Beach Ball = Doom?

[Dyuta]

I'm a bit confused on what exactly the spinning beach ball indicates.

I was under the impression that it means the system is busy... but I see it posted often here as a telltale sign or a symptom of a larger problem. If I'm mostly just running the stock programs (except low-level stuff like Adium) - certainly not anything heavy duty like the FCS that's installed but as-yet-untouched - on my 17" MBP (and the apps are Universal)... should I be getting the beach ball at all? (n.b. it only appears briefly, for a few seconds... and generally more often when launching apps than during their operation)

Should the beach ball never appear when chatting/surfing/performing basic tasks?

Apologies if this is an obvious question. It's my first Mac.

 

[iMeowbot]

Yeah, the beachball is one of the busy cursors, sometimes you will see other variations like a watch. It's about the same idea as the Windows hourglass.

Occasionally when a program gets wedged you'll find that it never does get away from that beachball, and you're stuck having to do a forced quit. Again, it's analogous to that hourglass.

Bottom line: not a real problem unless it refuses to go away!

 

[dops7107]

I would say it is normal to beach-ball during application start up. Even during CPU-intensive tasks, like video encoding, you shouldn't see beach-balling - although other applications will be slow to respond and *may* beach ball if you try to access them. In general you see it on the few occasions where an application is waiting for a response from something else (e.g. reading from a drive that needs to spin up, or reading a font list upon first access). Basically it indicates a "stall". During routine use, emailing and internet, word-processing etc. you should never see it.

HTH

 

[GimmeSlack12]

During routine use, emailing and internet, word-processing etc. you should never see it.

But understand that if you DO see it, It is not a HUGE problem. Like previously stated, if you see the beach ball for 2 minutes.... then maybe there is a problem.

 

[Dyuta]

Okay... so the occasional beach ball on program launch isn't anything to concern myself over, so long as it's brief. Thanks for alleviating my paranoia, guys.

 

[3kids]

I never saw the beach ball until after I installed the security update. Now the ball sometimes spins around for a LONG time.

 

[motulist]

Seeing the beach ball too often is sometimes an indication that you need more ram.

 

[dmw007]

Seeing the beach ball too often is sometimes an indication that you need more ram.

Yes, I believe that it can be. My iBook G4 has had a lot less "beach balls" after I doubled the RAM (from 512MB -> 1GB).

 

[IJ Reilly]

The first thing you should always try if you're see a lot of beach balls is a reboot. If it doesn't go away, you've probably got other issues.

 

[3kids]

Seeing the beach ball too often is sometimes an indication that you need more ram.

I've got 1 G on a brand new system so I don't think it is a RAM issue. I had never seen it before the security update.

 

[berg]

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