hello folks. being a hater, i’ve declined to update my m2pro minimac to os26. thus it’s running 15.7.7. for the past three or four months, the system has had severe lock-ups. usually it’s finder. at least once it was the backblaze app. killing the guilty app is of no avail (killing finder is usually difficult anyway). reboot or shutdown just fail. the only solution is to sandbag the machine by powering it off.
on top of this persistent frustration, no trace of what caused the crash can be found in the console log files.
i’ve run hardware diagnostics on the machine twice now. returns clean. seems wrong. obviously something is corrupted in the box. but haven’t found the guilty.
suggestions on how to troubleshoot and perhaps eliminate this would be gratefully received.
Start with Etrecheck Pro. Act on its observations if possible. After that if not solved do a clean re-install. Then come back here if still not solved.
A spinning pizza of death (SPOD) means that the event queue is stalled; the active app isn’t pulling events out of the queue.
If it were just one application, it could be a bug in that application that causes its main thread to be locked on some other task. For example, it could be in a loop. Or let’s say it is a badly written video conversion application that is using its main thread to transcode Jurassic Park into HVEC using a software encoder, and it never checks the event queue until that hours (days?) long task is complete.
But what you describe sounds more like a system level problem. I suggest as possible culprits:
System drive trouble, such as a failing drive.
Blocked on some other I/O. It could be waiting on a response from some other drive or peripheral. (I’ve seen before where if macOS disk arbitration gets stuck trying to mount something, it freezes everything until it completes)
Blocked while it takes a snapshot
Resource starvation, such as insufficient RAM for what is currently processing
Running out of free space on the boot drive. Or writing to the SSD faster than it can do garbage collection, which is exacerbated by low free space.
Some other application is hogging 99.99999999% of the CPU
Anti-virus problems: Occasionally I see this caused by anti-virus software going haywire, sometimes due to a problem applying a new signature download. It gets cleared up by rebooting.
The question is how can you diagnose it, if the system is frozen?
I use iStat Menus, which shows a lot of useful information: what’s using the CPU time, disk I/O, and memory, for example.
While you may have trouble getting it to respond, iStat Menus keeps a history. If after restart you see that you had extraordinarily high memory usage before the incident, that’s a clue.
Application Monitor can tell you about CPU and memory
Maybe when you force-quit, the kernel dump will tell you what was running at the time
As Michael said, I’d strongly suspect a dicky drive. You might do a quick Disk Utility - First Aid check on each of them if you don’t have EtreCheckPro, which I would also recommend. Disconnect them all and try booting and running, add back steadily, you might track it down.
ran etrecheck. it found nothing interesting. a couple orphaned config files; completely clean after deleting those.
ran disk utility first aid on the device and then containers of the system drive. containers reported a missing resource fork in every one of the snapshots. says this problem will go away when the snapshots are deleted. otherwise, nada.
only other drive is an external ssd used for time machine. it also reported clean.
resource starvation seems unlikely. box has 32gb ram and 4tb disk. disk is only ~45% full. plus the system is usually more or less idle when i encounter finder “spod”. every time the lockup occurs is first thing in the morning after opening the machine to read news and email.
btw: it’s been my habit since my first osx machine (2004) to leave it running 24/7. this minimac is the first that apparently requires frequent reboots to keep it from locking up.
9to5mac this morning discusses a similar issue with macOS 26.5. Perhaps because it’s a different OS it’s not relevant, and it does discuss less persistent beach balls and freezes than you describe, but you never know.
reluctant to go through the nightmare of a reinstall when it’s still unknown what’s causing the problem in the first place. i’ll take that step when the crashing becomes intolerable.