I'm tired of the constant beach balls on my iMac. 4gigs of ram and plenty of hard drive space. I've twice done the lion repair and reinstalled user accounts. How can I properly diagnose what's causing the problems?

What programs are they occurring in? We also are getting them with a 2.16 and 3GB 24" iMac. I have moved from FF13 to Chrome and that has helped.

Put Activity Monitor (Utilities folder) onto your Dock to keep it handy to see and what's going on with your Mac, especially the CPU and Memory amounts being used.

There may also be some background daemon type processes running you don't need and hogging CPU or memory.

Selecting them and clicking the 'inspect' -> Open files and ports tab can give you an idea of what the process belongs to or is part of.

Based on several previous threads, 3GB is pretty much absolute minimum RAM for Lion, which means 6-8 GB should be considered the practical minimum.

As I mentioned, Activity Monitor will provide the user with the info as to what is happening with their Mac's loaded CPU processes and Memory, and 3GB of installed memory *may* be adequate, but sure nor overly surplus. ;)

Edit: I missed that darkscot already has 4 GB RAM installed which should be more than adequate for an average 2.66GHz Mac user.

Suggestion for darkscot, shut down and do a cold boot into 'Safe Boot Mode', run DU again to repair permissions and verify disk and then restart normally.

If that doesn't fix things, assuming Activity Monitor stuff has been checked, download the Lion COMBO 10.7.4 Update, then run it when booted into 'Safe Boot Mode', restart and run Software Update until it says you're up to date, and then check some of your app versions such as Safari that they are actually up to date.

Sometimes I see iTunes running at near 100% but don't notice much else. Activity monitor looks like Chinese to me. Considering upgrading to mountain lion today to see if it helps. Will try safe mood and run permissions first. Getting more ram this weekend too

What is iTunes actually doing or being used for when it's close to 100%?

Nothing at all

That's a bit bizarre and I would think almost impossible if iTunes was just open but not doing anything to be using so much CPU.

Try a Safe Boot and see if things improve generally.

Have you reformatted the drive and started fresh or simply reinstalled a new OS on top of an existing one? The symptoms you're experiencing are also consistent with drive failure, though that may or may not be the case with your particular iMac.

haven't started fresh since Snow Leopard. I sur hope it's not the HD. (I am backing up all the time tho!)

If you have a backup, I would go with a clean install. Its easy to install, relatively fast and hassle free.

run your backup and do a clean install *without importing your data*

use the machine as is for a few days. if you still see beach balls its probably a pooched hdd

Ok I didn't have the patience for a clean install. Put in mountain lion and got beach balling. Safaridavclient was at near 100% so I turned off icloud safari synching, deleted my safari plist file and turned it back on again , killed the process and much quicker. I do get a beach ball or stall when on the login screen (from sleep or boot) a lot tho. I never saw the Safaridavclient problem before. I had my iCloud tied to a apple user id I never use - I wonder if that was an issue? Trying to synch bookmarks with an ID that never had bookmarks in another device?