There's something a little curious and almost certainly a bit wrong with our Mac Pro 8-core 3GHz.
While doing fairly normal things the cursor will suddenly 'beachball' for upwards of 30 seconds before responding to whatever it was I was trying to do.
Some examples of when this happens quite often...
- Selecting items in Sequence and choosing to Nest them.
- Saving a project in Color, beachballs for 30-seconds or so before Color save progress bar even comes up.
- Moving to another location in the timeline (sometimes).
It's not just FCP and Color (although that's where I notice it most). While playing out a sequence for client viewing in Avid earlier in the week the system would beachball for a minute or so every 10-15 minutes - completely stopping playback.
The system isn't locking up entirely, just one application (the entire time I've been writing this post FCP has been displaying stalled trying to nest three clips).
What's going on?
I don't really know enough about Macs to know where to look.
Re: Beachballing by Dylan Reeve on May 7, 2008 at 8:23:10 pm
After waiting more than 10 minutes it was pretty evident that FCP had completely hung. I decided to force-quit.
This is pretty frustrating. Unfortunately I'm really up against heavy deadline pressure at the moment, and don't have a lot of time to research the issue, so any pointers would be hugely advantageous.
Re: Beachballing by Russell Lasson on May 7, 2008 at 8:27:34 pm
Open the activity monitor in the utilities folder. Sort by processing power and see if some other application or task is eating up your processors. I've seen it where a dashboard widget was using an insane about of processing power. Then you can force quit that item.
Re: Beachballing by Rafael Amador on May 8, 2008 at 2:21:00 am
Hi Dylan,
Do you use DiskWarrior or TechTools?
Mac OX 10.5.2-FC 6.02-QT 7.4.1
G5 2x2Gh 4GbRAM-BlackMagic Extreme
PMBP 17"Core2Duo 4GbRAM-AJA ioHD
JVC DTV-17"
SONY EX-1 . SONY PD170
..and always a big mess on top of the table.
Re: Beachballing by Rafael Amador on May 8, 2008 at 5:44:25 am
So Dylan,
My best advice: Get your self one of those applications.
No way the applications run well if your System is not optimized.
You dedicate 20 minutes every two weeks to clean your System directories and no "beachballing", no crashes, no need to trash any preference.
Really, i don't know how is possible to work with MacOX without any of those utilities.
Mac OX 10.5.2-FC 6.02-QT 7.4.1
G5 2x2Gh 4GbRAM-BlackMagic Extreme
PMBP 17"Core2Duo 4GbRAM-AJA ioHD
JVC DTV-17"
SONY EX-1 . SONY PD170
..and always a big mess on top of the table.
Re: Beachballing by Dylan Reeve on May 8, 2008 at 8:36:15 am
I did look at DiskWarrior recently, but as someone who's not that familiar with OS X it's really hard to actually figure out what it is for and how necessary it is - 'rebuilding directories' means nothing useful to me really, doesn't make a lot of sense in any context I have about what a directory is.
In a month or so (hopefully) when Avid Media Composer 3 ships, we'll be rebuilding the system with Leopard also.
Re: Beachballing by Dylan Reeve on May 7, 2008 at 9:31:07 pm
[Russell Lasson]"Open the activity monitor in the utilities folder. Sort by processing power and see if some other application or task is eating up your processors."
I don't think it's that, because the system is still responsive and other applications run just fine, it's only the current app (typically FCP or Color) that is hanging.
I will pop open the activity monitor next time though and see what the processor ulitisation is like.
Re: Beachballing by Wes Koetje on May 7, 2008 at 11:09:24 pm
I have a similar thing happen when a external harddrive is spinning up, the hard drive contains no media or render files, yet when it spins up it stalls FCP for a few seconds. This may be completely unrelated, but I thought it might provide a little insight
Re: Beachballing by Dylan Reeve on May 8, 2008 at 8:40:50 am
[Russell Lasson]"Open the activity monitor in the utilities folder. Sort by processing power and see if some other application or task is eating up your processors."
So I did this when I was trying to save in Color (where it 'beachballs' for about 30-60 seconds every time) - it showed no huge processor usage, but it did show Color as 'not responding' which went away after the beachball stopped and the Color save progress bar came up.
I have experienced similar on another Mac Pro, also with FCP. It's most frustrating when it happens when trying to do something seemingly so simple, like moving down the timeline, or clicking on a dropdown option in a dialogue box or something.
I'll look into DiskWarrior or the other application that was suggested, and will upgrade to Leopard when Avid supports it.
Re: Beachballing by Kevin Monahan on May 8, 2008 at 4:58:20 pm
Dylan,
Put yourself on a weekly maintenance program. Run Disk Utility (while booting from the disk) and Disk Warrior as part of that process. Delete any files you will not be using. Easily done when sipping your morning coffee and it's good for your piece of mind.
Re: Beachballing by Mitch Ives on May 9, 2008 at 3:25:38 pm
Is this a new 2008 8-core or the 2007 model?
If it's a 2008, they don't seem to like odd ram config's. Pull out the 1GB and drop down to 4GB (I assume it's a pair of 2GB modules). Our 2008 was killing us when we had 10GB of ram. Removing the original ram and dropping back to a pair of matched 4GB modules stopped a lot of the crashing and beach balls. Not all of it is gone, especially on long renders, but it's at least usable now.
