I have an M2 Mac mini with 16Gb memory and 1Tb storage running Sequoia 15.2. Since installing Sequoia I have seen the spinning beachball far more frequently that under Sonoma. Looking at Activity Monitor I see that CPU usage is below 10% and there is at least 4Gb memory free.
The performance pause usually lasts 3 to 5 seconds.
Have others experienced this and, if so, has anyone found a solution?
Same here. I’m not sure what but freezing and spinning. Over and over and over. Patrick
Reassuring to know I’m not alone!
Since updating to 15.2 I’ve had similar experience on my 2019 27” iMac. Not on my M1 Max MBPro which is fine. After a day of it, intermixed with crashes, right now I am duplicating my startup drive on it, with a view to wiping and a fresh install.
I hope that helps. I’ve reloaded Sequoia several times via Recovery, not same as fresh wipe and install. Will be following to see if that help. Thank you, Patrick
I don’t think these days that will do much for most problems.
Because of the SSV and the way macOS boots on Apple silicon Macs, if you can log on to your user account that means macOS has already been able to verify that every piece of the system matches exactly what Apple says it should and how it was initially installed ro updated. The exception being few items like Safari that have been relegated to remaining outside the SSV (presumably to facilitate updates).
These days, if your macOS suffers just a single bit failure (think infamous cosmic ray event) — even within a piece of code that never gets loaded on your system — that should prevent the system from booting entirely. At that point you’d need to reinstall through Recovery. But once you have done that and booting the OS means it has verified that the OS is fine down to the single bit, additional Recovery installations (or form any other source) serve really no purpose.
If the OS boots, the SSV is fine. No reinstall is going to help. But what likely could, is starting to dig into the user account. Set up a new account instead, verify all good there. Then manually and piecemeal migrate all user settings and docs, verifying things remain solid. Once they do not, you’ve found the culprit. And yes, without having a specific suspect to look out for, this can become quite a tedious process.
As far as I can tell the problem is associated with Finder. I see the spinning beach ball only when Finder is directly or indirectly invoked.
What activity are you doing at that point or are you saying it is a random thing?
Opening or saving a file within an app, e.g., Keynote or Word. Or just opening Finder. Not random.
I’m not seeing any issues on my M1 Air but will watch out for that.
You might use Disk Utility to run First Aid on your drive. Disk corruption could generate odd behavior.
There’s no general issue with Sequoia and performance.
Adam, thank you for this suggestion. I just ran the First Aid check and it returned with “error code 0” presumably meaning all was fine. I will report here if performance changes.
That’s good! Disk corruption is always a pain.
Next thing I’d do is try to keep Activity Monitor open so you can switch to it instantly when an app beachballs. Maybe you can see if it’s really the app or some other connected process.
Are you running any applications that interact with the Finder? Things like Hazel, Keyboard Maestro, Default Folder, etc. hook in to the Finder in various ways and can sometimes create slowdowns in the Finder or with Finder related actions like file reads and writes. It is also possible that automations that you are running with Shortcuts or Applescript may be triggered by file operations. These can also cause spinning cursors.
I dabble in app development in Swift and SwiftUI. Over the past few years, Apple has made many changes in concurrent, multi-threaded processing. One of the most common causes of the spinning cursor is having an app run a longish process (such as a web request, or a long read or write to disk) on the same thread as the user interface, rather than a background thread. The main thread handles user interface updates and takes priority over other threads. Long running processes should run on a different thread. When one does that, it can stall user interface updates and that can bring up the spinning cursor. The sorts of apps that I mentioned above have the potential to cause those sorts of calls and can possibly lead to slow downs in user interface updates if the programmers failed to correctly handle concurrent calls. It is also possible, that Apple updated something in Sequoia in their concurrency code that is creating problems.
I would suggest doing a safe boot and seeing if the slow read and write issues go away. With a safe boot, most extensions and apps that open on login do not launch, so it may be able to remove the conflict causing the slow downs. If with Safe Boot the slow downs go away, I would suggest that you, one by one, add back in any background utility apps that you may be running and testing to see if the slow downs start up again. Since it could be interactions between two or more utility apps and the Finder, this testing can take some time. Assuming you can identify a culprit, then you can reach out to the app developer(s) for further help. Rather than a a Safe Boot, you can create a testing user account, and try to identify any culprits there.
Apologies for the long post, but I think there was a fair bit to cover on this sort of annoying problem.
Norm
Norm, that’s fascinating. However, no I don’t run any of those apps not am I running anything under Sequoia that I wasn’t running under Sonoma. As is often the case with these types of problem I can’t find a simple combination of steps guaranteed to reproduce the symptoms.
Thank you for offering assistance.
Although this is just the sort of thing that I would do, I wonder if the app beachballs (great phrasing, by the way) because it is waiting for something and not because it is consuming many CPU cycles. Even after four years with my M1, I continue to be amazed at how most of the space in Activity Monitor’s CPU History (and GPU History) is blank—essentially all the time. (What’s the opposite of a Power User? Me.)
You’re absolutely right that the app could be waiting for something and not consuming CPU; I don’t know if there’s any way to distinguish the two. The hope is to get a data point of some sort.
IME spinning beachball is always i/o related. If it’s not a slow local disk waking up (HDD), it’s some network storage over a laggy connection. Of course, YMMV.
Have a look here and see if any of the suggestions help:
Macintosh Beachballs!
http://www.macattorney.com/rbb.html
You might want to disable any third party stay-resident software that might need updating, such as fully interactive anti-virus software, or dropbox, etc.
Also, is your boot SSD somewhere in the range of 70% full or more? That will cause its performance to really lag.
Simon and Randy, thank you for your suggestions. As it happens the problem has not recurred for some time so I can’t try possible solutions. My machine is an M2 Mac mini with 1TB SSD storage and it is exactly 70% full but it has been for 2 years and the problem is recent. I run MacUpdater frequently so all apps are up to date. I do use Dropbox and BitDefender but only as needed and not resident.
Thanks again.