as it has to be set up while running macOS.

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