GaryK

OK thanks for all the max guru's help on here!

But I have another pressing issue having just had to do a hard reset for about the 4th time in just under two weeks I'm really starting to question the stability of an OS that I thought was absolutely bullet proof.

What has happened on the last two occassions is everything just locks up except the mouse pointer. I can move that around but the keyboard does respond to anything and I can't click on anything, cant force quit any apps. I could see it locked completely as entourage was in the middle of a send/receive and it just got stuck.

So what do I run? The machine is on typically 8-12 hours a day, its a 2.16ghz imac with 2gb RAM. I use winxp on parallels with just under a gig assigned to the VM. Entourage is always running as is skype and firefox. To my mind though it shouldn't really matter as no single application should bring down the OS, certainly not a linux derived platform.

So this has happened four times and each time the only recovery is to power off/on which is a little frustrating. I'm thinking of calling apple but I'm sure they will fob me off. The bottom line is I have a big question mark over the stability of OS X and wanted to get an idea of experiences or maybe its a known problem in very specific circumstances.

Gary

twistybits

I have exactly the same issue with hard resets, i think it something to do with Entourage as it also hangs for periods of time then catches up the key stokes after 5-10mins.

If you find a resolution to your issues please PM me

Cheers

TB

marklemac

Process of elimination.

You have an Intel Mac, but still running Power PC Apps.

Have you tried just using one app at a time ? You say it locks up 4 times a day, so running just one app should be a pita for the short term.

My Macbook runs 12+ open apps all day every day and I only have to reboot the machine if a system update wants it, apart from that its faultless.

As are all of my clients machines that I have set up.

Is your 2gb ram factory fit, or did you bung in the extra ram ?

How old is the iMac ? Is it one of the first Intel models ?

I have only had 1 Intel iMac fail so far and thats in 15 months of them coming out. That would freeze up and give the grey screen of death with the reboot logo on the screen.

Turned out to be a faulty logic board that got replaced under warranty.

GaryK

markle

is office 2004 power pc? Obviously parallels is intel mac only.

No its locked up 4 times in a little under two weeks which is still not acceptable really.

factory fit 2gb, the machine is only 2 months old.

Cheers

Gary

marklemac

yep, office is PowerPC.

sorry, missread your post, 4 lock ups in 2 weeks.

Any reason you use Entourage rather than Apple Mail ?

I use Apple Mail,, but use Word & Excel all the time. They are bloody slow apps running in PowerPC mode.

And Powerpoint is awful !

Still comes back to process of elimination Gary.

When the machine 'locked up' did you leave it for a period of time to see if it came unstuck ?

I find this on some machines, if your patient enough they can come back to life.

Markus

Gary,
So, the machine is not completely locking up, as you can move the mouse around? As markle suggests, leave the machine alone for around 10 - 15 mins and see if it comes back to life. It sounds as though some process may have crashed, causing the machine to become a little upset.

My first thought is that it might be Parallels. Why? Well, the default disk caching system in Parallels is set to "Virtual Machine", which from what I've seen, basically means that the VM will take precedence over the machine, thus trying to access other apps whilst a VM is running can seriously slow down the Mac side of things, even to the extent where you would think the machine is dead but for the fact you can move the mouse (sound familiar?)

What you might want to do is change the disk cache option in Parallels. Edit the VM settings, select the "Options" resource item, then click on the "Advanced" tab, you'll see the options there. I've got my VM set to use Mac OS X and I don't see much if any of a slowdown, but that could be due to me using the Boot Camp partition as the VM's disk. However, it's worth trying to see if it does make a difference.

The machine does not appear to be crashing, as you'd usually see the the image displayed here. What you could do, after rebooting is to have a look in the /Library/Logs folder (Library folder at root of disk) for a file called panic.log, as this is where the kernel panic info will be written. If it's got today's date (well, the date of the crash) then it might contain info about what crashed.
It's also worth looking in the following folders:

/Library/Logs/Crash Reporter/ (Library folder at root of disk)
~/Library/Logs/Crash Reporter/ (Library folder within your Home folder)

View the contents by date modified and see what, if anything was modified around the time when you rebooted. This could also give an indication of what crashed.

You could also open the Console application (it's in /Applications/Utilites/) and have a look at the Console and System logs and see if there is anything mentioned for around the time when you saw the problem.

If you're not running 10.4.9 then upgrade to it now. It contains various fixes, including some to Rosetta, which is what Entourage will be using to run as it's still a PPC application, MS hasn't released a Universal version of Office yet. To be frank Entourage wasn't the most stable application when not running in an emulated environment, so throw that into the mix and it would not surprise me in the least if it had issues.

Is there a reason why you are using Entourage and not Mail.app? The Import option in Mail will allow you to import you data from Entourage so you won't lose any messages. I could understand it if you are in a corporate setting and thus need to connect to Exchange servers or use the options that Exchange provides that are not present in Mail.app. If it's just personal preference then I'd strongly advise you move to Mail.app. I used to use Entourage many moons ago on OS X and finally decided to switch to Mail.app, and haven't looked back since.

GaryK

Ok guys, excellent advice as usual and thanks for taking the time to respond!

No to be honest no real reason to use entourage, being a long standing windows user (and outlook) it just seemed the natural progression from outlook but guess I could use mail instead.

Thanks again

Gary

marklemac

Agree with Markus, Mail is vastly superior to Entourage.

RichB

ditto re mail and you can import from Entourage...

GaryK

OK mail up and running, I will abandon entourage and monitor progress and see how things go.

I still cannot understand how in a modern pre-emptive multi-tasking OS that an app can bring it down but like you say Markus maybe I am not giving it enough time to handle the problem, I will if and when it happens again.

Gary

Markus

It is possibly more than a timeout than a complete hang. Another classic example of how to put your machine in a state where it's unresponsive is to mount a volume via AFP, then have that connection terminated from it's source, for example, if I connect my iMac via AFP to my iBook and then I sleep my iBook and then go into the Finder and try and unmount the share from the iBook the Finder will get itself into a bit of a state because the connection is not valid any longer.

What is actually happening is that it's hitting the OSes built-in tcp/ip timeout, so it sits there and waits and suspends other tasks until the timeout is finished and then it unmounts the volume.

OS 9 had an AppleShare Client Setup utility that would allow you to tweak this time but there isn't an equivelent OS X version, nor have I found a setting file where this might be defined and thus changed.

When the machine is in this state it can also effect other applications as they may also be trying to use the Finder and cannot as it's in this timeout phase.

I think what happens with regards to applications is they start to eat up the a large percentage of the processor time, so everything else cannot do anything until that process stops, be it by itself, by OS interaction (not sure if the OS can do that though) ot by user interaction, eg; killing the app via force quit.

What you could do is to fire up activity monitor and sort the list by the % CPU column and see what's taking up most of the processor.
We were seeing a conflict between one of our products and Virex (or whatever it's new name is). It would only happen when you went into the scheduling component an clicked the padlock icon to unlock/lock the settings. The machine would then seriously slow down to a crawl. We launched activity monitor prior to clicking the padlock and after doing so we saw that it was a component of virex taking up 98% of the CPU's time, not good. After killing it (had to do it via terminal as AM was totally unresponsive at this point) the machine was back to full speed.

GaryK

Well guys ditched entourage for mail a week ago and mail is pretty good. Hadn't used the machine much this week as I was working away but now I have had two lock-ups in two days. On Friday the machine wasn't even being used it got stuck on the screensaver and had the spinning beach ball, left it a couple of hours still no good.

Now today it has just locked again, only using firefox and skype and got the beach ball, just couldnt recover, looked at the logs which just told me that thread 1 crashed but couldnt find any reference to a specific app.

I've started logging all this now as I'm pretty frustrated and I think it needs to go back to Apple, close to 2k on machine which I have as about as much confidence in as a sinclair zx81 with a wobbly 16k ram pack!

Is there any diagnostics I can run in the background which records everything and will give me detailed information in the event of a crash?

Cheers

Gary

john_s

iTrader: (1)

You have checked it's not got wobbly RAM, haven't you?

John.

Markus

I've seen the issue with the wake from screensaver before on my G4. I *think* the problem was that the machine could not display the password dialog for some reason. If this happens again, try pressing the escape key, and then moving the mouse, see if the dialog pops back up. You could also try typing your password and pressing return to see if it wakes the machine up.

You're not running OSXVnc on the machine are you? I have some vauge recollection that might have been what was causing my problem as I had it running in the background so I could protect my machine but still have remote access to it from home.

As for the "crashes". OK, do you have crash logs in the either/both of the directories I mentioned for the apps in question. If so then email them to me and I'll get a friend to have a look and see if anything jumps out. If there aren't any crash logs then technically it means an app didn't crash, but that isn't strictly true, I've had apps crash without generating a crash log.

John's suggestion of checking the RAM is a good one, I'd also suggest running Disk Utility on the machine (boot from the OS X install DVD and run it from there) and get it to verify/repair the disk and the permissions, see if that helps.

GaryK

Hi Markus,

Sent you an email with the logs from the system and my home dir. library directories. Nope not running VNC, I ran up activity monitor and noticed that firefox and skype use alot of threads 6-12 at any one time which seems alot for me especially when they are idle.

I also run something called SkypeMACMate which basically allows me to use skype with a VoIP phone and I will avoid this and skype to try and narrow things down further.

Cheers

Gary

GaryK

email bounced markus, have you got another email addy?

Its just crashed on me again, I'm going to ring apple now see what they say I think it needs to go in for repair.

Cheers

Gary

Markus

Gary, Just sent you a PM

mattbeef

If it was my machine id do the following.

Repair Permissions
Disk Repair (in either Single User or from install disc)
Run AHT (extended)
Erase and Install new OS
Replace RAM after telling Apple that you have done the above as they will ask you to that first before replacing it

Markus

Gary,
Got the logs and had a quick look and nothing is jumping out at me. I've forwarded them over to one of the dev team chappies to see if they can see anything interesting.

Markus

Ok a few things. First, the SkypeMacMate thing is a powerPC application, so it'll be running via rosetta. First thing I'd do is see if there is a Universal/Intel only build of it and use that. It seems the main code is running from thread 2 instead of thread 0, which is where it'd normally be run from, so that could be causing issues.

As for the other crashes, there isn't a pointer to anything specific really. One thing about the VPN stuff though. There was mention of VPN's not being too mac friendly, and I also have some recollection of VPN stuff via parallels not being particularly stable. Not sure if it's specific to Cisco VPNs or not though.

Bottom line, apart from the SkypeMacMate thing, which as it's probably running in the background could be causing other apps to hang, there isn't any single cause for the issues you have been seeing. Sorry.

GaryK

Markus,

Well thanks for looking I really appreciate the time you have spent in helping me. Things took a turn for the worse earlier on, it locked up again and then wouldn't restart. I ran disk utility which found errors on the disk which it successfully corrected and got me back working. Maybe there has been a problem all along that has just surfaced I don't know.

Yes well skypemacmate is the next thing I was going to kill off of my running apps and see how it goes. I will investigate the vpn under parallels issue.

My only other option for doing win development work on this machine is to use bootcamp I suppose which doesnt give me the flexibility of parallels but may prove more stable, we shall see and I'll keep you posted.

thanks again!

Gary

Markus

Thought I'd resurrect this thread as there is a post on macosxhints in regards to SkyMACMate and it locking up apps, which sounds a little familar.

Here is a link to the post on macosxhints. Could be worth reading and implementing the advice if you need/want to use SkyMACMate

GaryK

Markus,

Again thanks for all your help, I ditched SkypeMACMate and I havent had a single lock up for about 2-3 weeks now so it must have been the culprit!

Ive even had time to play around a little with some Applescript and automator!

Cheers

Gary