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System stalling/pausing after 10.5.2 Update?

1K views 9 replies 6 participants last post by  madgunde 
#1 ·
Hey folks,

Haven't had a chance to test more extensively, but I've noticed that ever since I updated my iMac 24" to 10.5.2 (was running 10.5.1 prior), my system appears to be "pausing" every half-second or so. It became evident upon typing anything into Firefox, or while having an aMSN conversation, etc. The system has been rebooted a few times since the update, so it doesn't appear to be a one-time glitch.

I don't seem to be noticing any other significant problems, however I had *never* experienced this pausing prior to the update. I also have a MacBook 2.2ghz C2D, which I'll be testing in a bit. But can anyone think of any reason this would start happening since the update? Is there any kind of new hardware polling or something that might be happening, which would for some reason cause the pausing?

I would appreciate any insight, kinda hoping someone else may be experiencing the same... thanks in advance!
 
#2 ·
Have you looked at the system log files to see what it's doing during those pauses?

In any event, my usual advice in these situations is to download the big combo update and have another go. If you want a smooth update, delete or disable ALL third-party login items and web plugins, then add them back slowly afterwards.
 
#3 ·
Before doing the combo update, which is a good suggestion, I'd suggest running disk utility to repair disk permissions and verify the disk for errors. While you're at it, select the disk and check it's S.M.A.R.T. status is "Verified" and not "failing". It's quite possible that repairing the disk or permissions will fix the problem.

If the disk maintenance and installing the combo update don't fix it, another thing to try is to create a new test user account on the computer and log in as that new user to see if the problem persists. If it doesn't, then you know the problem is related to something user-specific, so you can then focus your investigation.
 
#4 ·
I have not had pauses in system performance, however when I upgraded and restarted, the freaking computer shutdown and restarted as the machine restarted after downloading and installing the update. It started up normally after that. BTW, Titanium Software has an application that spans a few major releases of OS X that handles not only permissions repairs, but also verifies the S.M.A.R.T. Status & Startup Disk. Onyx is also Open Source so live it up with the freeness of a fresh running Mac OS X 10. The site is in French, so just choose English from the pull down menu. Older versions of Onyx are also available for Tiger, Panther and Jaguar.
 
#9 ·
the freaking computer shutdown and restarted as the machine restarted after downloading and installing the update. It started up normally after that.
It was perfectly normal behavior for your "freaking" computer to do this when restarting after installing the update.
It will shutdown and restart, and part way through restarting shutdown and restart a second time.

jb.
 
#6 ·
Doh! I forgot to mention that you might be suffering a Spotlight re-indexing. If that's the culprit, it will stop doing that on its own after a couple of hours, but just in case, you can force a rebuild of spotlight by opening spotlight's preference pane, dragging all your hard drives into the "privacy" window (which immediately stops indexing), then delete (from that window) the ones you DO want indexed. It will re-index them (so you'll have slowdowns for a couple of hours) but will stop when complete.
 
#7 ·
Thanks for the suggestions guys, much appreciated.

Oddly enough, the problem seemed to go away after a few more hours/maybe a reboot or two -- so chas, you might have been right on the money about the Spotlight re-indexing.

I'll definitely keep an eye on things though. Oh, in response to the CPU usage-- I had checked that shortly after my previous post and everything seemed normal. CPU usage was only maybe 2-3%, although I *did* notice it would spike up quite a bit every so often. Looks like that may have also disappeared now though.

Hey, so while I'm here, here's another one for you guys: I'm still pretty new to the Mac world, and due to my line of work I use PCs on a pretty regular basis. On my USB flash drives, portable drives etc I've noticed that under Windows, if hidden files are shown, there are duplicates of each file but with "._" in front of the filename. Am I right to assume these are probably just index/reference files, since MacOS stores its files in a different manor than Windows? I seem to recall hearing something about that ages ago, back in the Apple Macintosh classic days. :p And if so, is there a *safe* way to prevent those files from being generated, yet keep compatibility between both OS's?

Thanks again!
 
#8 ·
On my USB flash drives, portable drives etc I've noticed that under Windows, if hidden files are shown, there are duplicates of each file but with "._" in front of the filename. Am I right to assume these are probably just index/reference files, since MacOS stores its files in a different manor than Windows? I seem to recall hearing something about that ages ago, back in the Apple Macintosh classic days. :p And if so, is there a *safe* way to prevent those files from being generated, yet keep compatibility between both OS's?

Thanks again!
Yes.

They're called .DS_Store files (custom icon flags and other resource junk from olden days) and Blue Harvest will prevent them being created. There may be other utilities that do the same thing, but BH is the only thing I've found that takes a preemptive approach.
 
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